Green Tea and Velociraptors

In the spirit of openness, here’s my application for the 2016 Mozilla Science Fellowship! The deadline for applications is July 15th, so it’s not too late to apply! Good luck to all other applicants too! 🙂

CV, cover letter.

Describe to us how open science advances your research. (100 words)
The core data for my research is an openly licensed, professionally crowd-sourced and curated database comprising every single fossil occurrence ever published: The Paleobiology Database. I contribute to this, and use it on a daily basis for my research. The development of this open database has been instrumental in advancing our research field in the last ten years. I also use R for most of my analyses, and therefore rely on openly shared code, through projects like ROpenSci.

Are you leading any projects related to open science? (100 words)
I also work for ScienceOpen, where I spend my days advocating for many different aspects of open science. One recent project I have started leading is on what future models of open peer review might look like. This was actually started at the Mozilla Sprint! I co-organise the Berlin open science meetup, and recently we have started organising workshops for researchers on open and reproducible research. I’m also involved in helping implement open data schemes into graduate schools at an EU level.

How do you see Mozilla advancing your work? (50 words)
My PhD research is almost complete. What I want to do is learn something like R markdown, to make my code even more accessible to people. I’d like to see if there’s anything I can do with the Paleobiology Database, R, and living figures too.

What do you see as the opportunities for impact around open research at your university? Could you leverage this opportunity in a potential project? (50 words)
I could work with the library to help conduct workshops on open peer review, data sharing, code sharing, open access, and open evaluation. It would be great to build an ‘open science workshop’ as part of our grad school skills program.

What do you think needs to change most immediately in scientific research? (100 words)
Evaluation. We need to implement a reward system that values individuals, and all of their outputs. Not just the name of the journal they publish in. We do that, we incentivise sharing, and reform the structure of academia so that it is those who are most open and advancing scholarship in that way that see the most benefit.

What project in the field do you find most inspiring to further science and the web? (50 words)
WorldBrain!

Why is the the open web important to you? (25 words)
I believe that every single person on this planet has the fundamental right to free and equal access to knowledge. The Web enables that.