Open Scholarship Café – Open Scholarship and Social Justice

Open Scholarship / Open Science has many drivers and “schools of thought” about its purpose. This Open Scholarship Café will not look at how to open up the research process, i.e. through the publication of data, methods or publications, but will look at Open Scholarship as a social movement. To look at why and how Open Scholarship interacts with social change, we are glad to have three speakers who will shed light on this topic.

Open Scholarship Cafés are organised by the Library of the University of Galway and the Open Scholarship Community Galway. For this Café we have partnered with MÓR - Maynooth Open Research who will co-host the session.

This Open Scholarship Café will be online on Zoom. You are all very welcome to register! See below details of speakers and their talks.

Agenda

• Ciara Egan - Synergies between Open Scholarship and social justice for improving research
• Sarahanne Field - Who gets a place at the Open Science table? Problems and suggestions for improvement
• Monica Gonzalez-Marquez - What if we designed and practiced Open Science with our great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandchildren in mind?

Speakers

Ciara Egan - Synergies between open scholarship and social justice for improving research.

Summary

Open Scholarship has become a major focus in research and funding policy both nationally and internationally, with a lot of focus on how it may help research integrity and combat reproducibility issues across various fields. Recently there has been a growing interest on the intersection between open scholarship and social justice, in terms of shared values and synergies. This talk will serve as an introduction to the ways in which open scholarship can be used to foster better research environments and dismantle barriers to research, focusing on recent work in the area from the FORRT project and other scholars.

Speaker bio:

Dr Ciara Egan is a lecturer in clinical neuroscience at University of Galway. Prior to her appointment, she completed her PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience at Bangor University, and following this worked as a research assistant at the University of Oxford studying cerebral asymmetries. Her research interests include cognitive neuroscience (predominantly using EEG, event-related potentials and pupil dilation), and open scholarship. She is a proponent of preregistration and open & reproducible code/experiments, and of embedding these practices (and the theory behind them) into her teaching and supervision at all levels. You can follow Ciara on Twitter.

Sarahanne Field - Who gets a place at the open science table? Problems and suggestions for improvement

Summary:

The science reform movement is promising in a lot of ways and in the past decade, it has been gathering momentum as more people join the effort to improve scientific practice, inference, and dissemination. However, so much emphasis is placed on tools and methodology, which raises the question of what work is being done (or should be done) to improve diversity and inclusion in the movement? Does the science reform movement also seek to change systemic issues of sexism and racism, or are these shortcomings translated into the movement from the traditional scientific community that the movement emerges from without critical engagement from reformers? This talk aims to raise some important points for reform activists to consider, surrounding whose voices are heard in the reform movement, and how parts of the movement can improve practices and perspectives on who is allowed a place at the table, and ultimately, who is heard.

Speaker bio: My research focuses on scientific reform: its community, culture, and practices. My work with CWTS involves determining what constitutes responsible research practice across disciplines and establishing a community of practice revolving around those practices. My research shows that despite its shared enterprise, scientific reform is a heterogenous, diverse body of sub-communities, who each contribute to the enterprise in their own unique way. Alongside this, I am passionate about introducing reflexivity to quantitative science practice, working out how to best select a replication target, and interrogating scientific reform practices and anticipating their downstream consequences. I use mixed, sometimes digital methods to explore the scientific problems I find interesting. I am an Australian native, and live in the Netherlands. I am the mother of two small children and am a distance runner (my race of choice is the half-marathon, though you can't beat a night-time 10k!).

You can follow Sarahanne on Mastodon

Monica Gonzalez-Marquez - What if we designed and practiced Open Science with our great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandchildren in mind?

Summary: Open Science is a heterogeneous movement (Field, 2022). This is undoubtedly one of its strengths. People work on different aspects of the work that needs to be done, in ways that best make sense for them and their communities. We are fortunate to now see the beginnings of maturity in our movement. With that maturity comes the need to understand how open science is changing scientific practice, as well as a need for a collective vision of where these changes will culminate. My talk will introduce The Heliocentric Model of Open Science as a product of our collective aspirations for a science that serves everyone and as a model of what our documentation infrastructure should look like to achieve those goals.

Speaker bio: I work in Metascience and Open Science. My projects include developing evidence-based pedagogy to read scientific journal articles, pedagogy to teach research methods in collaborative workshop settings, and most recently collaborative theory-building for Open Science as The Heliocentric Model of (Open) Science. My background is in Cognitive Science with a focus on Cognitive Linguistics, Psycholinguistics and Philosophy of Science. I currently work as Open Science Manager at Forschungszentrum Jülich where my focus is on improving scientific documentation to facilitate use by current and future researchers.

You can follow Monica on Mastodon.