Building the Open Source Science Stack

This document is a response from 2i2c.org to NASA RFI NNH23ZDA005L: Scientific Data and Computing Architecture to Support Open Science. The submission provides guidance for NASA on how technology and social innovations will help advance the agency's Open Source Science Initiative.

Science is a social enterprise that builds and organizes human understanding of the universe with testable explanations and predictions. Science is a doorway through which we can walk into a better tomorrow. The enterprise of science, carried out in social structures like universities and colleges, government agencies, academic societies, conferences and workshops, philanthropic institutions, publishers, laboratories, research teams,..., constantly evolves. The unification of federal agencies to declare 2023 as the Year of Open Science is an historical opportunity to innovate and improve science at NASA and beyond.   

The inputs of the scientific enterprise are people and resources organized in social structures. The people participate in science by working with the resources and each other to generate the outputs of science: advances to human understanding of nature. What would it take to boost scientific productivity by an order of magnitude in a decade? A linear answer: a 10X boost in the inputs – people and resources – will generate a 10X boost in the outputs. The more exciting answer is nonlinear: improvements to the ways people participate in the science enterprise – open science – will generate massive gains in productivity. 

Three guiding ideas summarize 2i2c’s advice for NASA. We encourage NASA to:

1. Recognize each person’s right to participate as a core tenet of open science

2. Eliminate accidental complexity to enable participation and collaboration

3. Build “digital villages” enabling open science communities to flourish. 

2i2c will collaborate with NASA to enable communities that want to do science in the open by empowering them to do so with state-of-the-art digital and social infrastructure.