#MozFest session recap
rainsworth opened this issue · 9 comments
This issue will contain the notes from Session 582: What resources do we need to break down barriers to open science? which will need to be turned into a post for the project website.
Many scientific fields are still dominated by closed research practices. It is often difficult to reproduce results and frustrating to build on the research of others. The reasons for this are diverse, but one prominent barrier is a lack of understanding about how to work in an open way.
In this session, participants discussed the barriers to and benefits of open science based on their own experiences. From this discussion, we gained insight into what an open science toolkit for researchers should contain and began compiling resources.
This session aimed to address the why's and how's of open science in order to incentivize and make it easy for researchers to open up their workflows.
Session objectives:
- To identify barriers/objections to open science practices in research.
- To break down these barriers by countering them with the benefits to be gained and the resources available to practice open access/data/source/science!
Participants broke into smaller groups, introduced themselves and discussed the challenges they have faced in researching openly and/or what benefits they have experienced - putting each item on a separate colored post-it note.
- What challenge(s) have you faced to researching openly? [pink or orange post-it]
- What benefits have you experienced? [blue or green post-it]
Barriers/challenges:
- Colleagues against the open science movement
- Protected data can't be uploaded to GitHub
- Requires active challenging of status quo consistently (requires mental energy)
- Falling out of the mainstream, not taken with the same level of appreciation
- Very narrow definition of open!
- Lack of external feedback on my project for 2 years
- Institutional support for proprietary software only
- Disinterest
- Time & money i.e. doing it well needs some effort
- Collaborators not aware of benefit of OS & prevent sharing
- Need to protect intellectual property
- Limited understanding of resources around openness (e.g. CC licenses)
- How to be OPEN as opposed to 'more open' (definitions/scope)
- Convincing my colleagues to work open: data sharing, preprints, etc.
- Data privacy
- Access to science knowledge/new research to people who can't access journals & academic papers (i.e. people who don't work for a university)
- X Journal is the best / that open one is just about a blog - no good!
Benefits:
- Greater confidence in correctness of results due to best process management
- Serendipitous reuse of outputs (data, materials)
- New collaborations
- Grant money
- Encouraged me to explore and learn lots of new technical skills
- Unexpected links
- Easier reproducibility
- Finding jobs
- Community support/review improves code
- Cross disciplinary research/projects e.g. as an artist working with science ideas/research
- Multi-lab replication efforts
- Ability to include the public in ideation, creative process of research
- Better interaction with the community
- Open means others can tell you about mistakes & suggest fixes
- Students get really engaged and excited about open science!
- Learning new skills
We read the post-it notes out loud to identify themes and gain insight into how we should approach our Resources for Open Science toolkit.
We identified the following themes and attached the related post-its to them:
- Culture
- Data
- Feedback
- Money
- Replication
- Skills
We broke into groups again to discuss the barriers/benefits for our chosen themes and brainstormed solutions to the challenges.
- Think about your chosen barrier - what open science benefit, solution or rebuttal can you use to break down that barrier?
- What open science tool or resource would allow someone to overcome that barrier? [yellow/green post-it]
- If you have any other suggestions for topics, resources, tools, tutorials, etc. that you think should be included in such a toolkit, please write these down too on the related color post-it!
Culture
Barriers
- Colleagues against the open science movement
- X Journal is the best / that open one is just about a blog - no good!
- Requires active challenging of status quo consistently (requires mental energy)
- Falling out of the mainstream, not taken with the same level of appreciation
- Very narrow definition of open!
- Disinterest
- Collaborators not aware of benefit of OS & prevent sharing
- Convincing my colleagues to work open: data sharing, preprints, etc.
- Institutional support for proprietary software only
Benefits
- Better interaction with the community
- Community support/review improves code
- Students get really engaged and excited about open science!
- Ability to include the public in ideation, creative process of research
- Open means others can tell you about mistakes & suggest fixes
Discussion/tools/resources/solutions
- Scicomm training for scientists (need to make it accessible)
- Open & closed science can coexist
- 101 innovations (.wordpress.com)
- More visibility & reach i.e. people read & use it
- Making it easy to practice it - step by step guides
- Toolkits for PhD students - they will make a difference
- Open Science conferences?
- Publishing research processes
- Giving OS advocates a voice
Data
Barriers
- Data privacy
- Protected data can't be uploaded to GitHub
Benefits
Discussion/tools/resources/solutions
- Anonymize data
- Zenodo
- Figshare
- Dryad
- Dat
Feedback
Barriers:
- Lack of external feedback on my project for 2 years
Benefits
Discussion/tools/resources/solutions
Money
Barriers
- Time & money i.e. doing it well needs some effort
- Need to protect intellectual property
- Limited understanding of resources around openness (e.g. CC licenses)
- Access to science knowledge/new research to people who can't access journals & academic papers (i.e. people who don't work for a university)
Benefits
- Serendipitous reuse of outputs (data, materials)
- New collaborations
- Unexpected links
- Grant money
- Finding jobs
Discussion/tools/resources/solutions
- Database of grants: OpenCon Funding DB
- Funding policies/journal policies
Replication
Barriers
Benefits
- Multi-lab replication efforts
- Easier reproducibility
- Greater confidence in correctness of results due to best process management
Discussion/tools/resources/solutions:
- Docker
- Open Science Framework
- GitHub workflows markdown
Skills
Barriers
- How to be OPEN as opposed to 'more open' (definitions/scope)
Benefits
- Encouraged me to explore and learn lots of new technical skills
- Learning new skills
- Cross disciplinary research/projects e.g. as an artist working with science ideas/research
Discussion/tools/resources/solutions
- What are the skills?
- preprints
- Licensing
- Where can you learn them?
- workshops
- hacker nests
- librarians
- Open Science Framework
- Science Open
- Open Science MOOC
- Practice GitHub repos (e.g. try git)
- JISC skills training
- Online dynamic notebooks (e.g. Jupyter)
- Data carpentry
- First timers only
- Many resources
- taxonomy/tree
- e.g. data
- management
- preservation
- learn about skills you don't know exist
- Resources where to practice skills
- What is the "Hello, world!" for open science?
Wrote this up slightly more formally here: https://medium.com/@rainsworth/what-resources-do-we-need-to-break-down-barriers-to-open-science-mozfest-2017-session-recap-bc5562553c72