Guidelines to apply open science

To apply open science in any scientific project there are just some guidelines to follow, which aren't really subjective (or very little subjective). Unless you want to have a commercial profit of your projects, which is sometimes done in science, you should make your project open and follow open science, in order to benefit science as most as possible with it (unless you want to keep it for yourself, which sometimes can be needed).

Open science

Open science is an initiative that aims to make science open, like open source, and then accessible for anyone. Scifir follows open science, and all his scientific projects are open. Members are not mandated to make all their projects open, but the projects added to Scifir must be open in order to be accepted.

Open science has the following six principles:

• Open methodology.
• Open source.
• Open data.
• Open access.
• Open peer review.
• Open educational resources.

Open source

Open source means software with his code available publicly. Richard Stallman has started the movement, and currently it's widespread around the world. The movement has started with the GNU Project in 1983, and after that with the Free Software Foundation in 1985.

You can search and browse open source projects inside platforms of software development that store code repositories, like GitHub, GitLab and SourceForge. You should see various projects in those websites in order to learn about open source projects. You can browse the projects of Scifir too.

Open source community

The open source community is wide, there are lots of programmers in various websites around the web. Although not all programmers develop open source software, the community of open source is equally very big. You can check Libera Chat and OFTC as chats, and use for example GitHub to develop open source software.

The Four Essential Freedoms of Free Software

The current definition of free software is:

• The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).
• The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
• The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
• The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

Creative commons license

A Creative commons (CC) license is a license that allows any person to use the property for any purpose. It has some restrictions, which are specified on each CC license. The CC license has been created by Lawrence Lessig and Eric Eldred, and released on 16 december 2002. It's between the copyright and the public domain.

The four rights of the CC licenses are the following:

• Attribution (BY): Licensees may copy, distribute, display, perform and make derivative works and remixes based on it only if they give the author or licensor the credits (attribution) in the manner specified by these. Since version 2.0, all Creative Commons licenses require attribution to the creator and include the BY element. The icon for BY is
• Share-alike (SA): Licensees may distribute derivative works only under a license identical to ("not more restrictive than") the license that governs the original work. (See also copyleft.) Without share-alike, derivative works might be sublicensed with compatible but more restrictive license clauses, e.g. CC BY to CC BY-NC.) The icon for SA is
• Non-commercial (NC): Licensees may copy, distribute, display, perform the work and make derivative works and remixes based on it only for non-commercial purposes. The icon for NC is
• No derivative works (ND): Licensees may copy, distribute, display and perform only verbatim copies of the work, not derivative works and remixes based on it. Since version 4.0, derivative works are allowed but must not be shared. The icon for ND is

The CC licenses can have any of the four rights. Since the version 2.0 of CC licenses the attribution right is mandatory. So, the author must select any or all of the other three rights in their CC licenses. The six more regularly used licenses are the following:

• BY:
• BY-SA:
• BY-NC:
• BY-NC-SA:
• BY-ND:
• BY-NC-ND:

You can choose any of the previous CC licenses, or use another one with other combinations of CC rights. Also, there exist the CC0 license, which is a public domain. You can use CC0 if for some reason you don't want to have any right for your work.

• CC0:

Open access

Open access (OA) is a set of principles and practices through which the research outputs are distributed online, free of charges or other barriers. It applies to any scientific publication, like papers, theses and book chapters.

There are different models of open access publishing:

• Green OA: The author self-publishes in his website, in the one of his institution, or a similar media. It's free for the author.
• Gold OA: The author pays a high sum of money to publish in a journal.
• Diamond OA: It combines Green OA with Gold OA, it's free for the author and it's a journal. Those journals are funded by donations.
• Black OA: It's a storage of unauthorized digital copying.

An schema of the different models of open access is the following:

Unless you work for an institution, you should publish in green OA, by creating a website for your publications, or sending it to a scientific community that already has a website, and publish your work there. Gold OA is very expensive and, so, unless you work for an institution who pays it, should be avoided.

OA journals

There's a wide amount of open access journals. DOAJ, the Directory of Open Access Journals, contains 3,064 journals of science (and more of other subjects).

Open standards

Other open movements

There are a wide amount of open movements, among them there exist open

The Open Knowledge Foundation has the objective of promoting the open knowledge. Open knowledge is knowledge that is free to use, reuse and redistribute without legal, social or technological restriction. It includes open education, open data, open research, among other categories.

Intellectual property

The use of intellectual property is opposed to open science, which claims for copyleft, but can be needed for a project, and then it's explained here.

Documenting an open science project

Keeping the project for you

If you don't want to follow open science, and don't want to commercialize the project, you can keep it for yourself.