PLOS ONE How can Open Data change science for the better?

So I did this experiment with hippocampal neuroanatomical variation aggression, whatever, now you in your lab take the same strains different mice of course but the same strains and you look at something completely different the cerebellum or whatever and now you can take those data, your data, my data and put them together and see what they are going to tell you, and so there are databases about that and so there’s things you can do because everybody who is using these strains is putting the data in there. So you can do incredibly complex analyses which would not be available and not be possible if you didn’t have Open Science if you didn’t share your data. I think it’s critical because we get funded by the public, the public pays for what we actually do and so to not then have that open to the public just seems wrong to actually then sign that over to a private company that then makes a profit off what we’re doing when it’s been paid by the public and then the public not to have access to it, politicians not to have access to it, people who need that information not to have access to it and people from other countries from third world countries that don’t have the money to actually pay for those journals that are making money out of science, not to have access to that is; I personally think it’s morally wrong and so I think Open Access is the only way we should be going and I’m glad that a lot of the granting bodies are now going towards ensuring that we have Open Access for anything that is publicly funded and also having the data accessible as well so you know for somebody to get a grant, collect lots of data, especially something expensive such as neuroimaging, and then to hold that; keep that to themselves and not have that accessible to other researchers when it is publicly funded; it’s not my money it’s the public’s money, it should be accessible to everybody so PLOS ONE opening it up and allowing us to use PLOS ONE as a database so that everyone can access that data I think it’s really essential and the way to go forward. It is important to be able to validate results and make sure that the published results are actually reproducible and there are way too many published papers whose results are essentially not reproducible for various reasons and it’s very often not the author’s fault you know sometimes it’s the fluke they did some statistics and they ended up finding something they thought would be significant and it turned out not to be. By having the data published it allows others to actually see and reanalyze the data and allows for more transparency, more validation, better statistics; better and ultimately I would say better science… than in a quotes closed access journal.

03:03 - Right, there’s things you can do that you couldn’t do otherwise, to me that’s the most important thing of Open Science and Open Data. So, if you think what science is, so it’s observing the world, trying to see some pattern or to validate a hypothesis or to build around an idea and then sharing the results of these analyses with the rest of the community, this is what we basically do and doing it in an open fashion is basically the ultimate aim of it. So I mean no one should reply to a single reviewer as if it was person X, I mean it should be always a proxy of a much wider community. So in the same way the data that I collected should be; could have been collected by anyone else, I mean the same nature of the statistics that we do, so I mean we try to generalize our results so this kind of implies that the data that my colleague collected could have been collected by me; it could have been collected by my colleague, so they should be the same. And so by making them open and public, we are actually doing this.

We are making everyone’s data have properties and subject of the research 04:44 - of everyone. .