Open Science Training

"Reproducibility. Openness. Communication. The high connectivity of the digital age has made it easier than ever before to work collaboratively and share our research with a global audience. The Open Science movement has an instrumental role to play in this, by driving the development of data-sharing infrastructure, methodologies and licensing practices. Policy changes are starting to happen at the level of research councils and publishers, but we now need to ensure that openness can thrive at all levels of academia, requiring open science education. Openness in academia needs to be supported both by top-down policy change, and by bottom-up training of new recruits. At opensciencetraining.com, we aim to tackle the second of these, by helping you to integrate open science training into your existing teaching framework...  Demand a Coherent Research Story...  Students starting a PhD nowadays are stepping straight into a data-rich environment and will need to handle this rapidly evolving research landscape with confidence if they are to fully realise their research potential. For example, they should understand how to license data and content, how to work collaboratively and to handle online release of their findings. We need to stop focusing on published papers, and start demanding delivery of a coherent research story: that is, the research report, methods, data, metadata, all appropriately licensed and readily, freely available online. We have focused too long on turning students into research producers: we need to start making them see that they're research users as well. Only then can they start producing verifiable, reproducible, useful researc... Introducing the Open Science Training Initiative ...  We'd like to announce the launch of the OSTI (Open Science Training Initiative), a programme of micro-lectures and exercises that can fit around an existing subject-specific training course in an academic environment. Suitable for theoretical, computational or experimental students, all OSTI materials are released under a Creative Commons Attribution Licence, allowing you to use, reuse, and/or remix the materials as you see fit. The pilot scheme for the initiative is scheduled to run at the University of Oxford's Doctoral Training Centre in January 2013: content, slides and advice sheets for the lectures and other training materials will be released on this site as soon as they're available. And the beauty of the CC-BY licensing means that you'll be able to download and reuse these materials for free! ..."