Discourse for open science

open-science-discourse.md

The recent Open Science SE site got shut down by StackExchange folks.

There is another proposal for the same right now http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/90201/open-science.

I am all for that proposal, trying to get open science going again on SE.

However, an alternative is Discourse, created by Jeff Atwood, etal.

Example forums:

• Atom editor - https://discuss.atom.io/
• Discourse meta - https://meta.discourse.org/
• rOpenSci - https://discuss.ropensci.org/

We could put up our own forum. Benefits:

• We, the people involved in the forum, would run the forum - it can increase in size slowly w/o having to be subject to SE's rules
• It has a lot of the same features of SE (great UI, markdown support, multiple login options, badges), minus voting/points

We would have to pay server costs, but that's minimal for such a potentially big group of people.

If you're not familiar with Discourse, visit one of the links above and peak through some of the discussion threads.

Totally fine if this is shot down - just thinking out loud

@Dilatino. Just be wary of importing the questions from the data dump - It will mean that the content will have to be licensed under CC BY-SA. With discussions that had taken in the SE beta about changing that to CC0, you need to make sure that you follow the requirements. Also, a lot of people may not be happy that you have simply taken the content and just reposted it another site. I, for one, would not be happy at all if I hadn't seen this (and there are many others who will be very mad and upset for not ever being notified). You could possibly run into many legal issues with that.

I need to however dispute your decision on this:

To be honest, I personally think that trying to restart the Open Science proposal on Area51 is rather pointless. The official goal of the SE company is not to support and maintain international academic communities, but to get "clean" (comments are considered to be noise and can be deleted by moderators at will) libraries of Q&As useful to an as large as possible crowed of external Googlers, written by voluntary contributors:

You seem to write that the official goal is not to support, that is something I find to be misinterpreted. Stack Exchange is there to create a compilation of knowledge over a vast variety of subjects. They are more than willing to support these kinds of sites. It seems that the overall sentiment is that SE rejected the Open Science proposal, because they didn't want it. _That's not true._ It was rejected due to lack of activity, which is something that an SE site needs in order to survive. SE isn't running the site, they're running the servers, fixing bugs and providing basic support. The community will always run itself, and will set it's own guidelines and policies, not Stack Exchange.

I really urge all of you to reconsider. The new Open Science proposal should be back up into beta within a couple months based on the activity that is currently seen.

Hi @Zizouz212
thanks for your concerns, but the attributions done when importing SE posts using the PO software are water tight from a legal point of view. Also, there is no problem with removing accounts and contributions of people who dont agree with their content being imported, it gets done immediately on PO upon request and I guess any future Open Science community will do the same in such a situation.

I personally expect more people to be happy when learning that the content they contributed to the closed beta site can be revived instead of being lost, than to be upset ...

Cheers

@Zizouz212 If people make contributions under certain Creative Commons license and then get upset when their contributions are re-used under the conditions of that license, then they are the ones who made a mistake. I do not think those people are as stupid as you think.

@Dilatino Thanks. I just wanted to bring that up because I wasn't sure how the licensing on the proposed site would work (because if it were CC0 which had been asked on the SE site, it would not work well). I personally don't mind if some of my answers are up on the site, the concern was the licensing, which I likely wasn't clear enough about. Thanks for the support :)

@pietsch Kind words. I wasn't accusing anyone of being stupid. Sincere apologies if I were unclear, but I wanted to point out that if there was support for making user contributions under CC0, it would violate the license that the current SE contributions are under.

I'm not involved in any Open Science project (and I have no reason to, I'm only 15), but whichever course of action the general community takes, whether it is with Discourse or Stack Exchange, you'll have my support. Obviously, if you pick Stack Exchange, you'll have my support in building the site as well :D

Just a little progress update: With lots of help from the PhysicsOverflow admins, I have successfully imported the Open Science SE dump into a fresh instance of the Question2Answer software. Questions (including votes) are looking good, but single sign-on is not going work because SE dumps no longer contain user IDs (or the EmailHash field). I will report back when the URL of my service has stabilized.

On the other hand, while skimming some answers, I became aware of a SE community called Computational Science. This could be a venue for more technical OpenScience-related questions that do not fit into Academia.SE or OpenSource.SE (for those who want to stay within the SE universe).

Another update: The new Q2A site with all the questions and answers from the SE private beta is running here: https://openscience.ub.uni-bielefeld.de/

What this site now needs is administrators and moderators (and perhaps a logo and custom CSS). Contact me if you are interested. The nice people from PhysicsOverflow have donated two plugins that allow admins (and mods, if so configured) to help users regain access to their imported user accounts by entering the e-mail address. This needs some organizing.

Another possible alternative or complementary offer: A colleague mentioned HUBzero as a platform intended to bring researchers from a discipline together. Perhaps it would be a useful tool for Open Science, too? Has anyone had any experience with it?