logankilpatrick / Transform-to-Open-Science

Transformation to Open Science

Transform to OPen Science (TOPS)

Accelerating Scientific Discovery through Open Science

Overview

• TOPS will act as a catalyst to jump-start a suite of coordinated activities designed to rapidly transform science.
• Designate 2023 as the Year of Open Science within a 5-year push to Transform to OPen Science.

Goals

• Increase understanding and adoption of open science principles and techniques in our Mission and Research Communities
• Accelerate major scientific discoveries through supporting the adoption of open science
• Broaden participation by historically excluded communities

Implementation

• 2022: Targeted investments to enable open science
• 2023: Activities to support organizational and community transformation to open science
• 2024 and beyond: Continue to harden support for open science
• Coordinate activities with scientific associations, institutions, philanthropic organizations, & move forward together

Overview Presentation

Short presentation on TOPS initiative:

• Slides:
• Recording starts at 1:55:32.

Join TOPS Mailing List

Please join the TOPS email list to hear about further activates and become more involved! This GitHub repository discussions enabled, so feel free to ask questions or join conversations there.

Motivation and Plans

We have lost the luxury of time. The Transform to OPen Science (TOPS) mission is designed to rapidly transform agencies, organizations, and communities.

Scientists are working to solve some of the most crucial and complex problems humanity has faced. To quickly address these pressing challenges, the pace of science must accelerate, but responding will likely include new ways to analyze unprecedented amounts of data and information. This response requires a cultural shift - from closed, siloed status-quo to open, transparent science practices and methods. This shift will empower a rapid community transformation, increasing access to data, software, and code, accelerating discoveries, and broadening participation.

Open science is defined as research conducted openly and transparently. Sharing knowledge advances science faster while enabling interdisciplinary collaborations leading to the breakthroughs we need to address the major challenges facing science. Adopting open science practices has the potential to lower the threshold for entry to marginalized communities, expand the science community, and increase opportunities for collaboration while promoting scientific innovation, transparency, and reproducibility. Open science will increase the pace and quality of scientific progress.

Recent advances have reduced many of the technological barriers to participating in open science, but other barriers remain. Many scientists are still unable to contribute because of outdated institutional policies around sharing information, a lack of support to transition towards openness, or they lack open science skills. The transformation to open science must be enabled by support from the institutions and organizations. To redesign the way we work together, we need everyone.

The Transform to OPen Science (TOPS) mission is aligned with recommendations from NASA's Strategy for Data Management and Computing for Groundbreaking Science 2019-2024 and National Academies reports on open science, reproducibility, and scientific software. The 2021 UNESCO draft Recommendation on Open Science synthesis report will be used as a framework to support the global scientific community's move to open science.

Within the TOPS mission, we are designating 2023 as the Year Of Open Science (YOOS), a global community initiative to spark change and inspire open science engagement through events and activities that will shift the current paradigm. TOPS is only the starting point; the science community needs agencies and organizations to make a long term commitment to support building an inclusive open science community over the next decade.

Targeted Activities:

1. Promoting a common understanding of Open Science, associated benefits and challenges, as well as diverse paths to Open Science. Increase open science visibility through high-level support and communication strategies, create a TOPS steering team to organize activities, give colloquia, and build partnerships with companies, philanthropic groups, and institutions to advance open science activities.

2. Developing an enabling policy environment for Open Science. The TOPS team will provide advice and guidance to agencies and organizations on targeted policy adjustments to allow for open science activities by federal employees and contractors.

3. Investing in Open Science infrastructures and services. Support development of an open science infrastructure center of excellence that has a strong community-led base to advance interoperability and inclusivity, and can advance open infrastructures and FAIR cloud-optimized data and software.

4. Investing in human resources, education, digital literacy and capacity building for Open Science. Support development of an open science education center of excellence that has a strong community-led base to advance open science literacy. Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), collaboratively develop curriculum on open science and data science skills with open science certificates and badges. Leverage existing investments in trainings and support summer internships, summer schools, HackWeeks, Open Science Launchpads, and challenges.

5. Fostering a culture of Open Science and aligning incentives for Open Science. Create open science awards, highlight successes, and integrate open science community building and practices into performance evaluations, research awards, and reporting.

6. Promoting innovative approaches for Open Science at different stages of the scientific process. Integrate open science practises into citizen science, provide free, low-barrier path to large-scale research infrastructures (eg. interactive notebook deployments on commercial clouds).

7. Promoting international and multi stakeholder cooperation in the context of Open Science and in view of reducing digital and knowledge gaps. Engage with international partners to participate in joint activities around open science, including open infrastructures, open MOOCs, international awards, and open metrics.

Repository

This repository is used to openly share information about TOPS and the Year of Open Science. Issues are used to collect tasks for development, and Markdown text documents for any planning documents that need to be developed. This could include linking to other resources. Please feel free to submit an issue or fork the repository to make a contribution.

Limitation

This repository will only be used for hosting content for documentation purposes. It will not be used for hosting code. A future version may involve code used to build a website. That will go through SRA (Software Release Authority) approval first. Documentation may be stored in different data formats, but the primary format for storing text documentation will be Markdown.