About the Federation

The Open Science Federation is a nonprofit alliance working to improve the conduct and communication of science. The purpose of Open Science is not different from that of science itself — open science is simply proper science — reproducible, extensible, accessible.

We are open source computer scientists, citizen scientists, and scientist-scientists, science writers, journalists, and educators, makers of and advocates for Open Data, Open Access, and Open Source. Our mission is in short: to open science.

Get to know us @openscience on Twitter, or in Google+, Diaspora, identi.ca…

Some of our favourite work in 2012 has been to build a federation of publishing and social networks, started in the Spring for ScienceOnlineSeattle, ScienceOnlineVancouver, ScienceOnlineBayArea, the #SciFund Challenge, and since then many others. Together, this federation is comprised of hundreds of individuals sites and blogs, serving labs, event series, workshops and working groups, and so on, such as the People Matter Project hosted within the Communications Lab network. They are federated in several regards, for example one’s username and password can be used in any federated site, and all sites share one version of the open source software and services we administer. It’s a bit like a WordPress.com for science, except that rather than being one network, it’s a network of networks, and we don’t only run WordPress.

Over the Summer we began another federation just for high school researchers and bloggers, and their teachers and mentors, including FutureScienceLeaders.org, StudentBioExpo.org, and U20Science.org. For just this junior federation, our volunteers have given hundreds of hours in software development and technical support pro bono, in addition to volunteered services such as web and email hosting.

We are currently updating opensciencefederation.com as a yearbook with these and other projects representative of our 2012; head to our home page and have a look around. When we have a couple dozen projects listed, we will document those in greater detail.

Later in 2013, we expect this site to be more interesting, but more importantly, we expect science to continue opening. Join us.