Sharing and Openness in Education a way to go?
The issues of sharing and openness were discussed in details with colleagues in my group.
I personals feel that, Sharing educational material and research works is a way to go now; it makes material and research works available to broader community, reduces the barriers to collaborative learning through data sharing, transparence and attribution, reduces duplicates in educational materials and helps to remove bias in our understand of a particular subject, enables others to build upon new ideas right away, whenever and whoever they are.
When I Read about openness and sharing research in a blog post by so called, F1000research which is platform for open sciences/open data, they discussed some reasons as to why researchers are reluctant to share research data openly; A common explanation is there is a limited academic benefit to them in sharing, plus curating data takes time and money, so beyond a public good argument, they feel there is little incentive to share. Furthermore, for the researchers who work in low-income countries, they have said that they feel that by sharing their data before they have had a chance to fully analyse them, makes them open to exploitation by researchers in high income settings. To put it bluntly, they feel like data exporters.
The pressures of research assessments are also another limiting factor. For example, in the UK, the Research Excellence Framework places much burden on researchers to seek high impact journals, with limited focus on the implementation and benefits to the public. If assessments were more about the implementation, making better use and re-use of data and collaborations across disciplines, then we may start to see a greater demand for sharing research data in its entirety
Way Forward….
If we want to eliminate the challenges brought about by sharing and openness some action are to be takes by every stake holder like researchers, public, funding organizations, charities, academic institutions and industry.etc.
We need to look at changing the culture to support and embrace openness, transparency and inclusivity. If the value and kudos of sharing are equal to the demands of institutions and/or research assessments then we might begin to see a change outside of academia as well.
Everybody has a responsibility to ensure that materials and research works are shared in a robust, safe and efficient way. If we can ensure and demonstrate that works are protected in a secure way, then the boundaries on withholding are weakened. Creative common policies are best way to securely share resources.
Finally, funders have a key role to optimize the value of material and research works sharing and institutions can enable academics to enhance the movement for sharing and openness to be or part of normal practice.
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