Alan Cottey: UEA Personal Pages
This page contains brief information on, and links to, other documents by me on Open Science and Open Knowledge
The Open Science Proposal is that it would be useful for the scientific community to have a widely recognised Protocol of openness, applying to individual scientific projects. Only a small fraction of all scientific projects would be done according to the required standard of radical openness, but those projects could claim a 'gold standard' of openness. Such projects would permit detailed scrutiny and criticism, and so furnish an efficient route to socially established reliable knowledge. In the second part of the article I discuss some aspects of OS which relate particularly to Information Technology.
A proposed adaptation of Open Science, focusing on guidelines for knowledge claims By the phrase Open Knowledge I mean a certain schema that defines a standard of openness of knowledge. The central element of the schema is a set of guidelines for those who would participate in the generation of OK. A sketch of the guidelines is given below. Knowledge claims conforming to the guidelines would be published on the World Wide Web. Such a publication must provide ready access to supporting evidence and arguments for its claims. Criticism and testing of the claims should be made as easy as possible. The OK proposal is an adaptation, to the broader field of knowledge-in-general, of the Open Science proposal.
'Open' and 'Science' are words that go together. The phrase Open Science has however been used in a number of ways. In this paper I survey briefly a selection of the writings which have connected 'openness' with 'science'. My own conclusions come in a separate section. Some of the conclusions are ... (i) contest (but not conflict) between openness and closeness is a recurrent feature; (ii) in a relationship model, openness and closeness occur in a social context and are manifested in the attitudes and the behaviour of actors, and this model permits a clarification of scenarios; (iii) there is no simple trend towards or away from openness; (iv) the review of project funding proposals should be comprehensive and open; (v) openness will be enhanced gradually through an understanding of a chain of concepts, openness - confidence - trust - empathy - integrity - more openness; (vi) the way in which these qualities are applied in the less fraught domain of science can act as a beacon in other, more testing, aspects of human relations.
International Journal of Science in Society (http://science-society.com/journal ) Vol 1, Issue 4 (2010) pp 185 - 194
In this paper I discuss openness and its converse, closeness, in science and society. Openness is an aspiration which is achieved to varying extents in different situations and by different actors in human culture. I identify confidence (here used primarily in the sense self-confidence) and trust as essential conditions for openness to flourish, and integrity as an overarching quality which fosters openness, confidence and trust. The principal example here treated concerns the views and practice of the physicist Niels Bohr, in his science and in his advocacy of openness in the science-related matter of the international control of nuclear weapons.
Openness is proposed as a key balancing aid for society, promoting change without instability. An open access read-only version can be found here.
The basic version of this page was created in 2006 and the page was last modified on 12 October 2018