Physics

Through the last 20-25 years “we won” many battles in the evolution of FLOSS into mainstream. No one can ignore today the role of open source in software, hardware, high-tech and even business development. However everything seems to be open today: Open Data, Open Innovation, Open Government, Open Research...what do we mean by that? Has “open” the same meaning in all of them? How reliable are the results from such openness? What about policies and science and technologies designed on top of them? This talk will share Open Parallel’s five years journey through the pre-construction challenges of the largest scientific instrument of the next decade -the Square Kilometre Array radio-telescope (SKA). Will present how a non-central country as New Zealand has a say on its design plus how open source software will be core to its success. Being involved in the OS side of the SKA, will also share some concerns around black swans and ask a few questions around cybersecurity. Open Science? Yeah, right.

The Open Science movement focuses on the broad benefits to the scientific enterprise, but its success will depend on the actions of individual scientists. Unless the short-term benefits to the researcher outweigh the costs, only the most altruistic will open up their research efforts to the world. Arguments based on hypothetical future benefits don’t carry much weight, and calls for better tools appear to be mainly driven by tool-designers, not potential users. I’ll start with two brief case histories (#arseniclife and Apple Academic Press), and then consider what the immediate costs and benefits are and how we might shift the balance between them.

In the talk I delineate a simple framework for open science and present empirical results on the adoption of open practices from my own research (+ others). The topics include data sharing, open access infrastructure, and replicability. I will show future perspectives for open science (including knowledge transfer and transdisciplinary research).

To do things together it is not enough to know. We must know what others know, and know that they know we know it, a phenomenon known as Common Knowledge. From the Royal Society to the Science and Nature super-journals, scientists have found ways—however flawed—to achieve it. I’ll introduce the concept of the Artifact, an abstraction that captures the essence of these institutions, and that may help us, in the 21st Century, to go beyond them. And I’ll propose, playfully, a few endeavors that may help us achieve it: Data Mists, Blockchain Republics, and the Moon Shot.