Finding your community
Having access to resources that help you engage in open research practices is a great first step, but navigating your open research journey will be so much easier if you surround yourself with like-minded people who can help each other. Being a part of a community means you have people you can turn to if you have questions: you can learn from each other's mistakes and successes, and maybe even forge collaborations!
Nowhere Lab
Nowhere Lab [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] is an online community that anyone can join that holds weekly Zoom meetings and has an active slack community. It is hosted by the lead author of this course. Although Nowhere Lab is not explicitly focused on open research, open research is a topic that is heavily covered, whether that be through discussion sessions, journal clubs (where members discuss a paper together), or training on different open research practices.
FORRT
The Framework for Open and Reproducible Research Training (FORRT) is a community of educators who wish to integrate open science principles into their teaching. They strive for open and reproducible research training, advancing research transparency, reproducibility, rigour, and ethics through educational reform. FORRT provides educational infrastructure and resources designed to support the teaching and mentoring of open and reproducible science. You can explore their resources directly to learn more about open research, and join their slack community.
Open research across disciplines
Interdisciplinary communities can be great for learning about how open research affects different fields differently. They can also be helpful for finding out how open research is done in your specific field. For this, check out Open Research Across Disciplines – a tool for exploring open research resources and case studies across fields. You can also use this resource to find people working on open research in your field and even reach out to them!
Big team science
Big team science has been mentioned a few times in this course, and it’s worth noting that as well as the benefits for credibility and accessibility of research, big team science can also be a great way of finding and building community. Joining a big team science project in your field can be a great way to learn about open research and get started in some open research practices before applying them to your own research.
Activity 3.1:
Allow about 10 minutes
Use the Open Research Across Disciplines tool to find resources for open research in your field. Spend ten minutes thinking about how you could apply these tools or ideas to your own research habits.
Use the text box below to write your thoughts.
Go back to your notes for Activity 1, where you were asked to write down ideas of how you could implement open research as part of your everyday research habits. Now, think about how you can share your data and materials from a research project you have finished. If you have not finished a project yet, you can use an imaginary one.
Activity 3.2:
Allow about 20 minutes
Use the open research decision tree to look up some possibilities. Click on the link to the open research decision tree, click the Actions button, then the I’ve finished button. This will take you to about ten possible actions you could take. What are they? Not all of these actions may be appropriate or achievable in your particular project – that’s fine! Once you have lined up some possible courses of action, you can choose the ones that are most practicable.
Use the text box to record what you find.
Open access repositories