Today’s TL;DR Short is brought to you by Chris DiBona, a world-renowned leader in Open Source Research, and covers many of the themes we are currently discussing across the research community, including open research, trust and integrity, and revamping research culture to make it more fit-for-purpose.
Chris has worked in Open Source Research for many years, including almost two decades at Google as Director of Open Source, during which lead the way on licencing and created many community engagement programmes and also co-organised Science Foo Camp (Sci Foo).
Chris believes that we are in what he calls a “very dangerous time” with the replication crisis challenging research and translation into a tangible impact on society. Chris goes on to say that there is a very legitimate push towards more open ways of doing research, some of which we heard about in our chat with Dr Niamh O’Connor, Chief Publishing Officer at PLOS, in last week’s Speaker Series interview.
However, Chris reminds us that by opening research, we are also making it more vulnerable to the deliberate misuse of the system to propagate disinformation and the potential for research fraud. Chris ends today’s TL;DR Shorts by touching on the research incentivisation system which he feels places too little value on doing honest research, again a topic that Niamh touched on in her interview, and which our very own Dr Leslie McIntosh is tackling as a pioneer in the new field of Forensic Scientometrics.
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