blog

A day early this week because of the bank holiday tomorrow, but there was still plenty of news from the open science community.

This Friday (April 3) you can tune in to a webinar on “Gaining Tenure as an Open Scientist”, hosted by OpenCon with Titus Brown as guest. One of the fears people often offer about open science is that they think it will hinder their career, so this should be an informative talk by someone who has already gone through the process!

Speaking of careers, if you’d like a job in open science, Kim Holmberg at the University of Turku is recruiting a postdoc to work on the project “Measuring the societal impact of open science”. Requirement: PhD in information science.

Last week we mentioned the “Open Source, Open Science” meeting that was held in North Carolina. This week, two additional links about that: a report by Erin McKiernan, and a post by organiser Kaitlin Thaney, who explains the decision to hold a closed meeting, Chatham House Rules style, about the topic Open Science.

“Chatham House Rules” means that a report from a meeting cannot indicate who said what, but a similarly regulated meeting in the UK this week, on reproducible research, reveals several speakers’ identities on the #ReproSymp hashtag. It’s not clear whether the rules were changed intentionally (feel free to leave a comment below if you know more) , but it seems that the topics of open or reproducible science are hard to translate to a “closed” setting.

More on reproducible research: an article in the Boston Globe outlines some of the causes and the wider problem of irreproducible research.

Finally, some new players in open science. ThinkLab, an open research funding and collaboration platform; and Open Human, a database of shared/open data related to patient studies.