Posted on 14 June 2013
New methods of opening up academic research to greater collaboration and scrutiny have been discussed at the Max Weber Fellows’ June conference.
Current fellow, Konrad Lawson presented on the potential "libre" open access might have on research, allowing members to simultaneously edit and manipulate the content, lifting and inserting material to create a new piece of work.
Lawson cited the example of GitHub, a platform currently hosting 5 million repositories being developed by 3 million users. GitHub aims to facilitate collaboration between computer programmers developing code, but Lawson thinks a similar approach could be of benefit to the academic world.
“If we become comfortable with this it could lead to a radical new approach to scholarship, [making it] much easier for hundreds of people to work together.” said Lawson.
In July last year the Research Councils UK announced the adoption of a Creative Commons Attribution License - allowing researchers to share, adapt, and even make commercial use of research funded by the councils, providing it followed attribution criteria set by the original author.
Such techniques make the process of research much more fluid. As well as direct collaboration, the approach would allow the direct improvement of scholarship that, for example, might be well written, or contain promising ideas, but lacks sufficient data, or visa versa.
“Any unfinished work can potentially become finished work.” Said Lawson, “Our texts, our scholarship, become living texts, they won’t die the day they are published. These can texts live on and evolve”
There is, however, concern among academics over accurate accreditations and the potential for plagiarism, with subsequent funding ramifications for themselves and their institutions.
Lawson understands the concerns, and has written articles detailing them. He remains, however, optimistic. “[I’m] not proposing a universal solution, but a provocative suggestion on how we might think about innovation. [It] allows collaboration on a much larger scale, which is something we’ve seen to be beneficial in the world of open source software development”
Speaking at the same conference, Elena-Ivona Dumitrescu, outlined the new Run My Code project, which seeks to give greater validity to work based on computer modelling. The project makes the coding from papers accepted to journals available on their "companion" website, simplifying the process of results reproducibility by other researchers.
Dumitrescu cited the examples of the Duke Cancer Scandal, and the case of Diederik Stapel, both of whom produced inaccurate results which went unnoticed because the data and coding were not available for scrutiny.
The project will also make it easier, not only to re-test results, but will also “Provide a very large community of users (beyond the academic sphere) with the ability to use the latest scientific methods in a user friendly way.” Said Dumitrescu.
Dumitrescu was presenting on behalf of professors, Gilbert Colletaz, Christophe Hurlin, Christophe Pérignon and Victoria Stodden, who jointly created the Run My Code project.