Summary

NASA’s Science Mission Directorate (SMD) is committed to making the scientific process open to broad participation from start to finish. Making NASA science more accessible, inclusive, and reproducible accelerates the pace of science, broadens the participation of historically underrepresented groups, and enables scientific discoveries. Your challenge is to think of creative new ways to determine the impact of open science, using examples from NASA science to highlight your methods.

Background

NASA’s Open-Source Science Initiative and Transform to Open Science (TOPS) programs are built upon the principles of increasing accessibility, inclusion, and reproducibility of NASA science. These principles are fundamental motivations for opening the scientific process. Open science has different impacts across the diverse communities that participate in or use NASA science.

Achieving open science requires a culture shift, including providing recognition to scientists who use open science practices. Developing creative new ways to recognize contributions to open science and demonstrate the impact of open science on society can help support the broad movement of scientific communities toward openness. Most traditional methods for measuring scientific output don’t take into account contributions to open science or the impact of open science on society. For example, a paper that has been cited many times in the scientific literature may not be open for all to read, and a scientist’s h-index (a metric often used to indicate the impact of scholarly output) doesn’t reflect how openly they have conducted their research.

As NASA and many other U.S. federal agencies celebrate 2023 as a Year of Open Science, it is time to rethink how we measure scientific output and the impact of open science. We invite you to think of creative new ways to determine the impact of open science on the world!

Objectives

Your challenge is to think of creative new ways to determine the impact of open science, using examples from NASA science to highlight your methods. Open science has many dimensions, from sharing scientific information openly (e.g., data, code, and publications) to conducting science in a way that supports collaboration and broad participation. Your approach to determine the impact of open science could focus on any of these areas. Think about what the core values of accessibility, inclusion, and reproducibility mean throughout the scientific process and how they could be considered to communicate the impact of open science on society. Are there new ways to determine the impact of open science that account for perspectives from communities that may not be well represented in traditional measurements of scientific impact?

As you develop your methods to determine the impact of open science, think about the following:

What is the community for whom you are determining the impact? What would scientific accessibility, inclusivity, or reproducibility look like for that particular community? The community you choose could include scientists or people who use NASA science. Groups that have been historically underrepresented in the scientific process or those who could benefit from new opportunities to use NASA’s scientific information could especially benefit from a new metric.
What would this community gain from having a way to understand impacts of open science? How would you demonstrate that open science benefits this community when compared to more traditional, closed ways of doing science?
Can you show an example or prototype of how your method determines or measures the impact of open science? One example would be measuring the impact of open data to a farming community and creating a slide deck or other media to summarize your work. Be creative!

Potential Considerations

You may (but are not required to) consider the following:

Think broadly when choosing the community you will highlight. Examples could include a particular research community, farmers using open data and software to understand weather or climate, early career professionals seeking recognition for their work in open science, or a university that wants to consider open science contributions in its hiring and tenure decisions.
Consider how the impact of open science (in terms of accessibility, inclusivity, and reproducibility) can be communicated to the public.
You are welcome to narrow the scope of this challenge to a specific domain or aspect of the scientific process. A solution need not be applicable to all facets of NASA science.
When we say “NASA science,” we mean any scientific discipline within NASA SMD, the usage of any NASA science dataset, or any scientific tool/infrastructure used by scientists within NASA SMD domains.

For data and resources related to this challenge, refer to the Resources tab at the top of the page.

2023 NASA Space Apps Challenge

Open Science Odyssey: Can you Determine the Impacts of Open Science?