Principles
We value a set of principles and practices that aim to make scientific research accessible to everyone. This benefits not only the scientific community, but also society as a whole. Science is part of almost everything that happens in our modern world, and at VLIZ we aim to contribute towards the increased understanding of, use of, and trust in science by society.
Open Science@VLIZ is about
- Open Access To the scientific outputs we create: data, publications, software.
- Open Source For the software we create: so that others can adopt and adapt.
- Open Initiatives Being open to collaborations.
- Open Understanding Reaching out to multilingual audiences, inside and outside the scientific domain.
- Open Infrastructure Developing system architecture that is open access and open source.
Open science is also about embracing principles of accessibility, transparency, inclusivity, and sustainability. We fully support the UNESCO recommendations on Open Science.
Ambitions
At VLIZ we believe that embracing Open Science will increase the quality, efficiency, and impact of science. We have already taken important steps in the fields of Open Access and Open Data. Unfortunately Open Science practices are not yet the norm, and at VLIZ we aim to use the expertise we have built up within the Data Centre and the Library to help smooth the way to the adoption of Open Science practices and technologies in the domain of marine science. We participate in numerous regional and EU projects that aim to make Science more Open, and crucially that actually help embed the practices of Open Science in a practical, workable way with the scientists and organisations that create the science.
Components
There are a number of components that we are focusing on in our Open Science journey
- Campaigning To spread the word about Open Science and about how to do Open Science. To engage with our fellow travelers - through blogs, talks, reviews, talking groups, events, and news feeds - in Flanders, Belgium, Europe, and beyond. To reach out to existing and new connections in industry, citizen scientists, and researchers in marine science and in other domains.
- Open Access We enact the principles of open access in our own scientific, technical, and data-oriented work. For publications, we have the Open Marine Archive (OMA) which can provide access to Green and Gold (-access) publications. We use text mining and Natural language processing (NLP), machine-readable semantics, linked-open-data (LOD) thesauri, LOD-oriented metadata formats, persistent identifiers (ORCID, ISNI, URN,..) to open up the content of the Library.
- Open Data The VLIZ Marine Data Centre has policies and data management practises that make our data findable, accessible, and useable by end users and to fully-automated inquiries. We use machine-readable semantics, LOD feeds, LOD-oriented metadata formats, persistent identifiers, and interoperable formats to open up the contents of our data systems.
- Open Coding We strive to make our code both openly and practically accessible. This applies at the level of the individuals, and at the level of the coded services we provide to interrogate our data systems. By listening and responding to our user community, we believe we can only improve our provisions.
- Open Infrastructure The nature of our system architectures will adapt to the Open Science principles. We already see how semantic web and linked-open-data projects equate success to the ability to fully embrace the open and interlinked resource-oriented structure of what made the web into what it is: the largest information machine humankind ever built. We are embracing the concepts of universality, federated searches, distribution through uniformisation, replacing duplicating with linking and harvesting with indexing, proper tuning and adoption of transparent proxying and caching, leveraging the principle of permissionless innovation, etc. Rather than just working “on the web”, our system architectures will need to become nodes and components, fully submerged “in the web”. In this, we acknowledge that proper collaboration with Computer Science departments is essential.