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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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.

Because many projects meant for collaboration failed that means either that the communities don’t have enough people willing to work with me (or on anything!) (or a time commitment) or I have networking issues. The latter is within my control and the earlier is one of the problems that most of the Open * communities face.

Lacking support and the feeling of not getting things done over these two plus years is making me to lose motivation to volunteer within these communities. In fact, some of this has already affected four teams within the Ubuntu Community: Ubuntu Women, Ubuntu Ohio, Ubuntu Leadership Team, and Ubuntu Scientists and no news or any activity is shown. As for others, I’m close in removing myself from the communities, something that I don’t want to do and this is why I wrote this. It’s to answer my question of: Where’s my support?! (“me” in the title, but it’s for the lightheartedness that this post needs) I know of a few that maybe feeling this also.

As a thought, as I wrote this post, is what if I worked on a site that could serve as a volunteer board for projects within the Open * communities. Something like “Find a Task” started by Mozilla (I think) and brought over to the Ubuntu Community by Ian W, but maybe as a Discourse forum or Stack Exchange. The only problem that I will face is, again, support for people who want to post and to read. I had issues getting Open Science groups/bloggers/people to add their blog’s feed to Planet Open Science hosted by OKFN’s Open Science But that might be different if it will have almost all types of Open * movements will be represented. Who knows.

Readers, please don’t worry, as this post is written during the CC election in the Ubuntu Community, it will not affect my will to run for a chair. In fact, I think, being in the CC could help me to learn to deal with this issue if others are facing this but they are afraid to talk about in public.

I really, really don’t want to leave any of the Open Communities because of lack of support and I hope some of you can understand and help me. I would like your feedback/comments/advice on this one.

Thank you.

P.S. If this sounded like a rant, sorry, I had to get it out.

Wir laden zur Eröffnung der Open Science Lecture Series ein. Mit Daniel Mietchen ist dazu einer der international umtriebigsten Open Science Akteure zu Gast. Er wird von seinen aktuellen Tätigkeiten am National Institutes of Health (NIH) zum Thema Transparenz in der wissenschaftlichen Begutachtung sowie seinen zahlreichen Aktivitäten in der Wikipedia erzählen.

PodiumsteilnehmerInnen:

• Daniel Mietchen: US National Institutes of Health (NIH)
• Katja Mayer: Universität Wien, Open Knowledge Austria
• Lucia Malfent: Open Innovation in Science (Ludwig Boltzmann Gesellschaft)
• Peter Purgathofer: Forscher, Universitätsprofessor und Designer am Institut für Gestaltungs- und Wirkungsforschung sowie Koordinator des Masterstudiums Medieninformatik

Wann: 3. Dezember 2015, Beginn 19 Uhr
Wo: Sky Lounge der Universität Wien, Oskar-Morgenstern-Platz 1. DG, 1090 Wien
Eintritt frei, Anmeldung notwendig

Die aus insgesamt 5 Lehrveranstaltungen bestehende Lecture Series zu Open Science ist eine Kooperation zwischen dem WTZ Ost, openscienceASAP und Open Knowledge Austria.

I broke up the sub-items with each major item by Open Source and Non-Open Source.  To me, I think there is some difference in those two communities in how are things are done and what is the focus.

There are two things that I forgot on this map:

• Meta Documentation (under tools for both Open Source and Non-Open Source)
  • Tools (for Meta Doc)
    • Wikis
    • GitBook
  • Review System
• Barrier to Entry (under problems for both)

We plan to have a rather informal community meeting with additional lightning talks on current activities, projects and events by the Open Science working group as well as other interested people from the Austrian Open Science Community. We kindly invite you to submit your idea for a lightning talk or any other contribution. The more the merrier! If you are interested in giving your contribution to the meeting, please contact us.

At the end of the meeting you will have the opportunity to network and exchange with the community. We are looking forward to the MeetUp and to a large group of attendees!

The meeting will take place on Monday, 19.10.2015 from 18:00 CET at Raum D, Museumsquartier, Museumsplatz 1, Vienna. See you there!

We also have a MeetUp page, and it would be nice if you register there.

—

>> Wann: Samstag, 21. November 2015 von 9 – 20 Uhr

>> Wo: TU Wien, Festsaal und Boecklsaal

>> Wer: Mitmachen können SchülerInnen ab 17 Jahren und Studierende, die sich für Wissenschaft, Kommunikation und Medien interessieren.

>> Wie: Die Teilnahme ist kostenlos, für Essen und Getränke wird gesorgt (ausreichend Mate!)

>> Mehr Infos auf wisskomm.at

—

Das Projekt ist eine Kooperation des des Bundesministeriums für Wissenschaft, Forschung und Wirtschaft (BMWFW) mit der HCI Group des Instituts für Gestaltungs- und Wirkungsforschung – die Open Knowledge ist als Kooperationspartnerin dabei und unterstützt die Veranstaltung mit (wo)man power in der Organisation und Kommunikation.

>> MentorInnen gesucht!

Wir suchen noch ExpertInnen aus den Bereichen Informatik, Medien, Design und Kommunikation, die den TeilnehmerInnen zur Seite stehen und beim Entwerfen und Umsetzen von Konzepten zur Wissenschaftskommunikation helfen, gegen Speis, Trank und ein kleines Honorar.

Wer sich dafür interessiert, schickt gern ein unverbindliches Email an sonja.fischbauer (et) okfn.at für mehr Infos.

Wir freuen uns schon auf euch!

photo credit: andy prokh