British Columbia’s Simon Fraser University is taking a nation-leading first step it hopes could help jumpstart research across Canada and around the world.
Dubbed Open Scholarship or Open Science, the concept is simple: make all academic research and data as accessible as possible to other scientists, regardless of who or where they are.
“This means, whenever possible, making it freely available for anyone to try to reproduce their work or to try to expand on their work and take it further,” said SFU vice-president of research and innovation Dugan O’Neil.
“We are trying to make sure that when we produce new knowledge it is out there and available for everyone to use.”
The initiative is being led by SFU’s Institute for Neuroscience and Neurotechnology, with the first efforts focused on sharing data in the search for brain disease cures.
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Institute director and neuroscientist Randy McIntosh said part of that work is the creation of an online platform that hosts a “virtual brain” that researchers around the world can share data with.
“Kind of like a flight simulator, instead of simulating a flight, we’re simulating a brain,” he said.
“To stimulate it you need data, and that’s where this open scholarship thing comes in, allowing us to pull the data together, and then use that for example to test what changes when someone has dementia, who do we detect it, how do we intervene?”
The initiative is being supported through a $1 million endowment from the Tanenbaum Open Science Institute, with matching funds from the university.
The money is being used to help develop platforms and procedures that will help researchers organize, curate and share their data with peers.
“We’ve got the policies in place to navigate this complicated field of open scholarship. What we don’t know is how to put it into practice, and that’s really a challenge,” McIntosh said.
“How much do we change our standard operating procedures, how much do we change daily lives in the lab and so on to really benefit from open scholarship, and that’s what these additional funds are going to support, is this implementation plan and then making sure we carry it forward, not just at SFU but across Canada as well.”
McIntosh’s graduate students will be among the first scientists on campus to contribute to the program, sharing their research not just with their classmates, but peers around the world.
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