Imagining tomorrow's university: open science and its impact

As part of a recent workshop entitled "Imagining Tomorrow's University”, we were asked to visualize the future of universities as research becomes increasingly data- and computation-driven and identify a set of principles characterizing pertinent opportunities and obstacles presented by this shift. In order to establish a holistic view, we take a multilevel approach and examine the impact of open science on individual scholars as well as the university as a whole. At the university level, open science presents a double-edged sword: when well executed, open science can accelerate the rate of scientific inquiry across the institution and beyond; however, haphazard or half-hearted efforts are likely to squander valuable resources, diminish university productivity and prestige, and potentially do more harm than good. We present our prespective on the role of open science at the university.