An open science work flow

I'm convinced that research should be done in a more open manner. The reasons for this are discussed in numerous places by people who have taken much more time thinking it over than me (I'm also including networked science in this). What I have found less information on is how you go about it. Even the definition can be a bit vague. To me, open research means that everything you do in the project can be scrutinized and commented on by others who can also become involved in the project.

An open project requires a well defined structure so that potential collaborators can come in at any point. It also helps keep the project on track and stop it it either heading off in directions it was never intended to (ok, sometimes this is good but you need to know it's happening!), or get stuck in a rut with people spending all their time on an insignificant part.

As an aside, I was recently in a room of people discussing some data. The data was good, in fact very good. The problem was that they had not though in advance how they were going to use it! It seemed to me that the project had lost sight of being useful in practice and even a proof of principle problem had not really been defined. Just asking what the end product of the project was would have been quite useful, and should have been set out much earlier on.

Below is the work flow of a typical research project. Ok, I know it doesn't work out like that in a lot of cases, but if you think about it either it should have been like that, or it was and you just couldn't see it at the time.

An open project needs collaborative tools for all of these stages. To me what is exciting is that you can then taken any stage in isolation and work on just that. What does that mean? Imagine a scenario where you have a great idea for a project but just don't have the time to do it. You post it to a message board for open questions and someone else picks up on it, expands the problem and go and solves it. You come back at the analysis stage when the results are put on a blog (linked to your original question) and realise it has results that you can feed back into your other current research.

Even more importantly, it divorces the necessity for the person collecting the data to be the one who analyses it. Very few people have the capability to do both of these well. As long as the aims of the project are well expressed and understood, you can have experts working at every stage to really make the most of the project.

Where do we go from here? Well, you need the tools for each stage and that is something I would like to discuss in future posts.