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)

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 visible and even less in action. In fact, many of the facets and principles are mainly known to 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 to give anybody an understanding of the concepts, principles, opportunities and challenges of the related subjects.

Aim

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.

This compendium aims to include documentation of the different facets of Open Science like Open Access, Open Data, Open Source, and Open Peer Review (see Facettes of Open Science). 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.

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

What we DON'T want to achieve

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

1. Such a collection - in the most basic form this could be a list, in a more sophisticated form this could be a database - 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 listed tools and services might be mainly relevant to specific contexts (disciplines), but not very useful in others. This might limit the usefulness of the collection itself.

However, there are attemts 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 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 e.g. domain-specific tools, regulations, or any other particular topics.

Over time, this would hopefully build an extended variety of educational material for many different contexts.

Current Status

Current Status: IN PREPARATION

Currently we are collecting ideas about the scope via the issue tracker and would invite everybody 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 public 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.

The content of this collection is licensed under a Creative Commons Zero license (public domain) to facilitate optimal reusability.

Contributing

We're happy to invite you to contribute, please have a look how and where! We expect of all participants to follow the Code of Conduct.

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

At the upcoming Mozilla Science Lab Global Sprint 2016 -- an event with local and virtual meetings -- we will work on the compendium. Again, you are invited to join us (which you can announce here: mozillascience/global-sprint-2016#36).

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

There will be two sites where we will be available in person during the sprint:

1. On Thursday Matthias will be at the sprint-site in Berlin
2. On Friday Andreas and Konrad will be available at the University of Würzburg (exact location to be announced soon)

Further information including how to join us remotely can be found in this etherpad.

License

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