Conquaire goes the Open Science way to Berlin!
22 Mar 2017Day-1 : 2017-March-20
On a cold Monday morning, Christian and Vid were two of the many people found trooping into an impressive building[1] in Berlin to attend the Barcamp, a one-day event generously hosted by Wikimedia at their office.
The camp was kick-started with a self-introduction - each attendee had one line with 3-5 hashtags for describing themselves.
Guido handed the stage to “Annekatrin Bock” whose Pecha Kucha talk on “Open Practices in the Classroom” touched upon the Open Educational Resources (OER), the need and the motivation(s) to share/give knowledge freely, and most importantly, the urgent need to improve the retention mechanism for researchers, including the reward and measuring system that will motivate them to stay on.
https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/oscibar2017_session7
A total of 22 sessions were proposed and Christian proposed a session on (add link here) while Vid proposed a session on “Reproducibility of Research Data & its Management whose summary is here. Later Konrad from Open Science Radio interviewed Christian [add link].
The session “Tools for open science” had an interesting list of technical tools and suggestions for enabling researchers to use and ensure they do open science.
The barcamp session ended with a discussion on “FOSS in Open Science” by the smart legal eagles from the FSF-EU branch who spoke about harnessing Libre software for Open Science, the opportunities and the challenges researchers face while doing this.
For the barcamp, the hashtag was #oscibar and you can find the twitter account @lfvscience20 that was live (re)tweeting attendees. An ether metapad was used by attendees to store our session proposals.
[1] …and Berlin’s landscape is dotted with many such impressive structures.
Day-2 : 2017-March-21
URL: https://www.open-science-conference.eu/programme/
On Tuesday, Prof. Klaus Tochtermann, from the ZBW – Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, opened the conference with an update on the science ministers meeting on the open science policy platform to manage and govern science in EU.
Then, Jean-Claude Burgelman spoke about the European Open Science cloud (EOSC) that is supported by DE ministry and by 2020, will federate all data infrastructures in an open and seamless (no data locking) cloud initiative. He introduced the OpenScience Monitor, an aggregator for all the science news in Europe.
Prof. Johannes Vogel spoke about the Open Science Platform and the EU Open Science policy that aims to foster open science. Professor Arndt Bode, from the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre, Munich, stressed the importance of Open Science and why it needs federated infrastructures. He introduced GeRDI, an infrastructure to support open and interdisciplinary research from the Leibniz super computing centre.
We heard Professor Jana Diesner, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), speak about innovating compliantly and transparently, overcoming road blocks with openness and solutions for doing OpenScience.
After a good lunch, the afternoon session was dedicated to the Posters selected to be presented at OSC. It was kicked off with lightning talks by the top 10 posters who got to present their research projects to the attendees. Vid introduced Conquaire and it was well received by the attendees. Konrad interviewed Vid about [research reproducibility](add link].
Day-3 : 2017-March-22
On Wednesday, the final day of the conference, was started by Professor Dirk van Damme, Head of the Innovation and Measuring Progress Division (IMEP), OECD, France, introducing attendees to Open Educational Resources that would be a catalyst for innovation in Education. He raised an important point about MOOCs not being openly licensed which did not fulfill the five R’s of OER, namely,
- Retain
- Reuse
- Revise
- Remix
- Redistribute It was quite evident that content sharing would be enabled by more open IP licensing, like CC licenses.
Professor Thomas Köhler from the Institute for Vocational Education & Media Center, Technical University Dresden, spoke about open educational practices as drivers of educational innovation, and how reuse and remix was crucial for the education sector.
Thereafter, there was a short presentation on “Report of the EC Expert Group on Metrics” followed by a panel discussion comprising of
- Professor Judit Bar-Ilan, Department Information Science, Bar-Ilan University (Israel) ;
- Professor Isabella Peters, ZBW – Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ;
- Dr. René von Schomberg, who represented DG Research & Innovation, European Commission ;
- Mr. Benedikt Fecher, German Institute for Economic Research (DIW Berlin) and Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society ; and,
- Professor Stefan Hornbostel, Institute for Research Information and Quality Assurance (iFQ), Germany.
The panel discussed the challenges : citation gaming and its acceptance by the research community, Bibliometrics, the biases in altmetrics and peer review. There was a lively discussion with audience questions and they agreed that it was important to measure what matters and why Open Science requires Open Metrics where data, content and code is not owned by companies that wont allow us to scrutinize the data.
Then, Lorna Campbell, from the University of Edinburgh, had an interesting presentation on crossing the field boundaries in Open Science, Open Data and Open Education.
Finally, Alexia Meyermann, from the German Institute for International Educational Research (DIPF), presented a report on building a research data infrastructure for educational studies in Germany. She described how only 144 out of 300 research projects gave a response about their research data.
The closing words were from Professor Klaus Tochtermann on the hopeful note of more progress and openness in the scientific world when the OSC was held the next year.