Open Science Symposium June 7th 2019 @ Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
On June 7th the Institute for Brain and Behavior Amsterdam hosted a symposium on Open Science at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. In four different talks the speakers highlighted different aspects of Open Science. Barbara Braams started with an overview of what Open Science is. In her talk she explained the different components such as Open Access, Open Data and Open Source. She also discussed the current status of policy surrounding Open Science and what is needed to make the transition towards Open Science.
The second talk was by Rogier Kievit. Rogier works at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit at the University of Cambridge. He is the PI at the Lifespan Dynamics Lab and his research focuses on using psychometric models to understand neurodevelopment changes in executive functions. Rogier’s lab practices Open Science. They publish all their papers Open Access, share data and they preregister their analysis plans. Rogier shared his experiences in doing Open Science. In his talk he showed how Open Science can help you do research that would otherwise not be possible, by using large open datasets for instance. In his talk he showed a couple of examples of open datasets and how to acquire these data.
The third talk was by Tomas Knapen. Tomas is PI at the Visual Neuroscience Lab, at the Cognitive Psychology Department at this university. Tomas works with fMRI and he uses the Open Science tools available in his field of research. Tomas talked mostly about Open Source. He showed that to do research that is reproducible we need Open Methods. He explained how to use Git and GitHub and showed an example of how he used a large dataset in his own work.
Lastly, Jessica Hrudey is a Research Data Officer at the VU. Also known as the Privacy Champion. She is an expert on all the new laws and regulations regarding privacy. Jessica shared her expertise regarding privacy issues of human data. In her talk she explained the difficulties of the new laws regarding privacy and how they apply to scientific data.
The main message of the symposium is that we all need to work together to make Open Science a success. PhD candidates need to learn new skills, PI’s need to give them the time and opportunity to do so. On the grant level we need panels to focus more on Open Access activities of the candidates. Finally, the most important take away of today is to just start doing Open Science.
