The scientific community has been flooded with well-intended ideas and concrete attitudes to tackle the openness in science, or better its lack of openness. More specifically, attempts to guarantee access to otherwise ‘protected’ material have been the obsession of many (mostly early-career) researchers.
You initiated the #DontLeaveItToGoogle campaign after Google brought out a search engine for scientific datasets. What was the reason to start such an initiative? Research data is an important scientific output and there are many benefits to research data sharing, including data reuse and aggregation. But discovery is a big problem, even bigger than in literature.
Open Science is a strange concept. Depending on who you speak to, it can be a set of scientific practices, a social justice issue, a complete fad, part of a political capitalist regime, or just a different but undefinable form of traditional science. This variety in thought is at once both a strength of Open Science, and its greatest weakness.
German universities and research institutions are playing a prominent role in the global trend of shifting academic publishing to open access. A nationwide consortium of scientific institutions, known as DEAL, aims to encourage academic publishers to adopt new licensing agreements for open access publication of scholarly content.
