Collaborative platforms for streamlining workflows in Open Science
Despite the internet’s dynamic and collaborative nature, scientists continue to produce grant proposals, lab notebooks, data files, conclusions etc. that stay in static formats or are not published online and therefore not always easily accessible to the interested public. Because of limited adoption of tools that seamlessly integrate all aspects of a research project (conception, data generation, data evaluation, peer-reviewing and publishing of conclusions), much effort is later spent on reproducing or reformatting individual entities before they can be repurposed independently or as parts of articles.
We propose that workflows – performed both individually and collaboratively – could potentially become more efficient if all steps of the research cycle were coherently represented online and the underlying data were formatted, annotated and licensed for reuse. Such a system would accelerate the process of taking projects from conception to publication stages and allow for continuous updating of the data sets and their interpretation as well as their integration into other independent projects.
A major advantage of such workflows is the increased transparency, both with respect to the scientific process as to the contribution of each participant. The latter point is important from a perspective of motivation, as it enables the allocation of reputation, which creates incentives for scientists to contribute to projects. Such workflow platforms offering possibilities to fine-tune the accessibility of their content could gradually pave the path from the current static mode of research presentation into a more coherent practice of open science.
by Konrad U. Förstner
Currently Konrad Förstner is a shared Postdoc at the Institute for Molecular Infection Biology (IMIB) and the Research Center for Infectious Diseases (ZINF), Würzburg, Germany, in the Vogel and the Sharma group where he is responsible for the computational analysis of miscellaneous biological data. He studied biochemistry and additionally computer science at the Ernst-Moritz-Arndt-University (EMAU), Greifswald, Germany. This included stays at the Lonza AG, Visp, Switzerland and the South-West Biotechnology and Informatics Center (SWBIC), Las Cruces, New Mexico, USA. Afterwards he did his PhD in bioformatics/computational biology at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), Heidelberg, Germany in the group of Peer Bork with a research focus on Metagenomics. There he also joined the global discussion about the application of the internet for scientific communication and the improvement of the research process itself. After finishing his PhD he founded a start-up and worked as a freelancing developer for scientific software. In 2011 he started to continue his scientific career.
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