CERN
University of Bern
SNSF
OpenData.ch
SOPHiA GENETICS
CENIT-CONICET
EPFL
EMBL, Heidelberg
SNSF
University of Basel
Turin Astrophysical Observatory
TIB, Hannover
PersonalData.io
sc|nat
Wild Tree Tech
SNSF
SNSF
Achintya Rao Science writer, CERN
Achintya Rao is a science writer for CERN, the European laboratory for particle physics in Geneva, Switzerland, and is pursuing a PhD in science communication from the University of the West of England in Bristol, UK. He is interested in open practices across all stages of the research process and has helped build the CERN Open Data portal.
Scholarly communication and the development of open science are currently undergoing a crucial shift: Now that open access is widely recognised and practiced, researchers, libraries and publishers vie for control over digital research infrastructure. New demands for open data and open access compliance from funding instruments add to the complexity of this competition. This talk will sketch out how Switzerland’s university libraries can contribute open alternatives to prorietary, closed products.
Andrea Hacker Open Access und BOP, University of Bern
Andrea Hacker joined Bern University's open science team in March 2018 after eight years of open access work as head of the publications office of Heidelberg University’s Cluster of Excellence Asia and Europe in a Global Context. She received her doctorate in Slavic Languages and Literatures from UCLA and taught at institutions in the USA, the Republic of Ireland, Germany and Russia.
The high-level goals are set. According to the Swiss National Strategy on Open Access, all scholarly publications funded by public money must be freely accessible on the internet by 2024. The Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) even wants to reach 100% OA by 2020 for all publications that result out of SNSF funded projects. How can these goals be put into practice?
View presentationThe open data movement in Switzerland is active for over eight years now. Community building, data liberation, political lobbying, conferences, open data hackdays (almost 20!) and other activities have been performed by hundreds of open data activists with a lot of success in the last years. However some limitations of open data in Switzerland are obvious: e.g. the lack of a federal open data legislation or the hesitation of most Swiss private companies to join the open data movement. In the short and midterm future open data should play a key role within a developing Swiss data ecosystem where beside open data also personal data will be used under the control of the individual ("my data") and private sector enterprises will exchange data under restrictive framework conditions ("shared data").
I will discuss the sharing of code and open code review in the organization rOpenSci. rOpenSci is a non-profit organization that promotes reproducibility in science by providing and enabling software, data access and tutorials for scientific applications.
View presentationJulia Gustavsen Software Engineer, SOPHiA GENETICS
Julia Gustavsen is currently a bioinformatician at SOPHiA GENETICS in St. Sulpice, VD where she analyzes next generation sequencing (NGS) data. She received her PhD in biologicial oceanography from the University of British Columbia (Vancouver, B.C., Canada). She is interested in biology, bioinformatics, network biology and coding. She also enjoys doing reviews for ROpenSci and teaching workshops for Software Carpentry.
The ability to use, study, replicate, and improve scientific instrumentation is a central part of experimental science, and plays a crucial role in education, research and action that are all critical to achieving scientific and development goals. However, these activities are currently restricted by proprietary instrumentation, which is difficult and expensive to obtain and maintain, since it cannot be fully inspected, evaluated, or customised. This situation is fundamentally detrimental to the production of knowledge in the global South and the potential for diverse actors to create equitable and sustainable solutions to local and international problems. Open Science Hardware (OScH) is one solution to promoting global access to hardware for science by freely sharing designs and protocols for instrumentation. The Global Open Science Hardware Roadmap is a collaborative community initiative involving 100 contributors from 30 countries that describes what is required for OScH to become ubiquitous by 2025.
Julieta Arancio Environmental Scientist, CENIT-CONICET
Julieta Arancio is a PhD candidate at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET) in Buenos Aires, Argentina, studying the Open Hardware movement in Latin America. With a background in Environmental Science, her work is developed at CENIT - a research center on innovation studies - and also at local spaces where she leads community science projects.
Announcements for next day
Luc Henry Open Science Advisor, EPFL
Luc Henry is a 35 years old chemist turned journalist turned science policy advisor and entrepreneur working on various projects challenging the status quo in science scholarly communication and research funding. He is an advisor to the President of the EPFL, formerly holding a similar position at the SNSF. His mandate is to draft a pragmatic open science policy for the EPFL and develop a community around it.
Science in the 21st century is becoming increasingly collaborative and open in nature. Consequently, the advancement of a research field should be measured not only by scientific output but also by the level of participation of its community members. Hence, a successful community should be able to promote equal participation from its community members independent of the factors such as geographic location, gender, ethnicity and social background. In my talk I will explore inclusiveness as one of the key features of open source community and share some of the lessons learned while adopting them in my work as a community manager.
View presentationMalvika Sharan Computational Biologist, EMBL, Heidelberg
Malvika is a computational biologist at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Heidelberg, Germany, where she coordinates the Bio-IT project, a community-driven platform for bioinformaticians. She organizes training activities and events for EMBL, de.NBI/ELIXIR Germany and other open source communities such as The Carpentries. She promotes diversity and open access through her work as a community outreach coordinator.
As pathogens replicate and spread, their genomes accumulate mutations. Such sequence data are increasingly used to track the spread of pathogens which in turn can inform public health public health interventions. Historically, however, sequencing and analysis has lagged months-to-years behind sample collection. We have developed automated analysis pipelines process openly available sequence data. The results are visualised in an interactive web application nextstrain.org. Intuitive and interpretable visualizations like nextstrain are key to turn data into actionable results that public health officials can build upon.
Just as the open access movement is forcing the scientific community to reconsider the traditional review/publication process, open data policies are highlighting the inadequacies of how scientific productivity is measured, especially in the context of large science projects. The open science paradigm can be better for both science and scientists, but institutes adopting open data policies must also recognise that doing science is often more than just doing research and publishing papers. Without such changes the (old) arguments for not sharing data to protect the careers of (young) scientists will continue to have weight.
In this talk we will discuss the realisation of a social scholarly information space that is completely driven by autonomous and interoperable open Web standards. What are the effects and artefacts of such paradigm? How is it different than the plethora of existing services and platforms? Why would a researcher-centric approach to scholarly communication be desirable?
View presentationSarven Capadisli Computer Scientist, TIB, Hannover
Sarven Capadisli is currently writing his PhD thesis with University of Bonn, and researches with TIB, Hannover. His research involves the Linked Research initiative and dokieli (a clientside editor for decentralised article publishing, annotations and social interactions).
A personal journey from open science and education to personal data activism, and the glimpse of a convergence.
Paul-Olivier Dehaye Mathematician, PersonalData.io
Paul-Olivier is the founder of PersonalData.io. Polytropon thinking about maths, data, science, ethics, collective intelligence and cognition.
The #WeScientists2035 workshops use speculative design scenarios to encourage novel thinking about what an idealised research culture would look like in 27 years time - with the aim to implement small changes today. The focus of the workshops at OpenCon will be open science, open data, research integrity and publication culture, which are all fundamental pillars of research culture.
Tania Jenkins Science Policy Advisor, sc|nat
Tania is a scientist turned science-communicator turned science policy advisor. She has been active in the public engagement of science for the last five years. At SCNAT she develops and leads research culture workshops that aim to create grass-roots change in the science community.
Tim Head will talk about why he thinks he can have more impact on the progress of science by not being a professional academic. Being a brain-for-hire has its own challenges but brings several benefits compared to life as a post-doc.
View presentationTim Head Data Scientist, Wild Tree Tech
Tim has a PhD in experimental particle physics, after years as a pro-academic he retired from 'the sport' to start his own data engineering consulting company in 2016. Since then he has contributed to several open-source software projects used by researchers, built private tools based on open tools and datasets and helped create mybinder.org a service that let’s anyone run any GitHub repository for free.
Using static website technologies to communicate research ideas in a radically open way. A workshop to explore out how to create and maintain academic web portfolios using open source software.
Short story of a Swiss Army knife for science policy.
Joao Martins Data Scientist, SNSF
Joao Martins is a data scientist working on science data at the SNSF. He is also chief-editor of ScienceGeist and former CTO of ScienceMatters. He received a MEng in Bioinformatics from the INSA Lyon and a PhD in Theoretical Biology from the ETH Zurich.