OSCD Net

= The goal of the Open and Collaborative Science in Development Network is to "Nurture an interactive community of Open Science practitioners and leaders in the Global South to learn together and contribute towards a pool of open knowledge on how networked collaboration could address local and global development challenges". [1]

URL = http://ocsdnet.org/

Description

"OCSDNet members believe that Open Science entails the collaboration and participation of diverse actors in a wide variety of institutional contexts, with widely different motivations, values and intentions. As such, we see Open Science as a conditional process operating within a highly complex socio-technical system. Understanding the principles and dynamics of collaboration and participation is central to OCSDNet’s activities. The network adopted “Open and Collaborative Science” (OCS) as an operating term to remind us of the centrality of ‘collaboration’ within the workings of the network.

Open Science moves beyond open access research articles, towards encompassing other research objects such as data, software codes, protocols and workflows. The intention is for people to use, re-use and distribute content without legal, technological or social restrictions. In some cases, Open Science also entails the opening up of the entire research process from agenda-setting to the dissemination of findings.

Open Science utilizes the prevalence of the Internet and associated digital tools to enable greater local and global research collaboration. Such collaboration need not be limited to traditional research communities, but could also include the participation of citizen scientists, both in partnership with traditional research institutions as well as those in non-traditional research locations, often using open software, hardware and other open technologies.

Given the diverse nature of Open Science actors, intentions and mechanisms for use, there is the potential that it may yield negative outcomes for some actors, perhaps exacerbating problems of inequitable participation, gender disparity and further excluding researchers who do not have the capacity to take advantage of tools and resources created by an OCS system." (http://ocsdnet.org/about-ocsdnet/about-ocs/)