Science 2.0/Open Science and Open Innovation are catchwords nowadays often heard and widely used in various contents but with unclear and partly overlapping meanings. Therefore it is important to generate a common picture explaining these buzz words and concretising the plenitude of their meanings in the context of the Science2Socienty project.
Science 2.0 and Open Science are two terms today used interchangeably. According to a large consultation on Science 2.0 held by the European Commission (see here) one of the general findings was that the term Open Science becomes more popular than the term Science 2.0. Therefore only the term Open Science will be used from this point forward.
Open Science describes an ongoing evolution in ways of doing and organising research changes. This new approach to the scientific progress uses information-sharing and collaboration enabled by digital technologies with the benefit of increased collaboration between scientists. It is driven by globalisation and growth of the scientific community as well as the need to address the grand challenges of our time.
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“The days of keeping our research results to ourselves are over. There is far more to gain from sharing data and letting others access and analyse that data.”
(Commissioner Carlos Moedas, “European research and innovation for global challenges”, Lund, 4 December 2015)
The shift that e-commerce had for retail is comparable to the effect of Open Science on research. Just like e-commerce, it affects the whole ‘business cycle’ of doing science and research, from the inception of research to its publication, as well as the way this cycle is organised.
On the other hand, Open Innovation proclaims to open up the innovation process to all active players so that knowledge can circulate more freely and can be transformed into products and services that create new markets. This means that knowledge, expertise and even resources are transferred from one company or research institution into another, enabling companies not using only internal ideas but also external ones, as well as internal and external paths to market, as they seek to improve their performance.
In this context the Science2Society project aims to increase the throughput capacity of the European innovation system. The project mission on the S2S project derived thereof can be found here .
