FORCE2019

The Open Science MOOC (Massively Open Online Community) is a peer-to-peer learning network based around engaging researchers, librarians and others in the academic ecosystem with open research practices. To achieve a transition to open research, this requires a massive cultural change with sustained community engagement around principles and practices of open scholarly communication. The MOOC has a powerful capacity for training at an individual and institutional level, and to meet growing demands across disciplines on all aspects of open research.

Environmental scientists are a diverse community that ranges from climatologists to geneticists, but we are united by an enormous need to work efficiently with data – and by the fact that we seldom have formal computing or data analysis training of any kind. There is great opportunity to borrow from the work of software engineers and use collaborative open tools that facilitate better science in less time. However, a fundamental shift is needed in the environmental science community that prioritizes data science and provides emerging scientific leaders training in open science tools and practices to strengthen and accelerate their work. I will discuss my work to catalyze this shift through two programs I have developed at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) at the University of California at Santa Barbara. The first is the Ocean Health Index training program, which teaches international government and academic scientists how to channel the best available scientific information into marine policy using our scientific method and tools. I launched the second in January 2019 as a Mozilla Fellow: Openscapes, a mentorship program that empowers environmental scientists with open data science tools and grows the community of practice.

Following a restructure in May 2019, the University of St Andrews scholarly communications team moved out of the University Library and became embedded in Research and Innovation Services. For many years, the University Library Digital Research teams (including open access and research data management) have worked very closely with the University's research office to share knowledge, build relationships and provide support to researchers with a joint approach. At a time when most libraries are building their support for open research, it is unusual for the scholarly communications function to sit in a research office. In this talk, we will explore the opportunities presented by this change, such as the ability to communicate open research messages with a strong 'policy' context and being closer to the levers needed to facilitate the required cultural change in researcher behaviour. We will also discuss the challenges in developing the skills needed to support open research, including copyright and licensing expertise, repository maintenance, metadata creation and APC management alongside, rather than within, the library. We aim to present new perspectives on collaboration across departments and how crossing bridges can help drive the open research agenda.

This half-hour session will include the following two short talks:

Developing scholarly communications support staff: a collaborative approach
(Helen Dobson)
The number of scholarly communications support roles in Higher Education Institutions has increased significantly over recent years and this has happened without a blueprint for developing staff to carry out their responsibilities. Roles vary across the sector and most development happens "on the job". The Scholarly Communication Competencies Coalition (SC3) is a group of representatives from UK universities and professional associations - including ARMA, the British Library, Jisc, RLUK, UKSG, UK-CORR, CORE, CILIP, SCONUL and Vitae - that was formed in 2017 to consider how a collaborative approach could address this issue. SC3 meets quarterly and has delivered a number of interactive workshops at national and international events. Through these activities, the group has been working to coordinate skills-development opportunities provided by member organisations, and to create resources that will be useful for managers in hiring and developing staff, or as career pathway guidance for individuals who already work in this area or
who are interested in doing so. This presentation will outline the work of SC3 so far and will introduce the key outputs to date.

The Jisc RDM toolkit: moving from a national focus to international collaboration
(Andrea Chiarelli)
This talk will describe the Jisc Research Data Management (RDM) toolkit, an open resource targeted at research support staff, IT specialists and researchers from all disciplines and career stages. The toolkit is intended as a signposting tool that the research data community can use to educate itself on the basics of RDM, open science and open research, and also to identify new topics of interest. Content is updated on a quarterly basis to ensure that it is current, and the web design is continually assessed to ensure that it meets user requirements.

The toolkit represents collaboration at a variety of levels. It can help to foster collaboration between the various resources that it links. Additionally, it encourages the community to work together in order to build shared knowledge and expertise, which may have the effect of reducing the need for individual resources and therefore allow staff to spend their time on other things rather than creating RDM training material. Finally, we are managing the toolkit through international collaboration in the form of a working group with twenty experts from the UK, USA, Australia and Iran. In this talk, we will share our experience of working together to develop this community resource and we hope to hear feedback on how we can take this resource to the next level.

Recently, a task group of the Dutch National Coordination Point RDM (LCRDM) delivered a report on data stewardship. Within the LCDRM, experts collaborate in task groups on RDM topics that are too large for one institution to solve and which need a coordinated national approach. Taking into account prevailing uncertainty about the interpretation of data stewardship, the objective of this task force was to provide insight into the demands currently made of data stewards by Dutch institutes, and the solutions that have been developed and implemented for them. The report was realized by various means:

• Studying international literature in this field
• Analysing a total of twenty-two vacancies
• Surveying staff from more than 30 research organizations using a questionnaire
• Conducting follow-up interviews with eight data experts from the professional field, in order to evaluate the survey findings and ask more in-depth questions

This gave a clear picture of how data stewardship was being implemented at Dutch institutes, as well as guidance on what currently works and what more is needed. The report offers a basis for clearer job descriptions of data stewardship roles and will also help institutions to implement data stewardship locally.

This half-hour session will include the following two short talks:

Training biomedical researchers to effectively collaborate with data scientists
(Alisa Surkis)
It is not realistic to expect that all biomedical and health sciences researchers will acquire the skills needed to apply data science techniques to their work. However, these researchers are all going to have to function in a research environment where the use of data science techniques is increasingly important. Collaborations between data scientists and researchers with domain expertise afford new opportunities. However, a lack of researcher awareness about data science can result in missed opportunities for collaboration, and differences in perspective and language can result in failed collaborations. Seeing no existing curricula that met the specific need identified, we developed a class to bridge that gap - Data Science for Non-Data Scientists. The class explains the possibilities, techniques, and terminology of data science, as well as conveying its limitations such as issues of interpretation, implementation and bias. This presentation will describe the motivation for developing the class, outline the approach taken and the elements of the class, describe the different settings in which it has been taught within our institution, and detail the outcomes of the class.

A Reproducibility Workshop Series for Biomedical Researchers
(Ariel Deardorff)
The library, graduate division and Open Science Group of the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), are collaborating with other experts on "open" to create a for-credit workshop series. The series is targeted at UCSF graduate students and researchers. It is in response to the need for hands-on reproducibility training for biomedical researchers, and aims to translate recommendations for best practice into actionable steps and training. In addition to covering open data, open code, open protocols, and open access, this workshop series will include sessions on designing rigorous experiments, engaging with new forms of peer review and building a reproducible lab. The eight-part series is scheduled for Fall 2019 and has been designed to meet the rigor and reproducibility requirements of the National Institutes of Health (https://www.nih.gov/research-training/rigor-reproducibility). The goal of this project is for subject experts to provide hands-on training that will improve research workflows, stimulate conversations about open science and research reproducibility, and build an open curriculum that can be replicated by other institutions. This talk will describe this innovative workshop series and report on pre-workshop assessments of researchers' knowledge and behaviors regarding reproducibility.