Open Badges: A fit for purpose credit mechanism

Editor's Notes

1. Talking about rethinking our outdated mechanisms for credit. Will focus instead on how we can reshape our credit mechanisms to value quality of skills and good community practices.
2. In the past ten years lots of development in Open Access, Open Data, and Open Source. This is happening in context of a changing infrastructure. Not only is this new infrastructure changing the way we socialise, changing the economy, it is changing and will continue to drastically reshape research economy. Pushing knowledge/information into a shared resource commons. This new infrastructure brings an opportunity for better and faster science. But currently we don’t have a mechanism for credit that supports this new research economy.
3. The current mechanism for recognition in science is one’s place in an author list and the Impact Factor of the journal in which one’s article appears. Several problems with this It’s “outdated” and like other things in publishing is designed for a 19th century rather than 21st century world It lacks transparency To solve the big problems in science, we must build on each other but current forms of credit do not support this. Theyre biased to one research object—the journal article. People aren’t sharing their data not because and open data economy will never work, but because we don’t have a credit mechanism to support it. People aren’t focusing on their quality of research skills not because we don’t value high quality skills but because we hire by looking at the number of publications rather than something that more directly reflects the skills one would bring to a role. In a new credit mechanism we need a few things: One that is fit for purpose in the digital world = machine readable, standardised Rewards all the skills that contribute to research
4. With Mozilla Science Lab, Orcid, and Ubiquity Press, we have built a mechanism for credit that fit these criteria. Unlike the author list, or the CV, it’s a digital credential fit for purpose in the digital world. It’s also standardised and machine readable.
5. The badges are based on a taxonomy around contributorship developed by the WellcomeTrust, Digital Science, MIT and others. There are 14 contributorship categories, ranging from methodology and data curation to validation and funding acquisition.
6. Badges are JSON data packages that come full of metadata for validation.
7. Using this badge infrastructure, where are we now?
8. Small pilot with the journal GigaSciene. When authors publish with GigaScience, they are sent an email with a link to the Paper Badger. They complete the information and a badge is issued.
9. You click on an article and can see the open badge flag. This takes you to a list of all the badges claimed by the authors. Clicking on an author will also take you to his/her ORCiD, where the badge data also live. With these badges can not only spur collaboration and smarter hiring, using this data to make it easier to find people with the skills you need, but take back credit and recognition from the broken mechanisms like the Impact Factor and put it back in the hands of researchers.
10. Two fold: also about promoting good community practices.
11. ~25% had applied for one or more badges 1st preregistration badge earned in November but not in print yet
12. Contact me if you’d like to get involved. We’re looking for other publishers and organisations to partner with to adopt these.