An Open Science Platform for the Next Generation of Data

Abstract

Imagine an online work environment where researchers have direct and immediate access to myriad data sources and tools and data management resources, useful throughout the research lifecycle. This is our vision for the next generation of the Dataverse Network: an Open Science Platform (OSP). For the first time, researchers would be able to seamlessly access and create primary and derived data from a variety of sources: prior research results, public data sets, harvested online data, physical instruments, private data collections, and even data from other standalone repositories. Researchers could recruit research participants and conduct research directly on the OSP, if desired, using readily available tools. Researchers could create private or shared workspaces to house data, access tools, and computation and could publish data directly on the platform or publish elsewhere with persistent, data citations on the OSP. This manuscript describes the details of an Open Science Platform and its construction. Having an Open Science Platform will especially impact the rate of new scientific discoveries and make scientific findings more credible and accountable.

Keywords: open science, open data, data reuse, data citation, big data, data science, provenance, data privacy, real-time data analysis, data sharing

JEL Classification: O32, O31, C9, C8, H4, H54