by jakeandlindsay

I am now a little more than three months into my Panton Fellowship. This means it is time to give an overview of my activities so far. As outlined in my initial blog post, there are two main objectives of my fellowship: working on open and transparent altmetrics, and the promotion of open science.

Regarding the promotion of open science, I would like to highlight two local activities first. Since September, I have contributed to a monthly sum-up of open science activities in the German-speaking world and beyond in order to make these activities and more visible within the local community. You can find the sum-ups (only available in German) here: September, October, November, December. At this point, I would like to add a big shout out to the other contributors: Christopher Kittel, Stefan Kasberger, and Matthias Fromm.

I was also a panelist at the kick-off event of the openscienceASAP platform in Graz, entitled “The Changing Face of Science: Is Open Science the Future?”. openscienceASAP promotes open science as a practice, and this event was intended as a forum for interested students, researchers, and the general public. It ended up to be a very lively discussion that covered a lot of ground including open access, open peer review, altmetrics, open data, and so forth.

Regarding wider community work, I have started to develop an open data policy for the International Journal of Technology Enhanced Learning. IJTEL will become one of the first journals in the field that has such a policy, and hopefully this will inspire others to follow suit. Furthermore, in my role as an advocate for reproducibility I wrote a blog post on why reproducibility should become a quality criterion in science. The post sparked a lot of discussion, and was widely linked and tweeted.

The fellowship also enabled me to attend several other events related to open science: in September, I went to OKCon in Geneva, and in November I attended SpotOn in London. Furthermore, I attended a meeting of the Leibniz research network “Science 2.0” in Berlin. These events were a great experience for me. I learned a lot, and I met many new and wonderful people who are passionate about open science.

I also used these events to discuss my second objective: the need for open and transparent altmetrics. Altmetrics will be the main objective for the second quarter of my fellowship. I will be looking at different altmetrics sources and how they can be used for aggregation and visualization. To kickstart the activities, I have outlined my thoughts on this topic in this blog post. Furthermore, I helped to organize a OKFN Open Science Meetup in Vienna on the topic. I also gave an introduction to altmetrics at this occasion; the slides can be found here.

The first three months of my fellowship were a busy yet wonderful time. Besides the activities above, I finally finished my PhD on altmetrics-based visualization. Now I am off for a three-month visit to the Personalized Adaptive Web Systems Lab of University of Pittsburgh. I cannot wait to see what the second quarter has in store for me! As always, please get in touch if you have any questions or comments, or in case you want to collaborate on one or the other project.