Science in Crisis – Is Open Science the Solution?

Since Open Science has become a recurring buzzword for recent meta-scientific developments, this article summarizes what these developments entail. What are the reasons for discussions about Open Access, Open Data and Open Peer Review? Which technological changes can we expect and which impact will they have on society and the research community?  Rima-Maria Rahal1 & … Read more

Open Science and Research Data Management: a workshop review

As Open Data and the F.A.I.R. Principles are more and more becoming a standard in scientific processes, transparency and reproducibility of the whole research workflow are starting to be recognized as good scientific practices (see for instance the SPARC initiative openscholarchampions.eu). To make the transition towards Open Data and the implementation of FAIR Principles smooth … Read more

Imagine a Research Future Defined by Open Values

Disclaimer as of Nov 15, 2019: Official announcement from the Open Science MOOC Steering Committee – Introducing the Open Science MOOC by Jon Tennant. This article was originally published on genr.eu | DOI: 10.25815/6hyr-g583 The world of research is not working as well as it could be. On all sides we see issues with reproducibility, … Read more

Open Scholarship Strategy

This article was originally published at ese-bookshelf.blogspot.com by our colleague Duncan Nicholas. After more than a year of work, the Open Scholarship Strategy document has been published in full. The work was inspired by the Foundations for OER Strategy Development, the FORCE11 Scholarly Commons Working Group, and developed by an open contribution working group of 32 … Read more

Open Science in Africa – Challenges, Opportunities and Perspectives

Justin Ahinon and Jo Havemann, both founders of AfricArXiv, talk in this article about the development of Open Science Services in Africa, initiatives, the current situation and chances in the future. This article was originally published at elephantinthelab.org (doi:10.5281/zenodo.1492745) Open Science is becoming increasingly popular globally and provides unprecedented opportunities for scientists in Africa, South … Read more

The man and the scientific publishing giant

In an attempt to secure and protect unbiased Open Science in Europe our team member, palaeontologist and Open Access activist Jon Tennant has taken another stand against Elsevier. Elsevier is the biggest and most influential scientific publisher and at the same time probably the most profitable business worldwide. To get an overview of the cascade of events … Read more

Mentoring at Open Science Fellows Program

Towards the end of September, the Open Science Fellows Program  will enter its third round at Wikimedia Germany. Once again, 20 scientists will be supported in making their scientific research and teaching open and thereby contributing to the promotion of Open Science. An integral part of the program is the mentoring component: two Fellows are closely … Read more

re:publica 18 session – Towards Lab Equipment as a Common Good

At this year’s re:publica, we had a session on Open Science Hardware. Our focus was on hardware and software solutions, tools and services, resources and projects that adopt the Open Source approach and have one goal: to increase access to scientific research. Initiatives and visionaries around the globe are putting this into action in different regional … Read more

The ethics of copyright transfer for scientific research

On his blog Green Tea and Velociraptors our team colleague Jon Tennant questions the ethics of the widely practiced copyright transfer from authors of peer reviewed articles that are based mostly on public funding to commercial publishers.  The following is an excerpt from Jon’s original blog post. […] Typically, the process of copyright transfer for research articles … Read more