Open Science at CERN: Infrastructure, Policy and Practice
This talk presents preliminary findings of my doctoral research on Open Science at CERN, funded by the Wolfgang-Gentner scholarship. After one year of research, I want to take stock of what I have learned and discuss what could be directions for future engagement.
Motivation:
Research at CERN involves the generation and application of a highly diverse set of scientific resources. CERN’s LHC requires the development of complex software and hardware components that enable the generation, storage and analysis of research data on an exabyte scale. Experimentation at CERN further necessitates the coordination of several thousand researchers and has led to the development of a unique set of tools that address the organizational challenges of the institution.
The complexity of research at CERN has presented the laboratory with challenges in opening up its diverse research outputs. During the course of CERN’s existence, various efforts have emerged to make data, software and hardware generally accessible. Exploring these efforts allows to understand how openness is conceptualized and enabled in a complex, multidisciplinary and international research environment.
Content of talk (30 minutes):
This talk provides an overview of open science milestones at CERN and categorizes them into three major categories: Infrastructure, Policy and Research Practice. It explores how these elements relate to each other in the context of CERN by introducing examples from each of those domains. To provide an impression of CERN's diverse landscape of practitioners and infrastructure providers, open data initiatives such as the CERN Open Data Portal, open source hardware efforts such as White Rabbit, and open source software endeavors such as Invenio, Zenodo and Indico are discussed. A specific focus will be the dual role of open source projects as open science infrastructures and open research outputs in their own right.
Discussion (30 minutes):
In the concluding discussion, I ask what infrastructure and research practice open science communities can learn from each other. Additionally, I want to explore the policy implications of the presented findings.
