Open Research London
Jenny Molloy - September 21, 2016 in Announcements, Local Groups, OKFN Open Science
Jenny Molloy - September 21, 2016 in Announcements, Local Groups, OKFN Open Science
Jenny Molloy - September 21, 2016 in Announcements, Local Groups, OKFN Open Science
Jenny Molloy - March 22, 2016 in Announcements, okfn, OKFN Open Science
The following is an application submitted by Jenny Molloy to join the Open Science Policy Platform as a representative of Open Knowledge International and the global Open Science Working Group.
I am writing to apply for membership of the Open Science Policy Platform as a representative of Open Knowledge International and their global Open Science Working Group. This community was founded in 2008 and includes interested people and organisations from a broad spectrum of open science stakeholders including researchers, students, librarians, policy makers, funders and citizens who are interested in greater access to the mechanisms and outputs of science. Our mailing list reaches over 800 members from across the globe with a strong European grouping and active local representatives, affiliates or groups in UK, Germany, Austria, France, Finland, Italy, Spain and Sweden. Open Knowledge also has a vast network of over 20 working groups and over 40 local chapters or groups who collectively represent one of the largest and most influential grassroots communities in open data: from education to government to transport to hardware.
I was a founding member of the open science working group and became the volunteer global Coordinator in 2010. During that time we changed our name from ‘Open Data in Science’ to ‘Open Science’ to reflect the widening interest in open access to all research outputs and openness to participation in the scientific process and I watched open science grow from a niche topic of interest to a political priority. I have been involved with numerous community initiatives including promotion of the Panton Principles for Open Science; coordination of community building activities such as the science track at OKFest, the world’s largest open knowledge event; running global calls and local discussion groups and supporting members of the community with their own activities. I have the support of the leadership team at Open Knowledge International and written endorsements from community members via our mailing list, so I am confident that I can credibly represent their perspectives at the Policy Platform. These perspectives are many and diverse, which is exactly the strength of the open science community in that it allows so many voices to access and influence science and science policy.
As an early career researcher whose chosen role is now enabling and facilitating greater openness in the field of synthetic biology, I am acutely aware of the perspectives and needs of my direct peers in addition to my long-standing engagement with the broader open science community. I therefore put myself forward with the following special interests:
I have experience with the European Commission Open Science Agenda having represented Open Knowledge in Brussels in 2013 at a consultation meeting on the Science 2.0 whitepaper. As an active community member and current or recently active scientific researcher I was in a minority of meeting participants and this experience cemented my strong belief that community-based organisations should be represented on official platforms alongside political organisations and formal institutions. I do not currently sit on any other international policy-oriented board but I coordinated working group responses to policy consultations such as the Hargreaves report into copyright exceptions for text and data mining in the UK and I’m a member of the Open Knowledge/ContentMine team in the H2020-funded FutureTDM consortium, who will provide policy recommendations for text and data mining to the Commission. I am a member of the Europe PubMedCentral Advisory Board and am frequently contacted for informal advice on openness in addition to numerous invitations to present or discuss openness in science at events on the national and international level.
My academic interests now extend into science and technology studies in an attempt to better understand the theoretical underpinning and implementation of cultural change in science. However, I am also happy to question the assumptions and goals of the open science agenda, which was necessary in coordinating an IDRC-funded scoping project on ‘Open and Collaborative Science in Development’. This ultimately led to OCSDNet, a network of 15 case study projects around open science in the global South and I have acted an an informal advisor to several of these. An advantage of affiliation with Open Knowledge is that I can also draw on knowledge of existing research on open government data and other areas of open knowledge, which are further advanced from a policy and implementation perspective and so offer a useful set of outcomes and critiques which may be relevant to comparative policies in science. Many similar questions and challenges are faced across the open knowledge movement and greater connectivity could only enrich discussions at the OSPP.
In conclusion, I bring eight years of experience in the open science community, a wealth of knowledge about different players and their interactions and personal dedication to seeing changes towards greater openness in science. I therefore believe that I am a well-placed representative for the segment of stakeholders described above and can bring a researcher, practitioner and community organiser perspective that will be valuable to the OSPP.
Jenny Molloy - March 22, 2016 in Announcements, okfn, OKFN Open Science
Jenny Molloy - March 22, 2016 in Announcements, okfn, OKFN Open Science
Jenny Molloy - March 22, 2016 in Announcements, okfn, OKFN Open Science
Jenny Molloy - January 5, 2015 in Announcements, Featured
Jenny Molloy - December 21, 2014 in Featured, Reproducibility, research, tools
“To reconstruct the student as producer: undergraduate students working in collaboration with academics to create work of social importance that is full of academic content and value, while at the same time reinvigorating the university beyond the logic of market economics.”[1]Openness focuses on sharing and collaboration for public good, at odds with the often competitive ethos in research and education. This involves more than simply implementing particular pedagogies or publishing open access articles – as Peters and Britez state bluntly in the first sentence of their book on open education:
“Open education involves a commitment to openness and is therefore inevitably a political and social project.” [2]This could equally apply to open science. Openness is a cultural shift that is facilitated but not driven by legal and technical tools. In open education, for instance, open pedagogy makes use of now abundant openly licensed content but also places an emphasis on the social network of participants and the learner’s connections within this, emphasising that opening up the social institution of higher education is the true transformation. In open science, a lot of training focuses on the ability to manage and share research data, understand licensing and use new digital tools including training in coding and software engineering. However, understanding the social and cultural environment in which research takes place and how openness could impact that is arguably even more fundamental. This section will focus on three topics around open science training, offering relevant linkages to educational literature and suggestions for teaching design:
Open science curriculum map at MozFest 2014. Photo by Jenny Molloy, dedicated to the public domain via a CCZero waiver.
Skills map for Reproducible, Open and Collaborative Science. Billy Meinke and Fabiana Kubke’s session at MozFest 2014.
“Each year, thousands of undergraduate projects are completed as part of the educational experience…these projects could meet the needs of recent calls for increased replications of psychological studies while simultaneously benefiting the student researchers, their instructors, and the field in general.” [7]Frank and Saxe [8] support this promise, reporting that they found teaching replication to be enjoyable for staff and students and an excellent vehicle for educating about the importance of reporting standards, and the value of openness. Both publications suggest approaches to achieving this in the classroom and are well worth reading for further consideration and discussion about the idea.
“…to turn the prevailing undergraduate culture of receivers into a culture of inquirers, a culture in which faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates share an adventure of discovery.”The previous section emphasised the potential role of open content, namely papers, data and code in research-based learning. In addition, the growing number of research projects open to participation by all – including those designated as citizen science – can offer opportunities to engage in research that scales and contributes more usefully to science than small research projects that may be undertaken in a typical institution as part of an undergraduate course. These open science activities offer options for both wet and dry lab based activities in place or in addition to standard practical labs and field courses. The idea of collaborative projects between institutions and even globally is not new, involvement in FOSS projects for computational subjects has long been recognised as an excellent opportunity to get experience of collaborative coding in large projects with real, often complex code bases and a `world-size laboratory’ [12]. In wet lab research there are examples of collaborative lab projects between institutions which have been found to cut costs and resources as well as increasing the sample size of experiments performed to give publishable data [13]. Openness offers scaling opportunities to inter-institutional projects which might otherwise not exist by increasing their visibility and removing barriers to further collaborative partners joining. There are several open and citizen science projects which may offer particular scope for research-based learning. One could be the use of ecology field trips and practicals to contribute to the surveys conducted by organisations such as the UK Biological Records Centre, thus providing useful data contributions and access to a wider but directly relevant dataset for students to analyse. NutNet is a global research cooperative which sets up node sites to collect ecosystem dynamics data using standard protocols for comparison across sites globally, as this is a longitudinal study with most measurements being taken only a couple of times a year it offers good scope for practical labs. On a more ad hoc basis, projects such as Open Source Malaria offer many project and contribution opportunities e.g. a request to help make molecules on their wishlist and a GitHub hosted to do list. One way of incorporating these into curricula are team challenges in a similar vein to the iGEM synthetic biology project, which involves teams of undergraduates making bacteria with novel capabilities and contributes the DNA modules engineered to a public database of parts known as BioBricks. In conclusion, open and citizen science projects which utilise the internet to bring together networks of people to contribute to live projects could be incorporated into inquiry-based learning in higher education to the benefit of both students and the chosen projects, allowing students to contribute truly scientifically and socially important data in the `student as producer’ model while maintaining the documented benefits of research-based pedagogies. This ranges from controlled contributions to practice particular skills through discovery-oriented tasks and challenges such as iGEM, allowing students to generate research questions independently. There are significant challenges in implementing these types of research-based activities, many of which are true of `non-open’ projects. For instance, there are considerations around mechanisms of participation and sharing processes and outputs. Assessment becomes more challenging as students are collaborating rather than providing individual evidence of attainment. As work is done in the open, provenance and sharing of ideas requires tracking.
Jenny Molloy - December 15, 2014 in Announcements, Featured, Meetings
Jenny Molloy - November 26, 2014 in Panton Fellows
Rosie with an air quality monitor
“This fellowship has been a great opportunity for me to kick start a citizen science project … It also allowed me to attend conferences to discuss open data in air quality which received positive feedback from many colleagues.”
“The crucial thing now is to continue to reach out to the average researcher, highlighting the benefits that open data offers and ensuring that there is a stock of accessible resources offering practical advice to researchers on how to share their data.”Another initiative Sam initiated during the fellowship was establishing the forthcoming Journal of Open Humanities Data with Ubiquity Press, which aims to incentivise data sharing through publication credit, which in turn makes data citable through usual academic paper citation practices. Ultimately the journal will help researchers share their data, recommending repositories and best practices in the field, and will also help them track the impact of their data through citations and altmetrics. We believe it is vital to provide early career researchers with support to try new open approaches to scholarship and hope other organisations will take similar concrete steps to demonstrate the benefits and challenges of open science through positive action. Finally, we’d like to thank the Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA) for their generosity in funding the 2013-14 Panton Fellowships. This blog post a cross-post from the Open Science blog, see the original here.