Sharing and Openness in Education a way to go?
The issues of sharing and openness were discussed
in details with colleagues in my group.
I personals feel that, Sharing educational
material and research works is a way to go now; it makes material and research works
available to broader community, reduces the barriers to collaborative learning
through data sharing, transparence and attribution, reduces duplicates in
educational materials and helps to remove bias in our understand of a particular
subject, enables others to build upon new ideas right away, whenever and
whoever they are.
When
I Read about openness and sharing research in a blog post by so called,
F1000research which is platform for open sciences/open data, they discussed
some reasons as to why researchers are reluctant to share research data openly; A common explanation is there is a limited academic
benefit to them in sharing, plus curating data takes time and money, so beyond
a public good argument, they feel there is little incentive to share. Furthermore,
for the researchers who work in low-income countries, they have said that they
feel that by sharing their data before they have had a chance to fully analyse
them, makes them open to exploitation by researchers in high income settings.
To put it bluntly, they feel like data exporters.
The pressures of research assessments are also another
limiting factor. For example, in the UK, the Research Excellence Framework
places much burden on researchers to seek high impact journals, with limited
focus on the implementation and benefits to the public. If assessments were
more about the implementation, making better use and re-use of data and
collaborations across disciplines, then we may start to see a greater demand
for sharing research data in its entirety
Way Forward….
If we want to eliminate the challenges brought about by
sharing and openness some action are to be takes by every stake holder like researchers,
public, funding organizations, charities, academic institutions and industry.etc.
We need to look at changing the culture to support and
embrace openness, transparency and inclusivity. If the value and kudos of
sharing are equal to the demands of institutions and/or research assessments
then we might begin to see a change outside of academia as well.
Everybody has a responsibility to ensure that materials and
research works are shared in a robust, safe and efficient way. If we can ensure
and demonstrate that works are protected in a secure way, then the boundaries
on withholding are weakened. Creative common policies are best way to
securely share resources.
Finally, funders have a key role to optimize the value of
material and research works sharing and
institutions can enable academics to enhance the movement for sharing and openness
to be or part of normal practice.
Reference
Hi Deodatus, Thx for sharing your thoughts on this, please make proper references as described in the requirements for the blogs in the course description of ONL. You mention "The pressures of research assessments". Have you any idea or dream how the ideal research assessments should look like? So the academic world obtain benefits of opening and sharing their research (data and more). Regards, Francisca
ReplyDeleteThanks Francisca for the comments especially on the reference
ReplyDeleteMy suggestion is, we should put more emphasis on assessing science in studies rather than, dissemination platforms such as journal with high impact factor or international scientific conferences which in most cases are commercial platforms. people need to be encouraged to go for open platforms.Open platform that accepts, publish and share studies from manuscripts level and then the peer review processes follows and is done openly as well, reviewer reports are shared openly on the platforms. such platforms should be emphasized. a good example fro this is F1000Research.
In this way, sharing is already done, hence people would have there inputs, use and reuse, etc.
Rejection rate to high impact factor is high, this limits openness and sharing.
Good work. Kindly share your email address.
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