What kind of formal or non-written rules/requirements does our project need to match and follow so we can say that our project is open science?
Is it only about research data which should be accessible to all?
What if the project doesn't make sense and it's publishing correlation data of the number of pirates with global temperature? Does it still match the criteria of 'open science' project?
To answer the first question:
I asked a similar question on twitter a while back and got a range of responses. Those are summarized in a storify. To paraphrase that summary ...
The last bit, and I think this is an important component, is that open science is not binary. It occurs along a gradient.
As for you second question, I would use reproducibility as a guide. The minimum data that needs to be accessible is that which allows for an anlalysis/project to be reproduced. Following the gradient theme, you could open up more than this, but that it isn't necessarily required.
On his site opencontent.org, Dave Wiley maintains a document describing what "open" means with respect to open content. Admittedly, this site and Wiley's work focuses on education and OER (open educational resources), but he (and others) have put a lot of work and thought into this and I think the points he makes here are relevant to open science.
Here, "open content" is described as works licensed to enable users free access to:
Replicability and reproducibility are crucial to science, and I think these "5R activities" describe a necessary and sufficient set of conditions enabling a scientist to replicate and build on the work of another.
Of course, the extent to which others can reuse, revise, and remix your research depends on a lot of practical factors. You may have licensed your incomprehensible Matlab research scripts using a permissive open license, but if nobody can decipher them, their "revise"-ability and "remix"-ability are limited. On the other hand, writing production-quality research software takes time and training that many academic researchers frankly don't have.
So I think at a minimum, open science projects must be licensed in such a way as to facilitate these 5R activities. Ideally, research software, data, and other scientific outputs would be also break down practical and technical barriers to be easily consumable by others, but exactly what is reasonable for a particular researcher in a particular context is hard to say.
The Panton Principles are a good guide - the reported research and everything it relies on (data, code/methods, analysis software, publication) should be made open and put in the public domain.
I don't know that it has to be reproduced, but it should be possible for someone to try to reproduce!
A specific example of formal criteria is the Badges to Acknowledge Open Practices Project.
At the moment there are 3 main badges:
They are awarded by participating journals to articles that adhere to that particular open practice. For example, if an article shares its data on a public third party repository then the editor can award it an Open Data Badge that usually appears in the article header.
There are currently few participating journals but one example is Psychological Science.
Another project you might be interested in is The Peer Reviewers' Openness Initiative (previously 'The Agenda for Open Research'). Signatories of the initiative are proposing to withdraw peer reviewer services if articles do not adhere to a series of open practices, such as sharing data and code.
Open Source Research (OSR) adopts the following basic criteria/rules/laws for open science:
in can be summed as:
All data and ideas are freely shared between participants and anyone may take part.
Initially they were written as part of Open Source Drug Discovery for Malaria. They're also available at Wikiversity.
