2019:Poster session/Open Science

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Poster session/Open Science

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Accessible and free knowledge is in the very heart of the Wikimedia projects. Since a key tenet of these projects is that all content be traceable back to trustworthy sources, the scientific literature plays an important role. Unfortunately, most of this information is not freely accessible: "When following a link to the official version of a scholarly article, Wikipedia readers are twice as likely to hit a paywall than one they can freely read."^[1] This results in a huge knowledge-gap between academia and society.

Open science can help bridge this gap. Open science combines various principles of open scientific work. The most well-known of these are open access, open data, and open source. Open science means making the scientific process and its results freely accessible, comprehensible, and (re-)usable – from research design and data collection to the publication of results.^[2] In this way, data and information are made available to the public – but also to other researchers – as a knowledge commons.

To support this development towards openness, Wikimedia Deutschland launched the Open Science Fellows Program three years ago. The program is a joint project together with two strong partners: the Stifterverband, and the Volkswagen Foundation. The primary aim of the Fellows Program is to promote the gradual opening of science and to spread the principle of collaborative knowledge production in accordance with the Wikipedia model. The program is geared towards young scientists and academics from all disciplines who want to make their own research and teaching open and usable. The idea is that the fellows will aquire profound knowledge which enables them to open up their academic work and morever serve as ambassadors for open science. The poster presents the Open Science Fellows Program. It invites everyone who is interested in open science and the cooperation of science and Wikimedia projects to an exchange of ideas.