OpenCon Berlin – Great success!
Right on the back of OpenCon in DC and my open science talk with the Ministry of Education in Slovenia was our AMAZING OpenCon satellite event in Berlin!
We kicked off day one with an epic hackathon, a ‘reproducibility hack‘ led by Anna Krystalli and Julien Colomb, and with the backing of the PaperHive and Overleaf crews for support. The aim of this was not to see if we could necessarily reproduce a paper or not, but to try and understand the process involved in reproducing a paper, and how authors/editors/publishers etc. can make this process easier when publishing. We are hoping to collate the efforts of this session, and write it up into a paper for people to use in future. Anna has also made all of the tools and details publicly available, which means you can have a go at reproducing the hack itself if you wanted!
For day 2, Jo Havemann has written up a nice summary of the speakers and their talks over at the Digital Science blog. I know I’m biased as an organiser, but look at that awesome line-up of speakers! Thank you to each of them for their commitment to talking, and for helping us to grow as a community in Berlin. Nicolas Schmelling has also written up his views on the event via GitHub, which is kinda cool! Videos of Julia Reda MEP’s keynote talk, Oliver Sauter, and the panel discussion can be found here via Digital Science, and the rest should be up soon!
Special thanks also to Laura Wheeler and Tony Ross-Hellauer, my epic co-organisers, to Kerstin Hellbig for offering us the venue at the Humboldt University, and to Figshare and Overleaf for kindly providing sponsorship, which was well spent on cake, coffee, and bagels. Natürlich. Cameron Shepherd from Digital Science has also collated the tweets as part of a lovely storify for you all too (full tweets here)!
After this, that makes something like 6 talks/conferences/workshops/panel discussions in 6 different countries in 6 weeks, and I am DONE. I’m actually writing this in Thailand, and having a month off work and my first holiday in years. Does this mean I’m cutting back on the science shenanigans? Ha, nope! We just submitted a formal complaint about the publisher Elsevier/RELX to the Competition and Markets Authority in the UK, and Lisa has been trying to organise some joint talks for us about open science in universities around SE Asia! We’re also continuing to work on the Future of Peer Review project via Overleaf, that anyone can openly collaborate with. We’ll be here in SE for about 6 months, working remotely with ScienceOpen still, then hopefully Vancouver and back maybe in Europe in a year or so recharged to take on the academia world (and more?) 🙂
For now, fellow researchers stay focused and committed and doing the best you can do for yourself, science, and the wider public every day. For students (or recently ex ones..), don’t sacrifice your physical and mental health for work – it’s never ever worth it. Take time off for yourself, you need and deserve it. For everyone else, keep kicking ass 🙂