Get your feet wet in Open Science!

Discover best practices in research data management, consult an international data service team, gain a hands-on experience in green Open Access, get yourself an ORCID profile, present your own research topic, bring your own data for description and sharing, and get helpful tips.


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The workshop was conceived as a contribution to the International Open Access Week and was designed in close cooperation with University of Helsinki doctoral programmes. The event was vibrant with 78 participants turning up at the flexible learning environment of Minerva Plaza on the premises of the Faculty of Behavioural Sciences. The organizer of the event was a team from Helsinki University Library with financial support from FOSTER. The morning session contained six short presentations setting the scene for the afternoon interactive workshops. Joona Lehtomäki, a researcher from the Department of Biosciences, University of Helsinki, gave a succinct introduction to Open Science followed by Ivo Grigorov from the Danish DTU Aqua. He gave ample advice on how to envision the impact part of a Horizon 2020 project application. Open Science definitely makes a difference on the foreseeable societal impact of a research proposal. Damien Lecarpentier, the manager of the EUDAT project at CSC IT Center for Science, showed the suit of tools developed in this consortium to enhance data management for the benefit of Pan-European research communities.

Lars Holm Nielsen from CERN presented Zenodo and showed the integration of this repository with GitHub making it easy to archive snapshots of open source software that could otherwise be lost. Tuomas J. Alaterä from the Finnish Social Science Data Archive presented the services of this firmly established data archive that has received a Data Seal of Approval confirming the implementation of best practices for long term data preservation. The session was concluded by Stina Westman from the CSC IT Center for Science explaining the support for data management and the tools developed in the context of the ambitious Open Science and Research Initiative funded by the Ministry of Education and Culture in Finland.

The purpose of the event was to enhance understanding and uptake of open science and data management among young researchers. These goals were pursued in the afternoon workshops with optional themes and hands-on sessions in small groups. The workshops focused on data management planning, open research data and self-archiving of publications. The participants could choose two consecutive workshops where they could present projects of their own, ask questions and share ideas. Participants also got the feel of communal learning: they used an interactive Flinga tool to send anonymously their ideas, questions and comments directly to a shared smart board.

The most popular workshops turned out to be Make your own data management plan, Explore licenses for open data and Find the most suitable repository. Make your own data management plan (DMP) workshop offered concrete answers to questions such as why DMPs are important and how to make the plan in the University of Helsinki. DMPs should be implemented in the research process at every step: in collecting, using and opening the data.

Sharing the research data for scientific community can be problematic considering copyright, ownership, and personal rights issues. Explore licenses for open data workshop presented the benefits and disadvantages of different licenses from this viewpoint. In Find the most suitable repository –workshop participants had the opportunity to discuss and find the best data repository for their own research data. Representatives from European data repository providers (Zenodo, CSC, FSD and EUDAT) answered questions and demonstrated the services of these repositories.

The atmosphere of the event was inspiring and the participants were pleased with the discussions, especially in the workshops. According to the feedback there were even too many interesting – and parallel – sessions, because one could not join them all. In general feedback was positive and encouraging, as expressed in this quote: *“Really excellent seminar day. One of the best ever & I’ve been to a few. Just right at current point of my research”*.

Presentations, interviews, photos and videos from the workshop are available from the [wiki page of the event](https://wiki.helsinki.fi/display/OAviikko/Open+Science+Workshop+20.10.2…).

Authors: Kimmo Koskinen, Liisa Siipilehto, Arja Niskala, Marja Moisio, Mika Holopainen, Jussi Männistö, Pekka J. Salminen
Publication year: 2015
Language: English (EN)
Level of knowledge: Intermediate: able to
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