Introduction to Open Science – Concepts, benefits, and practices

Scope

A key goal of science is to help society solve today’s wicked challenges. This requires reliable, trustworthy, and high-quality research. Open Science (OS) strongly contributes to achieving these requirements since it aims to make research more verifiable, transparent, and reusable. However, OS is currently not the norm in academia due to cultural (e.g., lack of awareness) and technical (e.g., lack of skills) obstacles. This course aims to overcome these obstacles through a conceptual and a practical overview of OS principles.

Learning goals

At the end of the course, participants are able to:

1. Define Open Science and understand its relevance;
2. Describe different Open Science practices and principles.
3. Understand the difference between preregistration and registered reports, explain their benefits and limitations and create a preregistration.
4. Describe issues in the context of Open Reproducible Research and identify existing reproducibility tools.
5. Differentiate between traditional metrics and Open Science based approaches to evaluate researchers and research articles.
6. Apply open practices at different stages of the research cycle.

Course description

The course “Introduction to Open Science – Concepts, benefits, and practices” is composed of five modules based on various teaching activities, including lectures, podcasts, guided discussions and exercises. Participants will finish the course with an Open Science plan for their own work.

In line with the Dutch and the EU’s OS policies, and the UNESCO Recommendation on OS, we will cover the following topics:

1. Introduction to OS, including key incentives and challenges, national (National Plan OS) and international (OS Communities) initiatives.
2. Preregistration and Registered Reports.
3. Open Data, its relevance and guiding principles.
4. Open Reproducible Research.
5. Rewards and Recognition in OS.

Tentative Program – five mornings + self-study

Day 1: Introduction to Open Science
Day 2: Pre-registration and Registered Reports
Day 3: Open Data
Day 4: Open Reproducible Research
Day 5: Rewards & Recognition

Course duration

One week, with contact times in the mornings and self-study in the afternoons

Course fee

• PhD candidates SENSE and WUR*: €250
• PhD candidates from other graduate schools: €290
• Other SENSE staff: €290
• All others: €330                      

*PhD Participants from Wageningen University are eligible for a reduced fee: WUR PhD candidates pay €125, and your graduate school subsidises the other €125.

Registration

Go to registration form

Contact person

For more information about this course you can contact Elackiya Sithamparanathan.