How can we use this platform for topic-specific open science?

Question

Research and education often revolve around tracking questions to which the questioner has no good answers.

So far, we have used this platform mostly for general-purpose open science questions, which are of interest to only a small sliver of those engaged or interested in open science, and it is very likely that way more people are trying to engage in open-science fashions within their domain.

Hence, I would like to use this ticket to invite feedback on how we might make this platform more useful in such contexts.

Answer 1

As you know, so far, our thinking has been that it is up to each discipline to evolve. Currently, many disciplines evolve towards more openness, but this transformation is discipline-specific, and I not sure how this site can help there.

On the other hand, given the low level of activity on this site, it is hard to gauge how useful it is as it stands. Analysing the webserver logfiles might give some insights. I wanted to present a detailed evaluation of this website's usage at this year's Open Science Conference in Berlin, but my poster abstract was turned down (for the first time). So let me just throw in some basic numbers:

Total number of visits and page impressions per year (according to awstats):

year	number of visits	page views
2019	292,150	998,631 (+ 7,434,836 by robots)
2018	249,758	822,335 (+ 3,422,786 by robots)
2017	170,529	752,621 (+ 850,991 by robots)

So this site sees a lot of use even when it does not show any activity on the surface.

However, I understand and enjoy the fact that the community who created this site is seeking to expand its remit. Please chime in!

PS: As usual with real-world data, on closer inspection, it turns out to be unreliable. In this case I just realised that awstats received no log data from the webserver between 25 July 2019 and 2 September 2019. So in reality, usage in 2019 was higher than the table suggests.

Answer 2

I would personally expect that more focussed disciplinary questions will have less people who are interested and will get less answers. Still there is nothing against trying.

We now have tags, which I guess are freely chosen terms, it may help disciplinary questions to have categories based on a standard system of scientific disciplines to make it easier to find them.

Putting the questions on social media is also a good idea. Because there is not much traffic here, I do not look that often at the homepage, but now noticed the question on Mastodon.

Answer 3

There are a few ways that this platform could potentially be made more useful in such contexts:

1. Providing resources and tools for tracking and organizing open science questions: Some tools and resources that could be useful for tracking open science questions might include databases or directories of open science research projects, question-and-answer forums or discussion groups specifically for open science, or tools for organizing and categorizing open science questions.

2. Connecting researchers with experts in specific domains: One way to make this platform more useful for tracking open science questions might be to facilitate connections between researchers who are looking for answers to specific questions and experts who have relevant knowledge or experience. This could be done through the use of mentor or expert directories, or by facilitating communication between researchers and experts through forums or discussion groups.

3. Encouraging collaboration and sharing of resources: Another way to make this platform more useful for tracking open science questions might be to encourage researchers to share their resources, data, and findings with one another. This could be done through the use of open access repositories, shared workspaces or collaboration tools, or through the development of community-driven initiatives or projects.