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From ORSWiki
The Open Research Society (ORS) is an organization promoting the ideas of openness in research. It is a non governmental organization (NGO) and is not depending on any government, political party, political or religious organization or entities representing financial interests.
The ORS aims at addressing openness through a community approach based exclusively on individual free will, so the ORS is neutral to pursuing any concrete kind of political action or legal regulation of the different elements involved in the scientific process.
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History
The ORS was formally constituted as an international NGO in 2007 according to Greek law.
The office of the ORS is located at:
VERANZEROU 34, 6TH FLOOR, SUITE: 2 10432 ATHENS (GREECE)
The ORS logo contains the shape of The Owl, a drawing by Pablo Picasso.
From ancient Athens, the silver four-drachma coin bore the image of the owl as a symbol of the city's patron, Athene Pronoia, the Greek goddess of wisdom. According to several popular cultures, owls possess supernatural knowledge and wisdom, and their nocturnal vigilance has been associated with that of the studious scholar.
Open Research defined
Research is defined in the Wiktionary as “diligent inquiry or examination to seek or revise facts, principles, theories, applications, etcetera; laborious or continued search after truth.”
Openness is a philosophy that is being used as the basis of how various groups and organizations operate, notably open source and open access are two concrete instances of open initiatives.
Open research in the ORS is currently defined as a collection of approaches, techniques, tools and methods for breaking down barriers to research, research outcomes and research-related institutions. This is a negative definition that emphasizes the inquiry on how research could be made more open. For example, open access is a set of concrete approaches that focus on removing restrictions to the availability of scientific papers. However, there is much more than access to the literature, since research is a system of activities, people, groups and institutions in which the open philosophy is applicable at many points.
Barriers to open research
In common language, open is “which is not closed”, or “which is accessible”, such as for instance an open gate. In consequence, searching for openness can be made possible by finding concrete barriers to openness. These include (but are not limited to):
- Barriers to the artifacts that are the product of research activities, e.g. scientific papers or data.
- Barriers to infrastructures and tools needed for research, such as machinery or scientific software.
- Barriers to means to acquire the capacities for research, as courses, degrees, books or scientific education.
- Barriers to publishing one own's results in journals, conferences and other kinds of scientific publications.
Open research approaches may address one or several of these barriers.
Current projects
This is the list of current ORS projects. Their degree of maturity is diverse, but all of them seek actively for new ORS members that want to engage with them.
- The ORS Journal Collection is a collection of open access journals not requiring fees from authors.
- The ORS Book Collection featuring research books with adherence to ORS assessment criteria.
- The ORS Learning Resource Collection featuring learning objects and related materials.
- The ORS University, an initiative for a distinct approach to Higher Education, removing distance, access to learning resources and also access to qualified on-line tutors.
- The ORS Research Open Source Initiative aims at filling some gaps in the availability of software for research purposes that are not covered by existing, mature open source.
Publications
LYTRAS, Miltiadis; SICILIA, Miguel-Ángel (2008). Open research – the ORS way. UOC Papers online article. Iss. 6. UOC. [Date of citation: 01/08/2008].
