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Mission
The goal of the Open Scholar Foundation is to improve the efficiency of scholarly communication by providing incentives for researchers to openly share their digital research artifacts, including manuscripts, data, protocols, source code, and lab notes. To that aim, the Open Scholar Foundation will certify researchers as "Open Scholars" and provide official banners of the form "Certified Open Scholar 2013" for them to show on their web sites and presentation slides.
Origin
The proposal of an "Open Scholar Foundation" was one of the winners of the 1K challenge of the Beyond the PDF conference. This was the task of the challenge:
What would you do with 1K that would significantly advance scholarly communication that does not involve building a new software tool?
Project Plan
The goal of the Open Scholar Foundation is to improve the efficiency of scholarly communication by providing incentives for researchers to openly share their digital research artifacts, including manuscripts, data, protocols, source code, and lab notes. To that aim, the Open Scholar Foundation will certify researchers as "Open Scholars'' and provide official banners of the form "Certified Open Scholar 2013'' for them to show on their web sites and presentation slides. Additionally, there could be annual competitions to elect the "Open Scholar of the Year.''
Expected Outcomes
This project should lead to an established and recognized foundation that motivates scholars to openly share their data and results. Being a certified Open Scholar should be something that increases one's reputation and visibility, and should give a counterweight to possible benefits from keeping data and results secret. The criteria for Open Scholars should become more strict over time, as the number of "open-minded'' scholars hopefully increases over the years. This should go on until, eventually, scholarly communication has fundamentally changed and does not require this special incentive anymore.
Join the Initiative
If you are interested in this initiative, please write a comment below or get in contact with Tobias Kuhn.
Links
On GitHub: https://github.com/tkuhn/openscholar/
Blog post by Jenny Molloy: http://science.okfn.org/2013/12/06/open-scholar-foundation/