Badge of Honor?

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

I met up with Shirley Wu, Michael Nielsen, and a few other ISMB attendees yesterday to talk about what's variously called Science 2.0 or Open Science. It was pretty rushed (and not helped by the bar we wound up in), but it got me thinking about creating an "open science" badge that scientists could apply to their work. Right now, people are using a variety of terms in inconsistent ways; it sometimes takes a very close reading to figure out exactly what the mean. I'd really like to see the PSB workshop (or some other meeting like it) put a peg in the ground and say, "If you do the following things, you can put this 'open science' badge on your lab's web site, and put, 'This research is certified open.' in your papers." The W3C's familiar badges and the Open Source Initiative's certification of software licenses have done a lot to clarify discussion, and have given people standards to aspire to. Nine years after the "Open Source/Open Science" workshop at Brookhaven National Laboratory, maybe it's time to borrow those ideas and put them into practice.