Runway for sustainability: OLS awarded funding from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative to power its next phase | Open Life Science

"OLS [Open Life Science] is absolutely delighted to share the news that as of January 2022, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative has awarded OLS a total of USD 574,945.30 over the next two years. This grant will provide OLS with a truly valuable opportunity to improve sustainability for the organisation and community, and allow enough time to focus on planning for the longer term.

Activities over 2022 and 2023 will include:

1. Four open research mentoring and training cohorts: OLS-5 applications have closed, and we will run OLS-6 in the second half of 2022, followed by OLS-7 and OLS-8 in 2023. As in the last cohorts, OLS will continue to cater to researchers and the open-research curious from all backgrounds.

2. New Open Source Software module in the OLS curriculum: OLS team will co-design a new module on Open Source Software to be delivered as an additional skill-up enhancement for those who have software and code-related projects and wish to attend it.

3. Sustainability and business model planning: Until recently, OLS was fully volunteer-driven. For cohorts 3 and 4, we were able to offer small payments in the form of honoraria to some of our mentors and call facilitators. This will be a core offering over 2022 and 2023, as well as dedicated time to pay the OLS core team to work on OLS...."