Future of Open Science

Problems to overcome

Brembs 2015 states that there exist no technical problems to practice Open Science, including a digital infrastructure for submission of automatically produced graphs.

As ZALF

As  ZALF is at the finish sprint for the 2016 Leibniz evaluation, enhancing quality and quantity of the publishing output is of main concern.

Open Science is In addition, the proportion  of minor importance for passing Open Access publications is requested - but not  assessed - by  the Leibniz evaluation. evaluation committee.

Data are not being evaluated.  Nevertheless, the data mangement department of ZALF has received more requests about registering data in 2014 and 2015 than before. The inclusion of ZALF Open Research Data into the Thomson Reuters Data Citation Index and information events might be a reason for rising awareness for Open Science. However, we have been asked if registered Open Data are collected in the research information system, which is not the case. If Open Data was treated like publications, funding and collaborations, more researchers might see a benefit and recognition for their additional effort.

One of themain  future activities for the service departments should be are  information and education events for scientists in order to explain short and long term benefits of Open Science, recognize fears and to meet the scientist's needs. Where justified objections for example against Open Data arise, other solutions such as open metadata can be found.  Easy to use tools for data management and data registration are crucial and need to be promoted.

A Technical solutions need to be implemented to facilitate the scientist's worklife and to reduce their workload during data submission.

A  data policy has been a means to promote Open Data at several German institutions (Göttingen, HUB, ...) and ZALF is currently preparing one. However, detailed workflows are being included the ZALF data policy, which slows down the process of implementing it. Policies can have different targets like rising awareness,  committing to something or regulating workflows.

For scientist who want to submit their open data after the data policy takes effect, technical solutions need to be implemented. Submitting data needs to be easy and fun.