Open science has become a pillar of the current national and international views and political programmes of governments, research funding bodies, and forums.
There are three main ambitions for that:
1) Change the way citizens could perceive research and public investments for research.
2) Enable opportunities offered by the digital revolution to allow everybody to participate in the scientific process by accessing research data at any time
3) Accelerate the discoveries and increase scientific value by sharing data and by transferring knowledge within scientific communities.
Open Data
Open data does not mean ‘free data’ and, furthermore, depending on what ‘data’ (in the sense of any digital object) is being referred to, conditions governing its access and reuse will always be applied.
Open Science and the EOSC initiative support an uptake of a set of guiding principles about the way to plan and produce scientific data. These are the ‘FAIR’ Data Principles, where ‘FAIR’ stands for ‘Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable’.
Those principles should be applied through the entire research process, implying rules of engagement and methodological practice from scientists and facilities, and investments to increase support infrastructure of FAIR data-publishing, analytics, computing, workflow services. But sharing data is not enough… and sharing needs to be scientifically useful…
The Asterics-OBELICS Repository
H.E.S.S. first public test data release
Some readings:
ESFRI cluster projects – Position papers on expectations and planned contributions to the EOSC
CERN announces new OpenData policy in support of OpenScience
Citizen Science
Professional researchers volunteer to make their scientific products available to the public.
Zooniverse is the largest platform for people-powered research where citizens, independent on their own background, can participate in studying authentic objects of interest gathered by researchers, such as images of faraway galaxies, historical records and diaries, or videos of animals in their natural habitats.
For instance, with the support of the ASTERICS cluster a project was implemented providing gamma-ray astronomy images from Cherenkov telescopes. Members of the public are invited through a web interface to visually scan these images and separate them in sub-samples of images potentially produced by different particles, namely photons, muons, and protons. After only the first five days that the project was on-line, we counted more than 1.3 million citizen classifications of images inspected on the web.
Help astronomers to find elusive muons disguised as gamma rays!
More genrally a key aim of the ASTERICS project has been to open up the astronomy and astroparticle physics facilities to a wider constituency of stakeholders, from technical audiences to policy makers to the general public. For the final category, we achieve this through crowdsourcing experiments
ASTERICS and The Open University have created a short series of videos about collaborative science:
60 second adventures
ESCAPE Citizen Science
Where do we stand with EOSC?
The implementation of EOSC concept is moving further… fast from some aspects and as it should be for some others. Indeed …
The ESCAPE cluster provided feedback in 2020 about the SRIA – Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). Version 0.9 is available and there are so,e intersting parts coming from, inspired or simply aligned with the ESCAPE scientific community.
The EOSC Association has been established and it will sign a Memorandum of Understanding with the European Commission to progress the EOSC partnership, which will bring together all relevant stakeholders to co-design and deploy a European Research Data Commons where data are findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable (FAIR), and also as open as possible.
Indeed the text illustrating the EOSC and the Association mission brings the same vision than the one (illustrated in my articles) that is the fondation of my approach with ESCAPE for the Astrophysics and Particle Physics disciplines: a virtual research space where the scientific results are not limited to publications but extended to all digital objects that make them reproducible and reusable to increase scientifc discovery and enable new results. As per the EOSC-Association mission, such a space allow researchers to uptake the Open Science to accelerate the creation of new knowledge, inspire education, spur innovation and promote accessibility and transparency.
We have already produced a lot with ESCAPE and the same is applicable to all five science clusters. But important milestones in the agendas of the scientific communities are still to come.
In summary, we need to implement the virtual research space leveraging the ESCAPE services, exploiting the pilot ESCAPE-EOSC-cell through some transversal science subjects (Test Science Projects) and support scientists to perform research in an Open-Science environment.
Test Science Projects
Strengthening the commitment of researchers to the Open Science ecosystem is a major challenge. To achieve this objective ESCAPE had planned to set up some Test Science Projects (TSP) which federate more than one ESFRI project. They were initially designed as a validation bench for ESCAPE services and scientific analysis projects that will produce new scientific results and publications. These TSPs will correspond to some key interdisciplinary scientific objectives of the ESFRI facilities concerned.
The TSP partners will address them by fully exploiting the services of the « ESCAPE-EOSC cell » demonstrating the innovative impact of data analysis in open science. This is notably the positive experience and leverage that ESCAPE represents as mentioned in the European Strategy Paper on Particle Physics 2020 (see page 16 of https://cds.cern.ch/record/2721050/files/CERN-ESU-014_Document_explicatif.pdf?version=1 ). It is relevant to take advantage of the TSP approach in order to federate collaborative actions between researchers, possibly transversal (e.g. experimentalist and theorists; astrophysicists, particle and nuclear physicists), which increase the involvement of the ESCAPE scientific community in the implementation of the Open Science concept.
In 2020 two TSPs have been selected and linked to two bottom-up expression of interests of the scientific communities: Dark Matter and Extreme Universe. I supported this initiative during my presentation at the JENAS conference in October 2019. This triggered discussions, which were then transformed into an official expression of interest on dark matter studies and on gravitational waves for fundamental physics studies.
The added value of TSPs and the strategy for Open Science in our research fields were discussed and shared with the ESCAPE General Assembly at its annual workshop held in Brussels on 26-27 February 2020 and finally supported by the chair of the European consortia APPEC, ASTRONET, ECFA and NuPECC.
Conclusion
There is no conclusion. This is just a start…
I do trust all the ideas youve presented in your post They are really convincing and will definitely work Nonetheless the posts are too short for newbies May just you please lengthen them a bit from next time Thank you for the post