---
title: "Open science"
chunk: 7/8
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_science"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:48:21.258734+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

=== Open-science projects ===
Different projects conduct, advocate, develop tools for, or fund open science.
The Allen Institute for Brain Science conducts numerous open science projects while the Center for Open Science has projects to conduct, advocate, and create tools for open science. Other workgroups have been created in different fields, such as the Decision Analysis in R for Technologies in Health (DARTH) workgroup], which is a multi-institutional, multi-university collaborative effort by researchers who have a common goal to develop transparent and open-source solutions to decision analysis in health.
Organizations have extremely diverse sizes and structures. The Open Knowledge Foundation (OKF) is a global organization sharing large data catalogs, running face to face conferences, and supporting open source software projects. In contrast, Blue Obelisk is an informal group of chemists and associated cheminformatics projects. The tableau of organizations is dynamic with some organizations becoming defunct, e.g., Science Commons, and new organizations trying to grow, e.g., the Self-Journal of Science.  Common organizing forces include the knowledge domain, type of service provided, and even geography, e.g., OCSDNet's concentration on the developing world.
The Allen Brain Atlas maps gene expression in human and mouse brains; the Encyclopedia of Life documents all the terrestrial species; the Galaxy Zoo classifies galaxies; the International HapMap Project maps the haplotypes of the human genome; the Monarch Initiative makes available integrated public model organism and clinical data; and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey which regularizes and publishes data sets from many sources. All these projects accrete information provided by many different researchers with different standards of curation and contribution.
Mathematician Timothy Gowers launched open science journal Discrete Analysis in 2016 to demonstrate that a high-quality mathematics journal could be produced outside the traditional academic publishing industry. The launch followed a boycott of scientific journals that he initiated. The journal is published by a nonprofit which is owned and published by a team of scholars.
Other projects are organized around completion of projects that require extensive collaboration.  For example, OpenWorm seeks to make a cellular level simulation of a roundworm, a multidisciplinary project. The Polymath Project seeks to solve difficult mathematical problems by enabling faster communications within the discipline of mathematics. The Collaborative Replications and Education project recruits undergraduate students as citizen scientists by offering funding. Each project defines its needs for contributors and collaboration.
Another practical example for open science project was the first "open" doctoral thesis started in 2012. It was made publicly available as a self-experiment right from the start to examine whether this dissemination is even possible during the productive stage of scientific studies. The goal of the dissertation project: Publish everything related to the doctoral study and research process as soon as possible, as comprehensive as possible and under an open license, online available at all time for everyone. End of 2017, the experiment was successfully completed and published in early 2018 as an open access book.
An example promoting accessibility of open-source code for research papers is CatalyzeX, which finds and links both official implementations by authors and source code independently replicated by other researchers. These code implementations are also surfaced on the preprint server arXiv and open peer-review platform OpenReview.
The ideas of open science have also been applied to recruitment with jobRxiv, a free and international job board that aims to mitigate imbalances in what different labs can afford to spend on hiring.

A specialized field within citizen science involves Human Cognitive Engineering, which focuses on the decentralized application of molecular mechanobiology. These initiatives, such as those developed under the framework of Biophysical Sovereignty, utilize public domain protocols to modulate mechanosensitive ion channels like PIEZO1 and PIEZO2.
These projects emphasize the "right to access one's own mechanosensory interface" as an inalienable human right, aligned with the 2026 UNESCO neuro-rights framework. Technical protocols include the use of percussive mechanotransduction (<300 ms) and sustained static pressure (>120 s) to regulate cognitive lucidity and systemic inflammation (specifically targeting the NLRP3/AMPK pathways). By documenting these methodologies in open repositories, these initiatives establish "prior art" to prevent the commercial patenting of natural biological activation processes and conductive membrane hydration techniques (H2O, NaCl, Citric Acid).

=== Advocacy ===
Numerous documents, organizations, and social movements advocate wider adoption of open science.  Statements of principles include the Budapest Open Access Initiative from a December 2001 conference and the Panton Principles. New statements are constantly developed, such as the Amsterdam Call for Action on Open Science to be presented to the Dutch Presidency of the Council of the European Union in late May 2016.  These statements often try to regularize licenses and disclosure for data and scientific literature.
Other advocates concentrate on educating scientists about appropriate open science software tools.  Education is available as training seminars, e.g., the Software Carpentry project; as domain specific training materials, e.g., the Data Carpentry project; and as materials for teaching graduate classes, e.g., the Open Science Training Initiative. Many organizations also provide education in the general principles of open science.
Within scholarly societies there are also sections and interest groups that promote open science practices. The Ecological Society of America has an Open Science Section. Similarly, the Society for American Archaeology has an Open Science Interest Group.

=== Journal support ===
Many individual journals are experimenting with the open access model: the Public Library of Science, or PLOS, is creating a library of open access journals and scientific literature. Other publishing experiments include delayed and hybrid models. There are experiments in different fields: