On 25^th June UCL is holding Open Science Day. The workshop will explore the facets of Open Science and how these are/could be pursued by UCL researchers. In the morning speakers will discuss different aspects of and perspectives on Open Science, and the afternoon workshops will offer practical advice.

Open Science, or Open Scholarship, is a movement that extends the principles of openness to the whole research cycle; it goes beyond making the primary outputs of publically funded research open access.

Open Science beehive, available from https://www.fosteropenscience.eu/content/what-open-science-introduction, under CC BY licence

Open Science includes various movements that aim at making every step in the research lifecycle open. It starts with Open Notebooks, an emerging practice of sharing the entire record of the research project. With Open Notebooks researchers share raw and processed data, failed and other experiments that otherwise would remain unpublished. Open Data focuses on the next step in the research cycle. The data related to a research project is managed to ensure that it is easily discoverable and accessible, and can be shared. You can find out about Research Data Management at UCL here.

Open Peer Review has many definitions. The most open approach would be to post the whole pre-publication history of the article online, with reviewers’ comments, authors’ responses and previous versions of the article. See Wellcome Open Research for an example of a platform that publishes research with open peer-review. Open Access is making research articles freely available online, preferably under a licence that allows re-use, so that they can be used and shared easily. Open Source involves sharing software including the source code, also in a fully accessible and discoverable way; the code and software can be freely disseminated and adapted.

In the movement, there is also space for Scientific social networks; researchers can share scientific knowledge not only by responsible use of social sites like ResearchGate.net and Academia.edu but also via platforms like Twitter and LinkedIn .

Part of the movement is involving general public in the process of scientific research via Citizen Science, where non-academic public can actively contribute to science. This can be a part of public engagement programme at an institution or crowdsourcing research activities, as in UCL’s project Transcribe Bentham or ExCiteS. Open educational resources is yet another step in making research openly available, and it involves making materials that are useful for both teaching and research purposes freely available and usable.

If you want to find out more about Open Science register for UCL Open Science Day via Eventbrite.