For Yet Better Science

Dame Jane Morris Goodall ,  formerly  Baroness Jane van Lawick-Goodall , is an English  primatologist  and  anthropologist .  She is considered the world's foremost expert on  chimpanzees , after 60 years studying the social and family interactions of wild chimpanzees. Goodall first went to  Gombe Stream National Park  in Tanzania to observe its chimpanzees in 1960.  She is the founder of the  Jane Goodall Institute  and the  Roots & Shoots  programme, and she has worked extensively on conservation and animal welfare issues. As of 2022, she is on the board of the  Nonhuman Rights Project .  In April 2002, she was named a  United Nations Messenger of Peace . Goodall is an honorary member of the  World Future Council .

At the heart of the Open Science movement is the conviction that  Open Science is better science . More rigorous. More inclusive. More efficient. More trustworthy. More reproducible. And more impactful for society. The different aspects of Open Science practice—from open methods and data, to preprints, to ORCID and CRediT, to published peer review—are all part of a mutually reinforcing cycle. Each component works in tandem, and as adoption rises the benefits increase, spiraling ever outward, reshaping our research system and, ultimately, producing   better science .  

Science is evolving. New tools and ideas are changing how discovery happens. Science Better is a collection of interviews with the vanguard — a repository of their best ideas and personal research habits.

During the coming year I will be exploring different career and project opportunities that could contribute to improving the scientific research system. As a first step I here make an attempt to formulate more clearly what “better science” could look like. On an abstract level, there seem to be two competing worldviews around. One is a consequentialist, welfarist, aim and the other is focused on the intrinsic value of knowledge.   

Reproducibility has long been a tenet of science but has been challenging to achieve—we learned this the hard way when our old approaches proved inadequate to efficiently reproduce our own work. Here we describe how several free software tools have fundamentally upgraded our approach to collaborative research, making our entire workflow more transparent and streamlined. By describing specific tools and how we incrementally began using them for the Ocean Health Index project, we hope to encourage others in the scientific community to do the same—so we can all produce better science in less time.  

Disclaimer:  This is a gross generalization of what science is about; science is actually much more complex than how it is described here, but this will give you a basic background if you need it.  

Gender bias in science has resulted in drug tests that treat the female body as an aberration, and search algorithms that perpetuate discrimination, but the solution is simple: increase the numbers of women working in the field and support the girls hoping to join them one day.   

A researcher from Notre Dame advises that we should move past the excitement and examine how virtual reality could enhance the efficiency of scientists. However, in order to harness these advantages, researchers need to carefully strategize and sidestep possible drawbacks.