Education/Newsletter/December 2016/Open Science Fellows Program launched in Germany
Open Science Fellows Program launched in Germany[edit]
By Christopher Schwarzkopf (Wikimedia Deutschland)
Snippet: Recently Wikimedia Deutschland and Stifterverband launched the Open Science Fellows Program. The program aims at making scientific research, data and dissemination publicly available, leading to a more reproducible and transparent science
Open science is on the rise: More and more scientists open up their scientific work for example by publishing papers open access or making their research data available under free licenses. In 2016, Wikimedia Deutschland and Stifterverband are piloting an Open Science Fellows Program. Its goal is to qualify researchers from diverse disciplines to apply instruments of open science to their academic work thus making it accessible and reusable for others. As part of the program, the fellows will have the opportunity to connect with experienced experts and practitioners and discuss both the benefits and the challenges of Open Science. In order to establish a community of practice, the program fosters exchange and networking opportunities. In the interest of bringing the concept of openness into science, the program addresses academic institutions and empowers fellows to act as ambassadors.
The program targets researchers who are in an early stage of their academic careers such as PhD students, postdoctoral researchers and assistant professors. It aims to impart knowledge about the idea of Open Science, collaborative working methods as well as digital infrastructures such as the Wikimedia projects Wikipedia or Wikidata. In the long term, the Fellows Program wants to trigger social change and promote openness in academic research and teaching.
More than 70 researchers of all disciplines submitted project proposals out of which the program team selected the ten most promising ones. The project ideas range from the development of a workflow for embedding videos in open access publications to the research of the brain activity of honey bees What they have in common however is the aspect of openness: In the context of the program the fellows will make their process of research as well as the results accessible and reusable for others. Through mentoring and group work by experts and practitioners, fellows are supported in applying Open Science instruments to their own research. In addition to their respective research projects, the fellows together with their mentors are working on a collaborative open science handbook on Wikibooks (in German). The book aims to serve as an application-oriented overview of open science that can be used by other researchers that want to open up their scientific work
The Fellows are currently working on their respective research projects, results will be presented in early march 2017 in Berlin.
For questions and more information about the Fellow Program please contact Christopher Schwarzkopf or Christina Rupprecht