Welcome to our Wikimedian in Residence on Open Science

Our work at the Open Knowledge Foundation, both in Germany and globally, often involves catalyzing the interactions between communities from diverse backgrounds that share a common goal. For example, the upcoming Open Aid Data Konferenz brings together communities working on and with Open Data, in and with the developing world, and on transparent governance.

Now, we are happy to announce that - thanks to a grant from the Open Society Foundations - we can welcome Daniel Mietchen as a Wikimedian in Residence on Open Science (see also the Wikimedia blog), so as to stimulate interactions between the wiki, Open Knowledge, Open Access and Open Science communities.

 Bollen, J.; H. Van De Sompel & A. Hagberg et al. (2009), “Clickstream Data Yields High-Resolution Maps of Science”, PLoS ONE 4 (3), DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0004803, Figure 5.

Matters of Open Science have always featured prominently in our activities: for example, we were involved in the drafting of the Panton Principles for the sharing of scientific data, and we ran an Open Science and Social Science Workshop prior to OKCon. The conference itself was organised in partnership with Wikimedia Germany and featured, amongst lots of other contributions, a sequence of sessions on Wikipedia & Research, Open Research, Collaborative platforms for Open Science, the Wikimedia Toolserver, Reforming Scholarly Publishing and Citing versioned sources.

Daniel - who studied biophysics at Humboldt University and sings in a band here in Berlin - was involved in several of these activities, and the new project provides him with a great opportunity to engage with these matters and to highlight the values of both wiki-based collaboration and Open Access to scientific information. He has set up a new blog along with a wiki home for the project and can be reached on Twitter via @EvoMRI.

There are multiple ways in which you can get involved, the gist being that if you are contributing to a Wikimedia project, the project can help you find reusable materials from Open Access and Open Science sources, and if you are involved in creating or managing open resources elsewhere, the project may help you reach a wider audience for your work. There are also opportunities for developers, illustrators, translators, reviewers and others - please get in touch if any of these is you.