Objectives
Abstract
Open science is being encouraged across disciplines and throughout the world, from the UNESCO recommendations to the Strategic Plan for Catalunya. But, beyond plans, guidance, and policies, what do we mean by open science? Why should we care and what can we do as scientists? I postulate that caring about open science is being scientific. If we want science to continue being verifiable, reproducible, and relevant to society, we must conduct science as openly as possible, while protecting data when necessary. In the age of AI and HPC, with the increasing use of massive datasets and computational methods, the foundations and implementation of open science are more important and challenging than ever. At BSC, we are taking the first steps.
Short Bio:Dr. Mercè Crosas currently leads the Computational Social Sciences program at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (bsc.es), a new program to facilitate the use of data, AI models, and HPC in social science and humanities and conduct leading computational research in these areas. Dr. Crosas is also President of CODATA, an organization affiliated with the International Science Council (ISC), with a mandate to be the scientific data committee of the ISC, provide recommendations on data access and sharing, and support open science.
From 2021 to 2022, Dr. Crosas was the Secretary of Open Government at the Generalitat de Catalunya, where she was responsible for open data, transparency, and civic participation. Prior to that, Crosas spent most of her scientific career at Harvard University, as Chief Data Science and Technology Officer at the Institute for Quantitative Social Sciences and University Research Data Management Officer. During her time at Harvard, she was co-author of the FAIR principles and the Data Citation principles, and was co-PI of the Dataverse and OpenDP projects for sharing research data and analyzing sensitive data. Crosas has also led data systems development in biotech companies and has conducted research and software engineering in astrophysics at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Crosas holds a doctorate in Astrophysics from Rice University, with a pre-doc and post-doc fellowship at Harvard University, and a degree in Physics from the University of Barcelona.