Welcome to our third newsletter in 2018 with news around our Leibniz Research Alliance Science 2.0 as well as general developments and upcoming events in the context of Science 2.0 and Open Science.
Enjoy your reading!
Barcamp Open Science: ‘We need to talk!’
The fourth Barcamp Open Science, organized by the Leibniz Research Alliance Science 2.0, took place on 12 March 2018 at Wikimedia Germany in Berlin. Following up the ignition talk by Lambert Heller on using peer to peer networks in scholarly publishing, the 80 contributors gathered and developed a schedule of diverse sessions. These sessions covered themes connected with Open Science ranging from Open Science tools to incentives of furthering open scientific practices. In case you missed the Barcamp Open Science, this blog post summarizes the event. Once again, Open Science Radio was present at the Barcamp and interviewed many session moderators. You can also grasp the atmosphere on #oscibar on our Twitter moment.
Save the date: Next year’s Barcamp will take place on 18 March 2018 at Wikimedia in Berlin!
Open Science Conference: ‘Open Science has arrived in the communities’
On 13 and 14 March, more than 200 participants from 35 countries gathered in Berlin for the Open Science Conference to address the scientific and practical dimensions of the Open Science movement. Since the FAIR principles (findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable) for research data and the corresponding research data infrastructures have recently gained importance, they constituted one of the focus topics at this year’s Open Science Conference. The other topics under discussion were current developments in research data management, a critical assessment of Open Science, and concrete projects for implementing Open Science in the various scientific communities. The presentation slides of the speakers and all posters are available in the conference programme. For some impressions of the conference take a look at the conference video. A short summary of the event is given in the press release, a more detailed report will follow.
Save the date: Next year’s Conference will take place from 19 – 20 March 2019 in Berlin!
Prototype of MOVING platform public
The first prototype of the MOVING platform is now available to the public and was presented at the Open Science Conference. The MOVING platform enables its users to improve their information literacy by training how to exploit data and text mining methods in their daily research tasks. Its’ search engine provides scalable real-time search, supports multiple document types, different file formats, and different programming languages. Faceted search allows to retrieve various kinds of documents such as scientific articles, books, video lectures, and metadata. Graph visualisation highlights relations among documents and related entities and offers an alternative way of exploring search results. Nevertheless, a classical search list is also featured. The Adaptive Training Support provides illustrated feedback to the user in order to help her get familiar with the platform and all its features.
You can try out the platform at http://platform.moving-project.eu/. Don’t forget to send any feedback that you might have!
Time Machine Project at TU Dresden
As part of the FET Flagship Time Machine, a network of scientists from over 160 international institutions aims to build a virtual time machine together. The TU Dresden is working on a virtual guide through historian Venice. Data from archives are digitalized to enable a search for historian figures and places through Facebook and Google. Learn more about the project on their website and in this newspaper article from Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (links only available in German).
COAR Annual Meeting
COAR (The Confederation of Open Access Repositories) is an international association of Open Access repositories and related initiatives with more than 100 members (including libraries, universities, research institutions, and research funding organizations) from around the world. Its’ annual meetings are open also to non-members. The next one will take place in Hamburg from 14 to 17 May. The program includes keynotes from Klaus Tochtermann (ZBW) and Jean-Claude Guedon (University of Montreal, member of the EU expert group on Future of Scholarly Publishing and Scholarly Communication). There are a few places left for participants. If you are interested to come, please register here.
Recommendations on Research Software
The Research Software Working group of the Priority Initiative ‘Digital Information’ group has published their recommendations on the development, use, and provision of research software. In their report they highlight the challenges relating to this software and state that the relevance of research software to modern research should be clearly underlined, especially in the context of political debates on digital transformation in the sciences and humanities.
The European Open Science Cloud is taking shape
The European Commission has presented the roadmap for the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), which is an initiative to make it possible for Europe’s 1.7 million researchers to access and analyze each other’s data. Science Business is summarizing the main points in their article ‘Condensation point: the science cloud begins to take shape’. The time frame of the EOSC was also presented at the Open Science Conference by Jean Claude Burgelman.
The need for data management plans
The opening of scientific data is currently a hot topic in the scientific community. Because of the huge amount of data that is produced in research, sharing can be complicated in practice. Therefore, according to the article ‘Everyone needs a data management plan’ it is essential to create a data management plan, in which the collection, cleanage, storage, and the sharing of research products are listed.
Transparent access to sensitive data – German Data Forums’ network of research data centers
The German Data Forum (RatSWD in German) has accredited a network of 31 research data centers (RDCs) to enable the access to quality assured and sensitive data for science and research. You can read about their services and their vision in a report now.
- OER18, 29 March 2018, Bristol (Great Britain)
- Webinar: Blockchain for Open Science, 12 April 2018,
- Helmholtz Open Science Webinar: SourceData – bridging scientific publishing and open science, 19 April 2018
- COAR Annual Meeting, 14-17 May 2018, Hamburg (Germany)
- Science Transfer East: Introduction to Scientific Blogging, 16 May 2018, Vienna (Austria)
- OPERAS: Open Scholarly Communication in Europe. Addressing the Coordination Challenge, 31 May – 1 June 2018, Athens (Greece)
- FORCE11 Scholarly Communication Institute (FSCI) Summer School, 30 July – 3 August 2018, San Diego
- NBI Summer School 2018: Riding the Data Life Cycle!, 3-7 September 2018, Braunschweig (Germany)
- Open Up Conference: Opening Up the Research Life Cycle: Innovative Methods for Open Science, 5-6 September 2018, Brussels (Belgium)
- 11th Forum Science Communication (Call for Program Proposals open), 7-9 November, Berlin (Germany)