I found Kirn and Bissell’s article of OER and Open Science really helpful when I was trying to distinguish the difference between Open Science and Open Data. According to Kirn and Bissell (2011), “Open science is a catch-all term that generally refers to the democratization of the capacity of anyone to do science as well as the elimination of the barriers to accessing the outputs of scientific research (e.g., research paper, datasets, etc). Open data is a narrower term which overlaps with the open science.” They also raised a very important question: What is the role of expertise in open science and/or open education? Which is related to the ethical judgment issue on how to decide the usage of science data and to prevent the data been used in a wrong way.
Obviously the concerns/issues under the open science topic are somehow different from other open topics. When we are discussing questions like: For whom is this an issue; Who is responsible for resolving the issue; Why is it important, and Who suffers if it fails, we also need to keep in mind about how the open science can mean to the world as how OER can bring benefits to students & instructors. Yes, it is true that there are many concerns (ethical, contents related and technical) in open science, and we realized that most people like to “get” then “give” from open contents database; since we already know the possible issues, we can think more thoroughly when planning our own open project and how to share certain data under proper creative commons licenses instead of being skeptical and reject the idea of openness.
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