Stefan Kasberger - November 15, 2015 in Courses, events, Planet
Jenny Molloy - March 15, 2014 in Announcements, events, Tools
The Google Summer of Code mentors have been announced and they include organisations working on some great open science tools. We encourage anyone who works with or knows keen undergraduate coders to promote this opportunity to participate in the summer programme.
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!
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.
Jenny Molloy - December 14, 2013 in events, Oxford Open Science, Research, Tools
The November Oxford Open Science meeting brought over 20 researchers together for a ‘Content Mining: Scholarly Data Liberation Workshop’.
Iain Emsley and Peter Murray-Rust kicked off proceedings by presenting their work on mining Twitter and academic papers in chemistry and phylogenetics respectively.
Next we tried out web-based tools such as Tabula for extracting tables from PDF (we were fortunate enough to have Manuel Aristarán of Tabula joining us remotely via Skype) and ChemicalTagger for tagging and parsing experimental sections in chemistry articles.
We then got down to business with some hands-on extraction of species from HTML papers and mentions of books on Twitter using regular expressions. All code is open source so you are welcome and encouraged to play, fork and reuse!
Peter’s tutorial and code to extract species from papers can be found on bitbucket and the relevant software and command line tools have helpfully been bundled into a downloadable package. Iain has also documented his flask application for Twitter mining on github so have a go!
If this has whet your appetite for finding out more about content mining for your research and you’d like to ask for input or help or simply follow ongoing discussion then join our
Some furry friends joined in the efforts – met Chuff the OKF Okapi and AMI the kangaroo
Jenny Molloy - September 30, 2013 in Announcements, events, Members
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!
Brian Glanz - September 19, 2013 in events, Hackday, OKCon
Most hackdays end with “Show and Tell” — each project giving a demo or a report on their progress. Today’s Open Science and Citizen Science Hackathon, anchored in Geneva on the heels of OK Con, included remote participants in France, Germany, the Netherlands and the US, and possibly other places. This did complicate Show and Tell.
part of the WikiSprint group in Geneva
We will use this post, however to recap the day! Fearless hackathon leaders Stefan Kasberger and Rayna Stamboliyska had previously solicited project proposals and votes on favourites, with which they announced what projects would likely be attempted on the day.
Hackdays don’t always go to plan and that’s intentional, people are welcome to start something unexpected. One unintended, good result of mashing up great people and great ideas was the metabolomics scientist who met Daniel Lombraña-González and got into crowdsourcing, citizen science with CrowdCrafting, run on OKF’s PyBossa.
A particularly active and international group held a WikiSprint to improve Open Science related content at the P2P Foundation and on Wikipedia as detailed in those links. You can still contribute! and please do. Pictured above are some of the participants in Geneva, with the photo taken by project leader, Célya Gruson-Daniel @celyagd. Activities were organized with this Etherpad, where you can find more on who got up to what in the WikiSprint.
@MaliciaRogue!
At about the halfway mark, Rayna @MaliciaRogue dropped a few summary tweets:
The Open & Citizen Science workshop is going very nicely: we have an #OpenScienceManifesto coming, an #OpenScienceWiki sprint, (cont) #OKCon
>>> We also have more hardcore statistical stuff going on w friends from OKF Finland organizing R packages for #OpenGov data analysis #OKCon
Last but not least, we have metabolomics scientists interested to involve citizens with #Crowdcrafting cc @teleyinex #OpenScience #OKCon
We will report more soon!
Brian Glanz - September 14, 2013 in Announcements, events, Hackday, Members, OKCon, Tools
Join us geeking out Thursday, Sept 19, 10:00 to 17:00 CEST at #OKCon and online! Details are below. See also our announcement of this event and everyone’s votes for favourite projects.
For WikiSprint: Global overview of Open Science initiatives please join us remotely via the coordinating Etherpad (found: https://etherpad.mozilla.org/xpQvKfNv5c) and working either here or on Wikipedia.
For other projects, join us in IRC: #openscience on freenode or via the web at http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=openscience. Find us on Twitter @MaliciaRogue, @stefankasberger, @openscience, and at #openscience or #OKCon.
Title: “Open Data in Research: an illusion?”
Details: Despite the dazzling development of the open access movement, open data initiatives in science and research are still trailing in involvement. Additionally, disparities in research data sharing and openness are huge across scientific communities and domains.
Last but not least, formats and licensing terms greatly vary even within specific field. This suggested activity will wrap-up current initiatives and achievements prior to formalizing the challenges ahead. The middle-term goal is to bootstrap connections converging to a true institutional change that leads to more participative, shareable and transparent science: the science of tomorrow.
Support: Open Data enthusiasts, geeks and science nerds welcome.
Comment: Remote participation welcome (IRC, pad). Hashtag: #OpenSciData
Title: “An inclusive approach to open science”
Details: The discourse in open science often runs along the lines of open vs. closed approaches. In reality though, most researchers act in-between those two extremes. From successful examples such as genomics, we can see that open science is essentially a community effort (cp. Bermuda Principles). Therefore, we (the Austrian chapter of the OKFN) advocate an inclusive approach to open science.
From a community perspective, it is the commitment to openness that matters, and the willingness to promote this openness on editorial boards and program committees. It is therefore important to get as many researchers on board as possible. This approach is _not_ intended to replace existing initiatives but to make researchers aware of these initiatives and helping them with choosing their approach to open science.
The idea of this hackathon is to create a manifesto/declaration for such an inclusive approach. A draft and a first discussion can be found here: http://science20.wordpress.com/2013/06/25/an-inclusive-approach-to-open-science/
We invite contributions from researchers in various disciplines on their experiences with advocating and implementing open science practices. This could be in the form of presentations, lightning talks, or focused discussions.
Support: We mainly need creative minds; designers, illustrators, and animators are welcome as we could produce a short video about the idea.
Comment: N/A
Title: “Wikisprint: Global overview of OpenScience initiatives”
Details: A few months ago an event was organised to agregate links and knowledge about P2P initiatives. http://codigoabiertocc.wordpress.com/2013/08/07/globalp2p-the-wind-that-shook-the-net/
In partnership with Michel Bauwens of the P2P Foundation and HackYourPhd I’d like to organize a similar event for OpenScience initiative. The P2P Foundation aims to promote and document peer to peer practices in a very broad sense. The collective HackYourPhd federate numerous students, researchers and citizens interested in the production and the sharing of knowledge. Being an administrator on the French Wikipedia, I will likely get support from the Wikimedia communities.
This “wikisprint” will be set up as follow:
Support: Designer and programmer are welcome for the visualisation
Comment: Here are some guidelines given by Michel Bauwens to help us organize this workshop.
Title: “rOpenGov – R ecosystem for social and political science”
Details: With the avalanche of open government data and other fields relevant to computational social science, new algorithms are needed to take full advantage of these new information resources – to access, analyse and communicate such information in a fully transparent and reproducible manner as part of scientific inquiry or citizen science projects.
A scalable solution will require coordinated effort from independent developers. Hence, we are now building up a community-driven ecosystem of R packages dedicated to open government data and computational social and political science, building on lessons learned from analogous and wildly successful projects in other fields. The site already provides open source R tools for open government data analytics for Austria, Finland, and Russia and we are now actively collecting further contributions.
The preliminary project website is at: http://louhos.github.io/en/ropengov.html
Support: In addition to internet access, the project would benefit from contributions from website designers, scientists and R package developers.
Comment: Distant participation to the hackathon through IRC/Skype is also possible.
Title: “Crowdcrafting Everywhere”
Details: Crowdcrafting is a straightforward, open source handy tool for citizen science. Unfortunately, Crowdcrafting solely speaks English for now. What about translating it into other languages, e.g. French, Spanish, Russian,…?
Support: Multilingual enthusiasts welcome!
Comment: Remote participation welcome.
Hashtag: #CCEverywhere.
Crowdcrafting’s lead developer, Daniel Lombrana-Gonzalez, will also be with us throughout the whole day.
Title: Open Access Button
Details: Open Access Button is a browser-based tool which tracks every time someone is denied access to a paper. We want to display this, along with the person’s location, profession and story on a real time, worldwide, interactive map of the problem. While creating pressure to open up scholarly and scientific research, we also want to help people work within the current broken system by helping them get access to the paper they need.
That’s the project summed up really briefly. We built a prototype at the start of the summer and are working towards a launch of later in the year.
Support: tbc
Comment: Waiting for confirmation for founders to join in person. Remote participation will be confirmed soon.
Title: “Booksprint: OpenScience Guidelines for PhD Students and researchers”
Description: Organize a book sprint to write a guide about how to do open science for researchers or PhD students.
No special skills are needed to participate, if you are a PhD student or a students or know the basic of science from another area. We will share our ideas and experience with open science.
Possible chapters:
* What does it mean to publish in open access?
* How do you go about publishing in open access?
* What is an “Open notebook”?
* How do I organize an open notebook?
* Which other tools are available?
* What tools are missing?
* How do we communicate and better support each other?
etc.
To write the book, we will use Fidus Writer ( http://fiduswriter.org ), an open source, webbased editor that typesets academic writing with citations and formulas, and lets us publish PDFs or ebooks of articles and/or journals without any technical skills. The Fidus Writer team will assist via hangout/chat.
Support: Some designers are welcome to help for figures, and other visualisations.
Internet access has to be available and Google Chrome or Chromium installed on the machines.
Artististic minds are also welcome 🙂
Comment: I think it would be a good idea to find a printing solution as well, because to have something in your hands, can be very engaging and it would be great for hackyourpdh to have something to show around. But this could be done afterwards.
Jenny Molloy - September 13, 2013 in Collaborations, events, External Meetings, Guest Post, Meetings, Research
This is cross-posted from the OpenUCT blog.
What do we include in our definition of open science? And what is meant by development? Two key questions when you’re discussing open science for development, as we were yesterday on day one of the IDRC OKFN-OpenUCT Open Science for Development workshop.
Participants from Africa, Asia and Latin America and the Carribbean have gathered at the University of Cape Town in an attempt to map current open science activity in these regions, strengthen community linkages between actors and articulate a framework for a large-scale IDRC-funded research programme on open science. The scoping workshop aims to uncover research questions around how open approaches can contribute to development goals in different contexts in the global South. Contextualization of open approaches and the identification of their key similarities and differences is critical in helping us understand the needs and required frameworks of future research.
Several key themes, which generally provided more questions than answers, came up throughout a day packed of presentations, discussion and debate: strategic tensions, inequalities, global power dynamics, and the complexity of distilling common challenges (and opportunities) over large geographical areas. Some of the key strategic tensions identified include the balance between the “doing” of open science as opposed to researching it, as well as the tension between high quality research and capacity building at an implementation level. Both tensions are centred on inextricably linked components which are important in their own right. This brings up the question of where should the focus be? Where is it most relevant and important?
The issue of inequality and inclusivity also featured strongly in the discussions, particularly around citizen science – by involving people in the research process, you empower them before they are affected. But this begs the questions: How open should citizen science be? Who takes the initiative and sets goals? Who is allowed to participate and in what roles? With regard to knowledge, a small number of countries and corporate entities act as gatekeepers of the knowledge produced globally. How should this knowledge be made more accessible? Will open scientific approaches make dialogue and knowledge distribution more inclusive?
By the end of the first day’s discussion, the workshop had surfaced opportunities and challenges for each of the regions, but many questions still remain in terms of how to address the complex issues at hand and bring together the complex and disparate components of open scientific activity. Day two of the workshop will be focused on articulation of research problems, possible areas of activity and the structure of the envisioned research programme.
Join the discussion via Twitter via #OpenSciDev.
by SarahG (Pictures by Uvania Naidoo)
Jenny Molloy - September 1, 2013 in Announcements, events, Hackday, OKCon
Open and Citizen Science in the heart of Europe – Workshop
Thursday 19 September, 10:00 – 17:00 @ Centre Universitaire d’Informatique Université de Genève, Auditorium, Ground Floor
Coordinators: Stefan Kasberger (Open Knowledge Foundation Austria) and Rayna Stamboliyska (Open Knowledge Foundation France), in collaboration with François Grey (Citizen Cyberscience Center / University of Geneva), Margaret Gold/ Brian Fuchs (Citizen Cyberscience Center / The Mobile Collective)
Hacking science makes us happy. If it makes you happy, too, then, this year’s Open Knowledge Conference is the place to be!
Indeed, OKCon 2013 is where an amazing bouquet of insights from Open and Citizen science will converge. But if you thought there would be only food for the brain, you were wrong. A satellite event will take place on 19 September aiming at giving space for everyone to actually get great things done.
With our friends François Grey (Citizen Cyberscience Center/University of Geneva), Margaret Gold and Brian Fuchs (Citizen Cyberscience Center/The Mobile Collective), we have come up with a way allowing everyone to take part to this exciting day.
I have an idea!
We know you do. Hence, we have a dedicated form ready for you to submit a short description of what you are keen to work on. You can also indicate what additional competences you need in order to get your project done.
Idea submission will be running from today until 10 September. Every week, we will be updating everyone (through the Open Science mailing list) telling you about the new ideas submitted. In addition, a community call will be scheduled to discuss and narrow down these ideas so that they actually become feasible within one-day long hands-on sprint.
Working together
The idea of the satellite event is to geek out together. On 11 September, we will be publishing a poll with all ideas so that you can be able to vote for the project you want to work on on Day D. Voting will run until 18 September.
Do not forget to bring your favourite geeking gear (laptop, some flavour of mobile device or a fancy notebook in the perfect 1.0 fashion). We will have WiFi, cookies and fun!
The workshop space can accommodate up to 45 people.
To sign-up, express your interest in the topic and get in touch with the coordinators please write to openandcitizenscience@okcon.org.
Jenny Molloy - July 20, 2013 in Announcements, Collaborations, events, External Meetings, Meetings, Research
We are delighted to announce that OKF is collaborating with the OpenUCT Initiative at the University of Cape Town in an International Development Research Centre funded project to develop a southern led research agenda for open science for development.
We hope to use this as an opportunity not only to explore research into open science but also to really push community building efforts in the global south and identify a strong network of open science advocates and practitioners – maybe setting up some new local open science groups along the way!
You can read more in our project proposal.
A small group met in London last week to set the ground work for a larger workshop in Cape Town 11-13 September 2013 and the results of that meeting will be available online shortly.
We hope you are as excited about this opportunity as we are and in the spirit of the exercise we will be making both the process and outcomes as open as possible. Therefore, if you would like to apply to participate in the Cape Town meeting please send jenny.molloy@okfn.org a brief half page introduction to yourself including answers to the following questions:
Why is this project of interest?
What expertise and experience do you bring?
What would you like to see come out of this project?
Preference will be given to participants from developing countries in order to further the aims of the project and full funding will be provided.
There is a short deadline of 24 July 2013 so please spread this invitation through your networks, particularly contacts you might have in the global south. If selected, we will organise travel and flights as soon as possible.
Daniel Lombraña González - May 3, 2013 in events, External Meetings, Hackday
Come and join other citizen scientists, humanities folks, technologists, designers, students, scientists, and all who are curious for a two days of Crowdcrafting Citizen Science at Medialab-Prado, Madrid, Spain. We’ll be hacking together apps and projects with various open tools such as Epicollect, PyBossa and/or BOINC.
The goal of the hackfest is to show the benefits that Citizen Science gives to citizens as well as professional scientists thanks to the new technologies. At the hackfest you will be able to learn about the tools used in volunteer sensing: data acquisition thanks to smartphones and gadgets for scientific projects, volunteer thinking: problem solving thanks to volunteers that collaborate in scientific projects using the web browser, and volunteer computing: where the volunteer donates his/her computer resources, (CPU idle cycles) to different projects.
How it works?
We will provide support for any teams who’d like to continue working on their projects or apps beyond the event!
What do I need to participate?
In principle you will only need a laptop, but feel free to bring any hardware, gadget, device that you think it is relevant for the hackfest and that could help in a citizen science project. For example, bring your own mobile phone (we will try EpiCollect in Android) as we will show how you can help in the acquisition of data, or an Arduino device that you have created, etc. In other words: bring any device that you think it will be useful for a citizen science project.
But if I’m not a scientist or a developer, how can I help?
You are more than welcome! Actually your participation is really important. Why? Because this workshop is about Citizen Science, so we want your participation in the event and the projects. How? Well, it is easy, giving us feedback, ideas, suggestions about the projects and tools that we are presenting. Maybe you know different languages, so you can help translating a project, or maybe you are a designer so you could work with the scientists creating a really nice logo for the project. As you can see, you can help a lot!
What is Citizen Science
Citizen Science is scientific research conducted, in whole or in part, by amateur or nonprofessional scientists, often by crowdsourcing data collection, problem solving & thinking. Formally, citizen science has been defined as “the systematic collection and analysis of data; development of technology; testing of natural phenomena; and the dissemination of these activities by researchers on a primarily avocational basis”. Citizen science is sometimes called “public participation in scientific research.”
Citizen Cyberscience leverages digital tools, mobile technologies and the web to involve citizen around the globe in the ‘formulating’ and ‘doing’ of Science.
Crowdcrafting tools provide online assistance in performing tasks that require human cognition, knowledge or intelligence such as image classification, transcription, geocoding and more.
Open Science means many things, but primarily scientific knowledge that people are free to use, re-use and distribute without legal, technological or social restrictions.
Organizers
The Citizen Cyberscience Centre
Socientize
Sponsors