Aha! This is the best version so far of my criteria for Radically Transparent Research (website really needs rewriting; it's currently a mess of writing from my first year of grad school), which is basically "a methodology for producing Free Scholarship." I know, I know, there all tons of Open Research movements and projects out there; I'm trying to write an examination right now and will loop back and check in with them again after I pass it, ok?

  1. The work is public and freely accessible.
  2. The artifacts (data, analysis, etc.) used to create the work is also public and freely accessible so that it can be studied and peer-reviewed by communities of practitioners.
  3. The work and its artifacts can be freely modified and distributed so others in these communities can benefit from and build atop it.

"Chua's 3 criteria for RTR" (or whatever less-silly name I can tack on that later) comes directly from a Free Culture + Academia mashup. From academic-land (specifically, the scholarship of teaching and learning), we have Lee Shulman’s 3 criteria for scholarship (paraphrased):

  1. It is public
  2. It is peer-reviewed by the practitioner’s community
  3. It can be used by that community as a stepping-stone towards future work

From Free Culture, Richard Stallman's 4 criteria for software Freedom:

  1. The freedom to run the program, for any purpose.
  2. The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
  3. The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor.
  4. The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others. By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

See the connections between Shulman and Stallman? I don't imagine this is the final or best statement ever (and look forward to seeing what future version comes up), but it sounds pretty good to me right now.