Closing Statement at the Open Data Science Symposium, December 1, 2016

1. Moving Forward with Open Data
Science:
Strengths, Weaknesses,
Opportunities & Threats
Open Data Science Symposium
December 1, 2016, Washington DC
http://www.slideshare.net/pebourne

2. Strengths
• Government support of open data and open science e.g. Holdren
memo
• The young people involved
• The commercial world is engaging at the pre-competitive stage
• People feel good about working for the common good

3. Weaknesses
• Need for better search
• Overcoming the cultural gap
• Economics - entrenched business models
• The current way we evaluate academic value
• Clear delineation between what belongs in the public domain and
what represents IP
• Double standards regarding openness – eg peer review journal vs
preprints

4. Opportunities
• Openness is a gateway to much more
• The 6 finalists you have seen today – real opportunities to change the
public health agenda and accelerate discovery
• Willingness to move from individual to team science – AMP
• Emergence of open platforms – synapse
• Participant science –
• Public-private partnerships
• Mechanisms for giving people credit for being open
• Community efforts as drivers eg GA4GH

5. Threats
• INCENTIVES / REWARDS
• Roll back of government initiatives
• Closure of the network – not the internet per se but the data and
knowledge layers on top
• Inability to push back on centralization – Willbanks
• Anglo global is not global, global - Goodhand