blog

It was a busy week for Open Science, so these are just some of the highlights we came across.

• What drives academic data sharing? An article by researchers from Berlin concludes that “research policies that better incentivise data sharing are needed to improve the quality of research results and foster scientific progress”
• Henry Chesbrough, who coined the term “open innovation” says that to implement open science, “we must adapt by inventing new types of institutions”
• Open science is especially important when it comes to fighting disease outbreaks, say Harvard scientists in Nature. (That’s why we have our open and free Ebola collection at F1000Research, which also serves as a portal for free Ebola content in F1000Prime).
• Geoffrey Bilder, Jennifer Lin and Cameron Neylon have written a set of Principles for Open Scholarly Infrastructure.
• A big success for Erin McKiernan and all the other scientists who wrote an open letter to SfN earlier this year to explain that their open access licenses were not sufficiently open. SfN has now adopted the widely recommended CC-BY license!
• We attended two events in London this week about different aspects of open science. On Tuesday and Wednesday, NC3Rs hosted a workshop on publication bias, which you can read more about on our blog. On Thursday, Digital Science hosted a panel on data sharing, which they summarized in a Storify.
• And finally, over the past hours, in a sort of unintended citizen science/open science project, the internet has served as an interesting source of data collection on visual perception. What colour is this dress? Buzzfeed ran a poll that showed that most people (about 71% at time of writing) see it as white and gold, but in reality it’s blue and black! Virginia Hughes explains the science.

It looks blue to me now, but was absolutely white this morning!