Hub4NGI D2.1 deliverable, citing DIN Forum 2017, defines evidence platforms as places where researchers can share, store as well as search data and models, where solutions to problems can be archived and possibly made available. Evidence bases thus provide a platform for innovation as through sharing data and models, people and other stakeholders can collaborate, identify new ideas and test existing ones. The deliverable, however, argues that such a single integrated platform providing sum functionality of data and solutions to problem is not available, though individual functions are independently available as briefed next.
For evidence platforms to be effective, it is important that the practice of open science or Open Research Data (ORD) is promoted to which both EC and the OECD have investigated mechanisms. EC consultation resulted in the Public Consultation on Science 2.0 with the name Science 2.0 now being replaced by open science, which investigated how science needed to change given new technologies and changes in attitudes, so as to reinforce science’s core principles of openness, transparency and reproducibility. The OECD has also determined its policy to clarify and support open science. Asserting that science should be a global public good, accessible by and for the benefit of all humankind, it accordingly defines open science as including open access to (i) scientific publications, (ii) research data, (iii) digital applications and source code, (iv) scientists, the public and commercial companies.
Royal Society in concurring with the Public Consultation on Science 2.0, highlighted that science has benefited from open practices throughout history and openness should be default for science. In keeping up this practice, making science data open enables the public to more easily engage in the results and process of science, also arguing that data-intensive science is becoming a driver of economic growth and development. The deliverable giving example of Zenodo stems out that scientific community also has clear will to support open research data. Fed4FIRE+ D2.1 deliverable [Taylor 2017] investigates Zerodo from the point of view of an experimentation platform.
Other than ORD repositories to store and curate results of scientific experiments, DIN Forum 2017 advocated that sharing knowledge on problem solving would also have additional benefits to support the innovation community quoting “often the cost of looking for solutions to problems is so great or the search intractable, that we resort to making our own solution instead of finding other peoples”. The deliverable gave example of Stack Overflow as a popular forum for persisting solutions to programming problems, and raised an open question to identify such forums in other important domains as well.
Apart from open data and solutions to problems, PSNC 2017 identified open public data as also being important specifically for start-ups. The deliverable summarized by realisinig the need to survey and forms a directory of platforms that provide above functions. Additionally, if there is any value in integrating these functions and platforms together over the integration Google search currently provides.
[Taylor 2017] Taylor, S. Fed4FIRE+ D2.01 Initial Guidelines on Data Management. In preparation. 2017.
