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Chapter 04: How Does OSS Relate To The Open Research Movement?

Learner personas - code contributor
- code-adjacent contributor
- manager/stakeholder
Pre-requisites - Chapter 01: Introduction To Open Source
- Chapter 02: Types of Open Source Software
- Chapter 03: Understanding OSS Governance

Table of Contents 🗂️

Learning Objectives 🧠

By the end of this section, you should be able to:

  • Get an overview of Open Research and its main principles and practices.
  • Understand how Open Research relates to Open Source.

Introduction to Open Research 🔭

Open Research (often called Open Science1) aims to transform how research is carried out and disseminated. Its primary focus is making research more reproducible, transparent, reusable, collaborative, accountable, equitable, and accessible to society.

The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) defines Open Science as:

The practice of making the primary outputs of publicly funded research results – publications and the research data – publicly accessible in a digital format with no or minimal restriction.

To achieve such goals, Open Research relies on practices such as Open Access, Open Data, Open Software, Open Educational Resources, Reproducible Science, Co-creation, Public Engagements, and Citizen Science. It also builds and expands on the principles of FAIR data (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable).

Open Research in practice 👩🏻‍💻

To ensure Research is genuinely open, every element of the research lifecycle should be publicly available, reusable, and transparent. This includes:

  • Open Data: Documenting and sharing data in a way that is accessible, reusable, and interoperable. This includes data from experiments, surveys, other research activities, and associated metadata.
  • Research Software: Documenting and publicizing software and computational workflows. This includes software for analyzing and cleaning data, running simulations, and other research activities.
  • Open Hardware: Documenting and making hardware designs and other hardware-related materials public and accessible.
  • Open Access: Making all research publications (and other published outputs) publicly available and accessible.

A man holding a book and standing at the beginning of a path with a hopeful expression. The winding path goes through an Open Data Village, an Open Tools waterfall, and an Open Code forest and finishes at the top of the Open Results mountain. At the top of the mountain is a person with a Data dashboard as a background.

The Turing Way project illustration by Scriberia. Used under a CC-BY 4.0 license. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.3332807

Open Scholarship2 builds on the principles and practices of Open Research but extends to other aspects of research such as:

  • Open educational resources: Making educational resources such as course materials, textbooks, and other learning materials publicly available and accessible.
  • Equity, diversity, inclusion: Ensuring scholarship is open and accessible to everyone without barriers based on gender, background, disability status, sexual orientation, etc.
  • Citizen science: The inclusion of members of the public in scientific research. This includes the public in the design, data collection, and research analysis.

Below is a more comprehensive taxonomy of Open Science by FOSTER.

FOSTER open science taxonomy. For a screenreader-friendly version of the mindmap, visit https://www.fosteropenscience.eu/themes/fosterstrap/images/taxonomies/open-science-ontology-en-fr.owl.xml

Open Research and Open Source 💻

The Open Definition sets out several principles that define openness about data and content (including software) and is widely used across Open Research contexts. The Open Definition can be summarized as follows:

Open data and content can be freely used, modified, and shared by anyone for any purpose.

Additionally, the Open Definition was initially derived from the Open Source Definition and retained many of its principles, such as:

  • freedom to use, modify, and share
  • no discrimination against fields of endeavor, individuals, or groups of people

It also requires that any content be distributed under an open license compatible with other open licenses (e.g., OSI licenses such as MIT, BSD-3, etc.). Research software outputs adhering to the Open Definition should then be distributed under an open license, though to be considered Open Source, the software must also meet the Open Source Definition as described in the Introduction to OSS chapter.

Euler diagram where Open research is placed on a circle on the left intersecting with Research Software and Open Source (on the right). Research software is in the top-middle region of the diagram in a smaller circle to denote it is only a small component of both Open Research and Open Source.

It is important to remember that Open Research encompasses other practices described in the Open Research in Practice section. Research software is only a small component of Open Research, and not all research software is Open Source or even open at all.

Resources 📚

Continue learning 🚥

⬅️ Previous Chapter: 03 - Understanding OSS Governance | Module activity: OSS power map ➡️

Footnotes

  1. The term Open Science is often used interchangeably with Open Research. However, Open Research is a more inclusive term encompassing Open Science and other research practices such as Humanities and Social Sciences. ↩

  2. Open Scholarship is a term used to describe the combination of Open Research and Open Education. It relates to making other aspects of scientific research open to the public, such as open educational resources, inclusive practice, and citizen science. ↩