Welcome! We are scientists who want to see open science practices incorporated in every researcher's lab workflow.
Open is the way science should be! Open science roughly means that the entire scientific process, from idea generation to the finished project, should be open. This includes making ideas open, sharing and/or collaborating on coding and methodlogy, sharing data, sharing analysis tools, making any information about the research process open and making the finished project available. You can read more about open science: https://www.fosteropenscience.eu/foster-taxonomy/open-science-definition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_science
Openness promotes reproducibility, accelerates progress, and communicates scientific knowledge in a complete and transparent way. These aspects of openness are necessary for scientific advancement, yet to some extent have been hindered by the culture within research. Often, if something is not truly open, its results cannot be accurately replicated, and the value of the research is cast into doubt.
Despite the growing evidence that open-research practices benefit discovery and individual careers, many academics hesitate to fully embrace open science in their research routines. Why? Is it the fear of being “scooped”? Is it the lack of peer pressure and institutional rewards? Or, is it a lack of time and knowledge about open-science practices and how to adopt and adapt them to their own work?
Survey data collected between 2015-2016 as part of the Innovation in Scholarly Communication project (https://101innovations.wordpress.com/) revealed that 80.9% of the surveyed researchers support the goals of open science, and 85.9% support the goals of open access movements. Given these results and based on our experience as researchers and open-science advocates, we believe that barriers are social (lack of peer-pressure) as well as technical (lack of time and knowledge about open science tools).
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Listen: We believe that scientific inquiry should avoid erroneous preconceptions or assumptions about a problem. Therefore our first step will be to develop a survey to explore in depth the underlying reasons for failure to adopt open science (OS) practices in academia. Initially we will test the survey in our home institutions, but our goal is to distribute the survey to other academic institutions across the globe.
The survey will seek to: * Understand researchers’ knowledge of and engagement with OS practices; * Learn about obstacles that prevent them from engaging in OS practices; * Ask what would incentivize them to adopt OS practices.
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Develop: Based on the results of the survey, and existing educational materials, we seek to develop comprehensive workshops to educate academics on the benefits of engaging with OS practices, and to overcome obstacles they face.
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Educate and advocate: With the development of the materials, we will run workshops on engagement with OS practices and make the workshop materials publicly available, so they can be used by anyone with an interest in OS.
About Daniela: I am a Ph.D. candidate in the Neuroscience Graduate Program at OHSU. I am passionate about research and making data available to everyone to advance knowledge and improve transparency.
About Amie: I am a Ph.D. candidate at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, based in Nijmegen, The Netherlands. I'm the Open Access Ambassador for my institute, and working on my own personal mission to advocate for open science in its entirety.