Check out their web page here >>

More information

Contact: @OpenResLDN if you’d like to get involved in the group, to propose a talk, host a talk at your institution, or would like to know more…

Twitter: @OpenResLDN follow us to keep up-to-date with meeting announcements!

Next Meeting: 3 October 2018, 6-9pm. Francis Crick Institute. Further details coming soon.

Ideas? Comments? Contact us on openresldn@gmail.com or on Twitter @OpenResLDN

I am writing to apply for membership of the Open Science Policy Platform as a representative of Open Knowledge International and their global Open Science Working Group. This community was founded in 2008 and includes interested people and organisations from a broad spectrum of open science stakeholders including researchers, students, librarians, policy makers, funders and citizens who are interested in greater access to the mechanisms and outputs of science. Our mailing list reaches over 800 members from across the globe with a strong European grouping and active local representatives, affiliates or groups in UK, Germany, Austria, France, Finland, Italy, Spain and Sweden. Open Knowledge also has a vast network of over 20 working groups and over 40 local chapters or groups who collectively represent one of the largest and most influential grassroots communities in open data: from education to government to transport to hardware.

I was a founding member of the open science working group and became the volunteer global Coordinator in 2010. During that time we changed our name from ‘Open Data in Science’ to ‘Open Science’ to reflect the widening interest in open access to all research outputs and openness to participation in the scientific process and I watched open science grow from a niche topic of interest to a political priority. I have been involved with numerous community initiatives including promotion of the Panton Principles for Open Science; coordination of community building activities such as the science track at OKFest, the world’s largest open knowledge event; running global calls and local discussion groups and supporting members of the community with their own activities. I have the support of the leadership team at Open Knowledge International and written endorsements from community members via our mailing list, so I am confident that I can credibly represent their perspectives at the Policy Platform. These perspectives are many and diverse, which is exactly the strength of the open science community in that it allows so many voices to access and influence science and science policy.

As an early career researcher whose chosen role is now enabling and facilitating greater openness in the field of synthetic biology, I am acutely aware of the perspectives and needs of my direct peers in addition to my long-standing engagement with the broader open science community. I therefore put myself forward with the following special interests:

• Open technologies for open science (software, hardware and wetware)
• Rewards and incentives for open science
• Education & skills
• New models for research communication and publishing

I have experience with the European Commission Open Science Agenda having represented Open Knowledge in Brussels in 2013 at a consultation meeting on the Science 2.0 whitepaper. As an active community member and current or recently active scientific researcher I was in a minority of meeting participants and this experience cemented my strong belief that community-based organisations should be represented on official platforms alongside political organisations and formal institutions. I do not currently sit on any other international policy-oriented board but I coordinated working group responses to policy consultations such as the Hargreaves report into copyright exceptions for text and data mining in the UK and I’m a member of the Open Knowledge/ContentMine team in the H2020-funded FutureTDM consortium, who will provide policy recommendations for text and data mining to the Commission. I am a member of the Europe PubMedCentral Advisory Board and am frequently contacted for informal advice on openness in addition to numerous invitations to present or discuss openness in science at events on the national and international level.

My academic interests now extend into science and technology studies in an attempt to better understand the theoretical underpinning and implementation of cultural change in science. However, I am also happy to question the assumptions and goals of the open science agenda, which was necessary in coordinating an IDRC-funded scoping project on ‘Open and Collaborative Science in Development’. This ultimately led to OCSDNet, a network of 15 case study projects around open science in the global South and I have acted an an informal advisor to several of these. An advantage of affiliation with Open Knowledge is that I can also draw on knowledge of existing research on open government data and other areas of open knowledge, which are further advanced from a policy and implementation perspective and so offer a useful set of outcomes and critiques which may be relevant to comparative policies in science. Many similar questions and challenges are faced across the open knowledge movement and greater connectivity could only enrich discussions at the OSPP.

In conclusion, I bring eight years of experience in the open science community, a wealth of knowledge about different players and their interactions and personal dedication to seeing changes towards greater openness in science. I therefore believe that I am a well-placed representative for the segment of stakeholders described above and can bring a researcher, practitioner and community organiser perspective that will be valuable to the OSPP.

Are you a young researcher with an Open Science project idea? Here’s a chance to win 5000 Euros to make it happen: The Young European Associated Researchers (YEAR) Network organises its Annual Conference on 11-12 May 2015 at VTT in Helsinki/Espoo (Finland) with a focus on Open Science. Registration for the conference is now open.

The YEAR Annual Conference is a two-day event for young researchers, which offers a platform for exchange and training focused on key aspects of EU projects. This event provides young researchers with a solid basis for successful integrations of both open access and open research data concepts in Horizon 2020 projects as well as current research workflows.

“Sharing is caring”! This is probably a good way to describe what Open Science really means: a new approach to science to share ideas, research results, research data, and publications with the rest of the world, through the newly available network technologies.

Open science approaches are rather new concepts that many researchers are not familiar with as of yet. Young researchers in particular struggle when being confronted with open access or open research data and issues related to it. This fact is reinforced by survey recently conducted by YEAR, according to which many of the surveyed young researchers are inexperienced with open science and unsure about its implications. According to a majority of about 80% of the survey participants one of the most effective channels for awareness-raising of Open Science is its integration in research training. The aim of this training is to respond to this demand and to provide young researchers with a solid basis for successfully implementing both open access and open research data concepts in H2020 projects and to highlight ways of integrating them into current research workflows.

Conference Day 1: invited international experts will introduce strategies for fulfilling open access requirements in H2020 projects and Open Data Pilots. The goal of Day 1 is to give the attendees the necessary background information and useful tools for publishing open access or open research data.

Conference Day 2: the young researchers are invited to come with a project idea relying on, or promoting open research data/open science aspects. They will be challenged to defend their idea and to work it out with the other young researchers to take a chance to win one of the two YEAR Awards. The goal is for the young researchers to gain hands-on experience on developing strong project ideas as well as to find other potential project partners.

Confirmed speakers and trainers: Jean-Claude Burgelman (European Commission, DG Research and Innovation), Petr Knoth (The Open University, UK), Jenny Molloy (OKFN, University of Oxford, UK), Peter Kraker (KNOW Center, AT)

YEAR Awards: the two most outstanding project ideas defended and developed during the Conference Day 2 will be awarded. The YEAR Awards consist of a European Project Management training course and 5000 euros each to further develop the project ideas.

Please submit your project idea for the YEAR Annual Conference 2015 by Thursday 2 April 2015 Thursday 16 April 2015.

The conference is supported by the EU project FOSTER and is organised by YEAR in cooperation with VTT, AIT Austrian Institute of Technology, KNOW Center Graz, and SINTEF. The Open Knowledge Foundation is a dissemination partner.

Conference links: http://www.year-network.com/homepage/year-annual-conference-2015

https://www.fosteropenscience.eu/event/year-annual-conference-2015-open-science-horizon-2020

Do you have 2+ hours a month available to edit and post some fantastic open science content to the Open Science Working Group blog?

We are looking for more editors to join Ann, Scott and Rayna on the blog editing team!

We aim to post at least once a month on events and activities organised by working group members, insights and thoughts from you all on different aspects of open science or the occasional guest blog post from others in the field.

The ideal minimum commitment is to manage/edit/author two blog posts a year but any additional help is much appreciated, for instance in curating the blog by putting together a short series of related posts and requesting guest posts.

More info on the role can be found here

If you are interested:

• Get in touch with any questions via this thread or science@okfn.org
• Add you name to the wiki
• Follow the open science blog queue topic on Discourse to pick up posts as they come in!

More interested in curation than editing?

Check out our discussion on aggregating blog feeds to create a Planet Open Science that Svetlana Belkin is driving forward. This will eventually involve ‘Editor’s Picks’, community tagging and other features.

Would you like your work featured on this blog?

Check out the blog contributions wiki page and get in touch!

Image Credit: 2008-01-26 (Editing a paper) – 31 by Nic McPhee on Flickr, licensed under CC-BY-SA 2.0

We are pleased to announce our first ever open science working group call specifically for Asia-Pacific timezones!

Sunday 21 December, 8:00 UTC

(12:00 UTC+4 – 18:00 UTC+10)

Dial-in instructions will be posted on the wiki and call notepad prior to the call.

Check out the open science wiki for more details and please do add your details there, especially if you would be willing to help host a call.

Massive thanks for Ranjith Raj Vasam for taking on the task of organising the first call. We look forward to seeing how the group shapes these calls going forward and look ahead to many more opportunities to bring together the open science community in the Asia-Pacific region.

We are pleased to announce that there is now an OKF mailing list for open science in the Netherlands, managed by Egon Willighagen at Maastricht University. We encourage those from or working in the Netherlands to use this forum for discussing projects and policy, supporting the Dutch open science community and organising events or activities locally.

You can find the mailing list here – do join up!

Netherlands flag from Wikimedia Commons. Placed in the public domain by author Zscout370.

Time is short as the deadline for applications is 21 March and ideally student would already be in contact with mentoring organisations, but do spread the word!

• The National Resource for Network Biology (NRNB) is organizing the joint efforts of GenMAPP, Cytoscape, and WikiPathways.
• Kitware are mentoring on open source chemistry visualisation among other projects.
• Public Lab are developing project ideas around spectroscopy, aerial mapmaking, and infrared imagery with open hardware tools for citizen science.
• Scaffoldhunter has ideas on molecular visualisation among other projects.

Plus many more on the full mentors list…

We hope to see even more organisations with open science projects involved in 2015 and play a role in promoting this increase. If you think you would like to mentor for GSoC, do make use of the open-science mailing list to draw on the advice and experience of those who have been through the process before and bounce ideas around.

GSoC logo – CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0

The Open Science Working Group has had a great year, growing to over 630 members (!) on the mailing list and we now have local groups or representation in:

• Sweden
• Finland
• UK (Oxford, London, Cambridge)
• Australia
• Austria
• France
• Brazil
• US

Which is fantastic, but we’d love to expand further! If you would like to be an open science ambassador for your region/country/city/university then get in touch with science@okfn.org.

To help us keep track of all these activities and make sure we’re being as effective as possible at providing a space for discussions and collaboration around open science, it would be great to hear from anyone who would like to be more involved in managing the working group.

You also might get to hang out with Chuff and this #animalgarden friends.

We would like to put together a group of community organisers to contribute to a variety of roles. There can be a name for this group but we haven’t settled on one yet – suggestions welcome.The time commitment will be flexible and relatively low, roles and tasks might include:

• Organising working group meetings
• Planning open science events at OKFest 2014
• Documenting events and updates from the working group
• Coordinating specific projects or documents
• Blog Editing
• Tech/Dev Liaison
• Event Organisation
• Designing publicity materials and logos etc.

Do get in touch if any of this sounds of interest even if you are only able to contribute a small amount of time – we’d love to hear from you! Tweet us on @okfnscience or email science@okfn.org.

The goal of the Open Scholar Foundation is to improve the efficiency of scholarly communication by providing incentives for researchers to openly share their digital research artifacts, including manuscripts, data, protocols, source code, and lab notes.

The proposal of an “Open Scholar Foundation” was one of the winners of the 1K challenge of the Beyond the PDF conference. This was the task of the challenge:

What would you do with 1K that would significantly advance scholarly communication that does not involve building a new software tool?

The idea was to establish a committee that would certify researchers as “Open Scholars” according to given criteria. This was the original proposal:

I would set up a simple “Open Scholar Foundation” with a website, where researchers can submit proofs that they are “open scholars” by showing that they make their papers, data, metadata, protocols, source code, lab notes, etc. openly available. These requests are briefly reviewed, and if approved, the applicant officially becomes an “Open Scholar” and is entitled to show a banner “Certified Open Scholar 2013” on his/her website, presentation slides, etc. Additionally, there could be annual competitions to elect the “Open Scholar of the Year”.

An alternative approach (perhaps more practical and promising) would be to provide a scorecard for researchers to calculate their “Open Scholar Score” on their own. There is an incomplete draft of such a scorecard in the github repo here.

In any case, his project should lead to an established and recognized foundation that motivates scholars to openly share their data and results. Being a certified Open Scholar should be something that increases one’s reputation and visibility, and should give a counterweight to possible benefits from keeping data and results secret. The criteria for Open Scholars should become more strict over time, as the number of “open-minded” scholars hopefully increases over the years. This should go on until, eventually, scholarly communication has fundamentally changed and does not require this special incentive anymore.

It is probably a good idea to use Mozilla Open Badges for these Open Scholar banners.

We are at the very beginning with this initiative. If you are interested in joining, get in touch with us! We are open to any kind of feedback and suggestions.

There are plans afoot to revive the Stockholm Open Science group and more generally increase activities in Sweden!

If you’re keen to get involved, head on over to the Stockholm Open Science discussion group and introduce yourself.

If you’re not based in Sweden but would like to start open science activities elsewhere, get in touch via science@okfn.org to see how we can help!