Pluto and Open Science

Open Science in South Korea

HOWDY GREETINGS! THIS IS TEAM PLUTO 🤗

We’ve been holding ‘Open Science Meet-up’s around the country since this January. In this post, we wanted to share some information, backgrounds, and concerns about the Meet-up.

Open Science

Open Science (OS) the movement to make scientific research, data, and dissemination accessible to all levels of an inquiring society, amateur or professional. Supranationals such as EC or OECD has categorized sub-fields of OS as i) Open Access which enables free utilization of research outcomes, ii) Open (Research) Data which opens up all data arising during and after a research project, and iii) Open Collaboration which promotes open, inclusive, transparent collaboration among researchers and institutes.

Projects oriented at OS range from those focused on information sharing and collaboration among researchers (ResearchGate, MathOverflow, Open Science Framework), to platforms facilitating quick dissemination of research outcomes with free access (PLOS, arXiv).

In short, Open Science is a concept that promotes collaboration by disclosing every data and information originating from research projects.

OS brings many advantages to the currently closed research ecosystem at large. Duplicate (thus wasted) resources put into same research topics around the globe will be saved, increasing the efficiency of research. Quality of research projects can be improved using openly shared datasets. Because it’s ‘open’ communications, directly follows there will be more communications between researchers, which will bring about diversity to research topics and methodologies. Participation from diverse citizen communities, not to mention research communities, will increase as well.

Eventually, through OS, the progress of knowledge would be made ever faster and efficient, and research communities will be made more robust with collaborative research frameworks. Open Access, one of the most famous categories of OS, has actually proven that free access to academic information, even free for the general public, contributes to a popularization of scientific knowledge.

Even with these clear advantages, there still remains some limitations and obstacles to implementing OS fully in practice.

• Obscure incentive Individual researchers are still in need of clear incentive or reward structure to actively engage in OS. National research (and innovation) policies, and those of institutes and organizations need to clarify how they would encourage them.
• Lack of Standards and Guidelines Mass implementation of Open Research Data requires relevant infrastructure, standards, protocols, and services.
• Field-specific Characteristics Research frameworks and generated data/information vary a lot in different disciplines. OS implementation and practices require different strategies as such.
• Misinformation Skepticism exists that proactive sharing of low-quality (or even false) data/information may harm the literature.
• Conflicts of Interest (COIs) There are concerns about moral and legal conflicts. Some research projects may require limited disclosure to protect commercial prospects (ie. patent), and it is necessary to pseudonymize any research data before publicly sharing, preventing any infringement against privacy.

Pluto and OS

While investigating problems in research world to bootstrap the project, the team began to learn more about OS, and concluded that OS can work as a building block for team’s vision: “Breaking down barriers in academia”.

Based on the concepts of OS, putting its own philosophies to overcome the limitations above, the team is designing a decentralized scholarly communication platform.

• Obscure incentive
  This is the most major design problem. Current research ecosystem has an absurd incentive structure. Researchers have to pursue “research for publication”, often referred to as publish-or-perish, to maintain their career. A huge portion of endeavors (by researchers) are realized as profits for commercial publishers. The team is putting much of its effort to come up with ideas to design a better incentive structure to put into the platform.
• Lack of Standards and Guidelines
  There is no single standard definition or protocol for OS. Recent remarks are that there needs to be an international association including most OS-related projects to successfully implement it. The team’s core belief here is to make the platform as interoperable (compatible) to other projects and services as possible. Doing so would make it easier to comply to standards when they’re made. At the same time, the platform’s own protocols need to be designed in such a way that individual researchers can make decisions among some options they may deem as ‘reasonable’.
  The team is also working on normalization of metadata of research outcomes. Currently, it is focused on those of academic papers (journal papers), where there is a lack of the global standard. Scinapse, our search engine service, works as an interface to deliver such efforts, and then the resulting normalized data enhances the quality of Scinapse retroactively.
• Field-specific Characteristics
  The team has received a lot of feedback from OS Meet-ups on this point. We understand that it might be almost impossible to embrace every research discipline with a single system. The mission here is to identify as many common aspects from most disciplines as possible, to embrace those identified in the default design of the platform, and to make it possible to generate sub-systems in the platform having their own characteristics but complying to the default guidelines at the same time.
• Misinformation
  The team believes that moral issues in academia, including misinformation, salami slicing, p-hacking, or HARKing, would be resolved by the ‘self-correction’ of the research communities. Put in other words, it is important to design the protocols in such a way that self-correcting actions of the participants are incentivized and promoted, while questionable practices are discouraged (or not-incentivized).
• Conflicts of Interest (COIs)
  Although the team advocate for OS, we also believe that it is unnecessary to “force” everything to be open. Of course, it is obviously important to disclose every “publicly funded” research. We respect the decisions of individual researchers. The point here is to have a proper design of incentive structure in them. Reasonable, and fair.

Dealing with these design problems, the core philosophies of Pluto Network are:

1. Reward where there is contribution
   Clearly identify what is deemed as ‘contribution’ to knowledge, and give incentives to those who contribute.
2. Transparent legitimacy
   Although we believe there exists “authority” in academia, we also ask them to be ‘legitimate’. If authorities are to be legitimate, the evidence must be transparently disclosed. While OS focuses on ‘open’, we believe in ‘reasonable, fair open’. Being reasonable and fair arises from being legitimate.

To sum up, our team is trying to solve the problems that are happening in the research community based on our philosophy with OS concepts. We believe that our efforts will contribute to the acceleration of scientific development.

OS in South Korea

Beginning with Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) in 2002, there had been consistent efforts for OS globally, with recent instances to put OS as global policy issues such as Open Data Charter by G8 in 2013 (now signed by 62 governments as of Sep 2018), or Daejeon Declaration in 2015.

Europe is developing numerous programs, focused around EU and UK, and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) of US has developed and put into effect its own policies to promote OS.

As such, many of research communities, institutes, funding agencies, and governments around the world are beginning to identify OS as a necessary policy issue. On the other hand, South Korea is relatively passive and slow in doing so.

South Korea has spent about 80 billion USD on R&D in 2014, 4.24% of its GDP. This ranks the country from 2nd to 5th depending on scales (5th by size, 2nd by GDP ratio, 4th by per capita). In other words, South Korea is investing tremendously into research, but it is hard to find efforts of OS from the country other than those by its government, which is a lot of times criticized as being “passive and bureaucratic”.

Implementing OS in South Korea comes with much greater obstacles, as its research community is very conservative. Recent ‘Fake Science’ scandal, where journalists reported that there were unbelievably large number of Korean researchers at fake conferences, clearly shows how Korean research communities are failing to establish a healthy ecosystem.

Pluto and OS Meet up

With those backgrounds, the team has been holding OS Meet-ups to bring researchers together, recognize that OS is an important matter, and discuss what needs to be done.

We believe it is critical to discuss with researchers why it is important to be open and how to properly implement it, and to have consensus and support from them. Based on these discourse, consensus, and support from researchers, we want to form a sound community of researchers to drive sustainable growth of academia in South Korea.

Remaining Question Marks

To sum up, the team has been putting efforts in

- identifying and communicating what kind of problems exist in contemporary research environments,

- establishing strategies and solutions to tackle these problems based on the concepts of Open Science,

- and building up a community of researchers through Open Science Meet-ups.

After a number of meet-ups we’ve bumped into a serious limitation of these offline events that there is lack of practical actions and consistent interactions among participants, including Pluto Network. We’ve been seeking ways to overcome this, and this posting is one such example!

One of our current breakthrough candidates is to collaborate with some of existing communities, to build up a greater community for researchers in the country. We’re more than happy to collaborate with research communities, and please feel no hesitate to contact us if you have any suggestions.

Pluto Network
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Email: team@pluto.network