Recommendations

A set of recommendations has emerged, resulting from the combination of standard good practices, as we learn them from web science and knowledge engineering, and partly emerge from the empirical evaluation of the evidence gathered in the course of the study carried out so far.

The recommendations are  intended to be adopted 'synergetically' to maximise their effecitiveness and impact

General recommendations for reseachers/PIs and grant holders:

Adopt Shared Knowledge Artefacts, such as Schemas, Models and Objects

To achieve optimal knowledge sharing potential of codified knowledge resources, such as technical knowledge, it is necessary to adopt appropriate conventions, formalisms and artefacts, as discussed in section x. Knowledge Artefacts must take into account the knowledge structures used in the corresponding knowledge domain, an example of an explicit representation of a knowledge structure is provided. Some of these knowledge conventions are well established, such as: use a publicly accessible online page or website, share resources using URIs and corresponding standard notations and formalisms, and have been encoded in the set of heuristics proposed. However as of to date, no single shared knowledge schema exists that researchers and practitioners in systems science can adopt when trying to make their research outputs more useful, and more easily accessible and reusable to others. In a separate paper (Di Maio, 2011) the development of a shared vocabulary for systems engineering using automated text extraction is reported. The analysis of relevant portions of the systems engineering body of knowledge results in a sample 'reference model', provided as an example of 'shared knowledge model' .

Recommendations For policy makers and funding bodies:

The fragmented state of heterogeneous policies and legislation can be confusing, and even lead to contradictory and conflicting measures. Although the existence of multiple policies is justified by the diversity of situations and cases, the fragmentations and conflicts between them result in uneven, erratic adoption of the same. The recommendations for policy makers and public research funding bodies can be articulated into the following categories

• Incentivate: Make sure that researchers are awarded extra resources and other incentives (brownie points and funding) for publshing open access resources

• Integrate: Rather than having half a dozen fragmented policies, for data, information, knowledge, work towards one simple set of set of measures to encourage and promote knowledge sharing , transparency and accountability in scientific research as well as its outcomes

• Monitor: Do not assume that grantholders actually follow the policy, and do not rely solely on statistical measures

• Adopt socio-technical approaches and Community Engagement:

• Leverage the synergies afforded by socio-technical environments, even consider crowdsourcing the monitoring

• Legislate: At the moment, open access polices are not mandatory, while knowledge transfer agreements are upheld by contract law. Suitable legislation should support knowledge sharing policies such as open access

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       Socio Technical Approach to Open Access

Intervention: Integration and alignment of the fragmented policies regulating the space