Open Science: Sharing Your Research with the World

You can become a more visible, effective and impactful researcher by sharing your research data and publications openly. In this introductory course, you will learn the objectives, main concepts, and benefits of Open Science principles along with practices for Open Data management and Open Data sharing.

Research increasingly relies on code, which is developed to process, model and simulate as well as to deal with the ever growing volume of research data. This course will therefore also introduce FAIR software practices that are essential for the reproducibility of your research results.

Societal participation in research is becoming ever more important. The course will demonstrate what citizen science is about, how to stimulate citizens to participate in your research and how to handle (new) responsibilities when implementing citizen science.

You will learn to establish links between publications, data, software and methods, how to attach a persistent identifier and metadata to your results, and methods for clarifying usage rights. You will also discover ways to apply these principles to your daily research and adapt existing routines. Finally, you will uncover potential barriers to sharing research and discuss possible solutions.

This course will help you grasp the key principles of Open Science, with answers to questions like:

● How can researchers effectively store, manage, and share research data and code?

● What kinds of Open Access publishing are most effective?

● How can researchers increase the visibility and impact of their research?

● How can the use of social media contribute to the visibility and impact of research?

● How can researchers be acknowledged for the research software they write?

● How can research benefit from citizen science?

You will apply the topics of the course to a variety of case studies on Open Science adoption, which you will then discuss among fellow students. You will also be presented with a hands-on guide to publishing your research with Open Access. This will help you to apply Open Science principles in your daily work. It will enable you to implement and benefit from the Open Science policies that are currently being developed by governments and research institutions around the world.

This course is aimed at professionals. Those who will benefit most include academic researchers at different levels: PhD students, postdoctoral researchers, and professors; researchers working for governments; researchers working for commercial enterprises; MSc and BSc students interested in learning about the principles of Open Science.

Week 1: Introduction to Open Science

Introduction to the Open Science movement. What are the objectives, main concepts, and benefits of Open Science? This includes:

● A brief introduction on the history of Open Science and an overview of key topics open scientists are working on

● Practical Open Science benefits for researchers

● Policies from important funding organizations

● Programs on Open Data and Open Access publishing

● Case studies on successful application of Open Science by researchers from different backgrounds.

Week 2: Research Data Management

Introduction to effective and secure research data management, including:

● Learning the disciplinary standards of FAIR data sharing

● Evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of different data storage and backup options

● Organizing, documenting, and adding metadata to research data to optimize the visibility of your data

● Data archiving, access, sharing and re-use with the use of data repositories

● Understanding the different copyright licenses designed to deal with Open Data

● Dealing with confidential data, company restrictions, and third-party agreements through case studies

● Evaluating a data management plan

● Explaining how Open Data can be applied in your field of research

Week 3: Publishing Open Access

Here you will discuss the main differences between the Open Access and subscription-based publication model in science, and the main misconceptions about Open Access publishing. In this week we also introduce the creative commons licenses used by Open Access journals and self-archiving policies. You will examine how you can maximize the accessibility of publications in subscription-based journals, you will present your opinion of the Open Access publishing model and assess the 'openness' of the main scientific journals in your field of research.

Week 4: Choose topic(s) depending on your interests:

Increasing your research visibility

Here you discuss and formulate your communication strategy, describing and choosing your social media channels for reaching certain target groups.

Making your research software FAIR (and OPEN)

Research Software development has gained significant attention in the field of Open Science. It has become clear that researchers need to possess at least some software development skills and adopt best practices to effectively share their research output. In this module, we will explore what it is like to write and reuse code (research software) for your research. You will learn about the challenges faced along the way – and how to address them – as well as concepts and tools for research software development, like FAIR for Research Software, re-use of code, version control, documentation, and publication.

Citizen science

Societal participation in research is becoming ever more important. The course will demonstrate what citizen science is about, how to stimulate citizens to participate in your research and how to handle (new) responsibilities when implementing citizen science. In this module you will learn how to involve citizens in your research.

Finally, conclusions of this course will be discussed and we will reflect on what has been taught in the previous weeks.