From Open Source to Open Science

The OpenScience project is dedicated to writing and releasing free and Open Source scientific software. We are a group of scientists, mathematicians and engineers who want to encourage a collaborative environment in which science can be pursued by anyone who is inspired to discover something new about the natural world.

Much of the work of science depends on having appropriate tools available to analyze experimental data and to interract with theoretical models. Powerful computers are now cheap enough so that significant processing power is within reach of many people. The missing piece of the puzzle is software that lets the scientist choose between models and make sense of his or her observations.

The talk centers on 6 areas the scientific community will have to figure out before Open Science (Open Source, Open Data, Open Lab Notebook, and Open Access) will be workable models:

1. Verifiability
2. The balance between Trust & Control
3. Recognition & Attribution
4. Copyright & Licensing
5. Sustainability
6. The public’s right to know

Some take-home messages and outlook for open source scientific projects

1. Have multiple project “leads”.
2. Think about how other researchers can cite your work.
3. Think about how your institution will view your work.
4. Formulate a way for the leads to be “gatekeepers”.
5. Use an appropriate widely-recognized license.
6. Don’t expect your project to be sustainable in the current funding climate.
7. Any solution to these problems is going to have to work within the established behaviors of the various communities.

About the presenter:

Dan Gezelter is a professor of chemistry & biochemistry at the University of Notre Dame.  His specialties are theoretical & computational chemistry and condensed phase molecular dynamics.  He's the original author of Jmol, and is the lead developer of the object-oriented parallel simulation engine (OOPSE).