About "Open Science 101" (working title)

Table of content

1. General Problem
2. Aim
3. What we DON'T want to achieve
4. What we DO want to achieve
5. Current Status
6. Contributing
7. Mozilla Science Lab Global Sprint 2016 (2nd - 3rd June, 2016)
8. License

General Problem

The principles and facets of Open Science have become increasingly noted throughout the last couple of years. However, whereas Open Access has gained quite a lot of visibility, other facets are hardly apparent and seen even less in action. In fact, many of the facets and principles are mainly known and applied by those who are interested in working openly anyway. Fostering (facets of) Open Science should not only be a case of "preaching to the converted", but also to give anyone an understanding of the concepts, principles, opportunities and challenges of these related subjects.

Aim

This project aims to generate high quality, concise teaching materials of Open Science principles. The target audience are teachers who would like to build courses based on this material, students and researcher who would like to quickly get an overview of core Open Science concepts as well as anyone that is interested in Open Science. The materials are available under the CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain Dedication license to facilitate optimal reusability.

This compendium aims to include documentation of the different facets of Open Science like: Open Access, Open Data, Open Licenses, Open Peer Review, etc. Our definition of Open Science is very broad - it also covers the opening of the humanities as well as Open Educational Resources and other related topics.

There are quite a number of approaches how this can be undertaken and a number of projects doing this for either certain topics or certain target groups. However, there does not seem to be a concerted approach.

We are collecting existing material that's already been made to introduce specific audiences to Open Science at Open Science Q&A. Many of these resources serve as templates for our material.

For a more detailed description of our target audience as well as potential contributors we would like to refer to our personas file.

"Open Science 101" is the current working title and might be changed in the future dependent on the actual content.

What we DO NOT want to achieve

The outcome of this project shall be more than merely a collection of resources (e.g. tools) supporting Open Science within different disciplinary contexts. This is for two reasons:

1. Such a collection - in its most basic form would be a list of resources, in a more sophisticated form this could be a database which would be very difficult to maintain as old tools and services are discontinued or new tools arise in quite a rapid manner.
2. Such a collection would be quite extensive in its scope and would quickly become long and more difficult to handle for interested users. In addition many of the tools and services listed might be relevant within a specific context (discipline), but not very useful in others. This might limit the general usefulness of the collection itself.

However, there are attempts to do such a thing (blogposts, wiki lists, etc.).

What we DO want to achieve

Instead, we want to come up with a set of educational resources that provide usable teaching material elaborating on the basic principles of Open Science that most of the different contexts (e.g. disciplines), if not all, have in common.

This material can then be easily adapted (e.g. forked) and complemented by domain-specific tools, regulations, or any other particular topics.

Over time, this will hopefully build an extended variety of educational materials that can be used for many different contexts.

Current Status

Current Status: IN PROGRESS (kickstarting sprint finished)

Currently we are collecting ideas about the scope via the issue tracker and would invite anybody to contribute to the discussion and to share ideas.

Our role models for this repository are Software Carpentry (http://software-carpentry.org/) and Data Carpentry (http://www.datacarpentry.org/). Both initiatives host all their teaching material publicly in GitHub repositories so the content can be easily crowd-sourced (see e.g. http://software-carpentry.org/lessons/). We will try to adhere to their style as far as this is suitable.

We are aware that this is not the first attempt to generate such a collection, but in our opinion, there is no comprehensive resource covering all the required topics.

Contributing

We are happy to invite you to contribute, please have a look to see how and where! We expect of all participants to follow our Code of Conduct.

Mozilla Science Lab Global Sprint 2016 (2nd - 3rd June, 2016)

At the Mozilla Science Lab Global Sprint 2016 -- an event with local and virtual meetings -- we worked on the compendium. Here is our project page and the issue for the registration of the project (mozillascience/global-sprint-2016#36).

For the two-day sprint, we have created a milestone that contains the issues we wanted to particularly concentrate on within the sprint - these are also good starting points if you want to join!

Further information found in this etherpad and our meeting documentation.

Matthias wrote a detailed blog post about the project and the MozSprint. Andreas, Markus and Konrad recorded a podcast episode about it.

License

This work is licensed under CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain Dedication.