The next Open Research London event will be on Wednesday 3 October 2018 at the Francis Crick Institute, starting at 6pm.

Three speakers will talk about open science, in particular the relationship between open science and commercial activity:

• Jenny Molloy (Shuttleworth Foundation Research Fellow, University of Cambridge)
  • Open science and the future bioeconomy
• Wen Hwa Lee (Chief Scientific Officer at Action Against AMD & Programme Director Oxford Martin School)
  • Open Science – how extreme can it be?
• Tim Britton (Managing Director, Open Research Group at Springer Nature)
  • Conflict, what conflict? Where open science meets commercial interests

Eventbrite registration page and further details of talks will be available soon.

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The evening will be chaired by Veronique Birault, Director of Translation at the Francis Crick Institute.

Jenny Molloy (Shuttleworth Foundation Research Fellow, University of Cambridge)

• Open science and the future bioeconomy
  The question of how society deals with intellectual property (IP) and structures scientific institutions and communities to manage and disseminate knowledge is critically important to our future. Open science covers a broad set of practices and ways of working that aim to increase that dissemination of knowledge and which have largely focused on digital research outputs such as papers and datasets. In biotechnology, there are on-going experiments with technologies and even downstream products where open approaches to intellectual property are strategically applied to increase economic or social impact, reduce transaction costs and accelerate innovation. This talk will highlight efforts that aim to de-risk drug discovery, accelerate transitions to renewable technologies and increase equity for those in resource-poor contexts. I will describe the insights these examples might give us into the legal, economic and governance issues surrounding open technologies and their potential for building a sustainable and equitable bioeconomy, where biological knowledge is applied to innovating or improving on production of food, medicines, materials and more.
• Dr Jenny Molloy is a Shuttleworth Foundation Research Fellow in the Department of Plant Sciences at the University of Cambridge, studying the role and impact of open approaches to intellectual property for a sustainable and equitable bioeconomy. Dr. Molloy’s work focuses on better understanding problems facing researchers accessing biological research tools in low-resource contexts, particularly Latin America and Africa. She is analysing existing innovative solutions and the potential for local, distributed manufacturing of enzymes to improve access and build capacity for biological research. The broader aim of her research is to contextualise “open source” approaches to biotechnology within current narratives of innovation and the bioeconomy policy agenda. In addition to her role in the University, she is a founding Director of two non-profit organisations ContentMine (producing open source software for text mining scientific papers) and Biomakespace (a community laboratory for engineering with biology) and she co-organises the international Gathering for Open Science Hardware.

Wen Hwa Lee (Chief Scientific Officer at Action Against AMD & Programme Director Oxford Martin School)

• Open Science – how extreme can it be?
  As Open Science gains traction, different segments of the biomedical research community have been trying to capture what it really is and how to better structure it to increase efficiency. As such, many of so called ‘open’ initiatives are simply rebranding of existing, rather closed implementations, which undermines the perception and ultimately the potential of truly Open initiatives. We will be examining the efforts of the Structural Genomics Consortium (SGC), which has been operating an ever-increasing open model and its impact in the way Open Science is practiced in drug discovery – delicately balancing changes instatus quo and the fleeting definition of acceptable/ implementable open science.
• Lee is a molecular and structural biologist with a wide international network in drug discovery, including charities, academia, industry and government agencies. He’s been a practitioner and champion of Open Science since 2004 joining the first cohort of researchers hired by the SGC Oxford. Lee designed and led several SGC strategies and served as its Director for the Disease Foundations programme, until June 2018 when he joined Action Against Age-related Macular Degeneration as its inaugural Chief Scientific Officer.

Tim Britton (Managing Director, Open Research Group at Springer Nature)

• Conflict, what conflict? Where open science meets commercial interests
  It is often assumed that there is an automatic tension between being ‘open’ and being ‘commercial’. In publishing terms this can be stated as a perceived incompatibility between open access and subscription business models. Further, there is a move, particularly in Europe, to demand full open access for all work with senior EU officials and advisors calling for full open access to publically funded research and targeting hybrid journals as a barrier to openness. This leads to breathless talk of ‘considerable tensions’ between universities, funders and publishers: a model in crisis with commercial parties and advocates for openness purportedly in conflict. Really?Tim Britton will address this question, demonstrate how the commercial and open agenda can align; how hybrid can and should be seen as an important part of the open agenda and how the true open revolution is yet to come.
• Tim is responsible for the open research portfolio across Springer Nature which includes BioMed Central, SpringerOpen, the open access journals from Nature Research; open access monographs from Springer and Palgrave Macmillan and open data. He was previously head of strategy and transformation for PwC’s global data research and insight centre, r2i, and before that spent eight years as UK CEO and European Chief Operating Officer of YouGov.

Four speakers will address issues around research data:

• Kirstie Whitaker (Turing Institute)
• Ardan Patwardhan (EMDB – Electron Microscopy Data Bank)
• Aadi Narayana Varma (Profeza)
• Mark Hahnel (figshare)

Eventbrite registration page

Ardan Patwardhan

EMDB, EMPIAR and the plans for an EMBL-EBI Bioimaging archive

The Electron Microscopy Data Bank (EMDB) is a global openly-accessible archive of biomolecular and cellular 3D reconstructions derived from electron microscopy (EM) data. The Electron Microscopy Public Image Archive (EMPIAR) stores raw image data relating to EMDB structures and is now expanding to include scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and soft X-ray tomography data. EMBL-EBI is considering establishing a global multi-modal bioimaging archive to enable the resume of data from this rapidly growing field. I will present an overview of the status of the archives and plans for future developments.

Aadi Narayana Varma

Using technology to break cultural silos: towards open data/open science

Profeza is a start-up building Open Source and Open workflow software solutions to enhance Discoverability, Reusability and Reproducibility of the scholarly outputs. It was co-founded by two ex- Life Science researchers from India(Aadi Narayana Varma Dantuluri and Sheevendra Sharma). The Software suite aims to keep the process of enhancing reproducibility and reusability of data and published articles continuous in contrast to one-time event & simultaneously rewarding the researchers. They do this by providing better insights, Automating the process of Educating/training needed and provide an Infrastructure that aims to contribute towards the improvement of the quality of published article/data without affecting varied priorities of different stakeholders in the scholarly community. Their software tools are Open source, Inter-operable and comes without Vendor lock-ins. They are currently looking for pilot partners to potentially evaluate the usability of the solutions they have built with different stakeholders in the scholarly community.

Mark Hahnel

The State of Open Data

Open data has become more embedded in the research community – 82% of respondents to a recent survey are aware of open data sets and more researchers are curating their data for sharing. The global commonalities in incentivisation and awareness of open academic research data go to show the increasing momentum around open research becoming the standard. A recent report from Figshare shows a tangible shift in researchers’ attitudes and data sharing practices in just a single year, and gives a sense that momentum is building. The report also highlights the need for funders and institutions to keep educating their academics about data.

Bio: Mark Hahnel is the founder of figshare, an open data tool that allows researchers to publish all of their data in a citable, searchable, and sharable manner. Mark is passionate about open science and the potential it has to revolutionize the research community.

Kirstie Whitaker

Barriers to reproducible research (and how to overcome them)

This talk will discuss the perceived and actual barriers experienced by researchers attempting to do reproducible research in neuroscience, and give practical guidance on how they can be overcome. It will include suggestions on how to make your code and data available and usable for others (including a strong suggestion to document both clearly so you don’t have to reply to lots of email questions from future users). It will include a brief guide to version control, collaboration and dissemination using GitHub as well as a discussion of tools to help you work reproducibly from the start. Exercises and resources will be persistently available after the talk and all audience members will leave knowing there is something they can do to step towards making their research reproducible.

Bio: Kirstie Whitaker is a Research Fellow at The Alan Turing Institute (London, UK). She completed her PhD in Neuroscience at the University of California, Berkeley in 2012 and holds a BSc in Physics from the University of Bristol and an MSc in Medical Physics from the University of British Columbia. She was a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Cambridge from 2012 to 2017. Dr Whitaker uses magnetic resonance imaging to study child and adolescent brain development and is a passionate advocate for reproducible neuroscience. She is a Fulbright scholarship alumna and 2016/17 Mozilla Fellow for Science. Kirstie was named, with her collaborator Petra Vertes, as a 2016 Global Thinker by Foreign Policy magazine.

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