Alexa Fredston , Julia Stewart Lowndes

Open science is a global movement happening across all research fields. It builds on years of efforts by individual researchers and a broad array of institutions, agencies, and grassroots organizations. Enabled by technology and the open web, the goal is to share knowledge and broaden participation in science, from team formation and early ideation to making intermediate and final research outputs openly accessible to all (“open access”). Because of its emphasis on transparency and collaboration, the open science movement dovetails with efforts to increase diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging in science and society. The Year of Open Science (2023), as declared by the US Biden-Harris Administration and many other US government agencies, is a great opportunity to boost participation in open science for the oceans. For researchers day-to-day, open science is a critical piece of modern workflows to analyze, collaborate, and communicate increasing amounts of data. Therefore, we focus this piece on open data science – the tooling and people enabling reproducible, transparent, inclusive practices for data-intensive research – and its intersection with the marine sciences. We discuss the state of various technical dimensions of open science – such as open-source programming and academic publishing – and argue that technical advancements in open science have outpaced our field’s culture change to adopt and incorporate them. We believe that increasing inclusivity and technical skill building are interlinked and must be prioritized within the marine science community to find collaborative solutions for mitigating and adapting to climate change and other threats to marine food sources, biodiversity, habitats, and society. As marine scientists whose careers have been profoundly influenced by and continue to benefit from open science, we provide examples of participation in this movement and the social transformation needed for the field of marine science to become truly “open”.