OpenCon Project Presentations showcase the quality and breadth of work powered by students and early career researchers in the community. We'd encourage you to reach out to groups you'd like to work with or support. If you’d like to make your project a part of the OpenCon Community, register it here.
You can download the slides for each presentation here.
RIO Journal
Research Ideas and Outcomes (RIO Journal) is an open science platform that encourages the publication of all stages of the research lifecycle, from initial ideas to any research outcomes they have triggered, such as research proposals, data, software, research articles or PhD theses. RIO allows for collaboration and peer review before and after publication and avoids most of the delays incurred by traditional non-open peer review methods. Documents published in RIO are readable for both humans and machines and tagged not just by research fields but also by relevance to societal challenges.
See here: http://riojournal.com/
Dissemin
Millions of papers are still locked behind paywalls. Many could have been made available by their authors in a repository, given the self-archiving policy of their publisher.
Dissemin spots these papers and helps their authors upload them quickly to mature and visible repositories such as Zenodo, Figshare or arXiv.
We are also working with universities to help them implement open access policies that recognize existing repositories (and hence avoid using a single institutional repository).
The project is non-profit, the platform open source and improving at a fast pace. Join us!
See here: dissem.in
OpenGlobalHealth
While global health involves large data to infer population-level behaviors and to inform policy makers, we are less inclined to share the underlying data due to patient confidentiality, national laws, and data novelty. Complex relationships with donors and legal requirements to keep critical patient data within a given country require novel ways to make global health research more evidence-driven, reproducible, and transparent. We could realize this goal by developing simulation/anonymization tools, enabling easy implementation of interactive visualization, and advocating policy changes.
Thinklab
Thinklab is a grand experiment in extreme openness. We've built a platform for researchers to openly share their research grant proposals, and for reviewers to earn recognition (and money) publicly sharing feedback. To rapidly compel adoption of open practices, we are partnering with science funders to create new incentives. First, we help funders create grants programs that require open proposals. Second, we help funders create "Reviewer Rewards" pools that reward scientists everywhere for openly sharing feedback -- both on the proposals themselves and the resulting research projects.
See here: http://thinklab.com
Open Access Academy
In general students and early stage researchers (ESRs) know little about publishing and even less about Open Access (OA) publishing. In February 2015 we survey students and ESRs about OA publishing. We have results from 1000+ participants showing that than 28% haven’t heard of OA publishing, 87% haven’t received training on OA publishing but 89% would like training or guidance on OA publishing. Similar surveys in Germany and Serbia show similarly high numbers. These figures were clear call to action to provide resources, support and advice for students and ESRs in their journey from writing to publishing papers. The goal of this project, the Open Access Academy (OAA), is creating a portal for students and ESRs that will provide all necessary information about OA publishing.
See here: http://oaacademy.org/
Engaging students in Open Education
A testimony on how making undergrad students write Wiki articles and make videos can engage them in Open Education and be more productive.
See here: http://pt-br.bmm0586.wikia.com/
Mining statistics from psychology papers
With the support of the ContentMine community, I am building a database of statistical test results reported in psychology articles. Each article contains a trove of information and certain elements can be used to answer an array of research questions. Our current database is already the largest of its kind (~250,000 results; osf.io/gdr4q), but limited to a prespecified format of in-line results, which we would like to extend to figures etc. The aim is to create the database, share it publicly, and then work on research questions such as estimating the prevalence of potential data fabrication.
OpenSesame: An experiment builder for the social sciences
OpenSesame is an open-source tool for developing experiments in neuroscience, psychology, and experimental economics. I would love to give a short overview of the project, and my experiences as manager of an open-source project.
See here: http://osdoc.cogsci.nl/
An investigation of archaeological practice with regards to the organization, integration and re-use of data
The production and utilization of data is a persistent yet inconsistent aspect of archaeological research. As larger volumes of information are increasingly being integrated and re-used for various purposes, we need to critically reflect on archaeological practice with regards to interactions with and construction of data. The aim of my thesis is to evaluate the manner in which the archaeological record is assigned meaning, how data is transformed through various forms of analysis and interpretation, and how the integration of data from different sources is either facilitated or limited.
Uncovering journal costs
We all know that the cost of subscription journals to the research community is high - but exactly how high? There is usually no easy way to find out how much an institution or entire nation is spending. That's why I (and others) used Freedom of Information requests to find out how much the UK academic sector spends (http://f1000research.com/articles/3-274/v3). Let's do the same for every country! If we create a brief how-to guide, we could uncover the costs of journal subscriptions to legacy publishers worldwide.
Engage OER
The purpose of this project idea is to present a familiar entry point for faculty to engage with OER through a critical and practical exercise. The objective is to recruit faculty to evaluate the quality and viability of open educational resources (OER) as potential alternatives to currently assigned textbooks. Resulting OER reviews will be posted for all to read.The goal of this project is to increase faculty awareness and familiarity with OER, particularly regarding subject coverage and content quality of existing open educational resources.
See here: https://openlab.citytech.cuny.edu/oer/
DropDeadPaper
For a variety of reasons, only a fraction of all academic studies end up as a formal publication in scientific journals. With DropDeadPaper, we want to raise awareness about #openscience and the importance of making results available, even if they are not suited for publication, or have been rejected. We believe this initiative will help increase transparency in science. However, we know that “failed” research is a sensitive question among researchers. OpenCon offers a great opportunity to discuss the challenges involved in this topic.
See here: www.dropdeadpaper.com
OpenCon Rating App
Do you love coding and enjoy Python programming language? Let's meet and talk! An application has been developed (using the Django framework) to support the OpenCon 2015 registration process (there were thousands of applications which needed to be reviewed) and it would be great to extend this app to make running the future OpenCons easier.
See here: https://opencon2015brussels.sched.org/event/e191f9a35fe044e42fa5cd2cfa7f1765
Integrating "Public" Data
We recently created a network for drug repurposing with 3 million edges. Creating the network brought together 27 collaborators who communicated via 266 CC-BY posts. The network integrates data from 28 public resources. However, each source imposes it’s own (often incompatible) restrictions, implicitly by copyright or explicitly by licensing. We’ve contacted 10 resources, with only a single affirmative response. We’re currently exposing the harms of transferring data copyright to publishers as well as Universities that seek to profit from publicly-funded databases while preventing reuse.
See here: https://doi.org/10.15363/thinklab.d107
Listen to your data!
I would like to talk about sonification, or the transformation of data into sound. I believe that through sonification, we can bring an aesthetic experience to the public and turn something very abstract (data) into something poetic. We run the risk in Data science (or Big Data) of losing the human dimension. By creating a poetic experience, we can let the public experience the abstractness of data. This in turn will create awareness on the issue that the dataset is focused on and as a further result can create engagement to instigate change. I will explain this vision through a few examples.
MULTIMOT
MULTIMOT is a project that aims to build an open data ecosystem for cell migration research, through standardization, dissemination and meta-analysis efforts.
The central goal of this project is to construct an open and free data exchange ecosystem for cell migration data, based on the development of extensible community standards and a robust, future-proof repository that collects, annotates and disseminates these data in the standardized formats. The standards and repository will be supported by freely available and open source tools for data management, submission, extraction and analysis.
See here: http://multimot.org/
OpenEducation Nigeria
It's a project that will campaign for OpenAccess and OpenEducation in Nigeria.
Commons Projects in Korea
Delivering one of the dynamic commons growing state in the world, Korea in OpenCon2015. Open Access projects in Korea with Open Access Portal collaborated with National Library of Korea, Open Education projects in higher education OER platform of universities and government, student and teacher's voluntary works on OER as CC Teachers. Open Data for a civic hacking group as CodeNamu, platform for sharing city movement of Seoul metropolitan city as ShareHub. These commons projects in Korea are going with Creative Commons Korea, holding CC Global Summit2015.
See here: www.cckorea.org
#textbookbrokeBC
Similar to the #textbookbroke campaign started by USPIRG, the #textbookbrokeBC campaign has two primary goals. The first is to educate campus communities across the province of British Columbia, Canada on the high costs associated with textbooks, while the second is aimed at informing them of the alternatives that exist. Through physical tabling as well as a photo campaign, there has been success at both Simon Fraser University and the University of British Columbia (the province’s two largest post-secondary institutions) driven by undergraduate students.
MyData: solutions for openness + privacy
Born out of an Open Knowledge Finland initiative, MyData is a project working on new personal data management solutions.
Open Access Week Kit
This Kit aims to provide a set of suggestions and materials for promoting the Open Access Week in Portugal. It was realized by the Communication and Dissemination Team of the Open Access Science Repository of Portugal (RCAAP), coordinated by the Library of Faculty of Science and Technology, Universidade Nova de Lisboa. The Kit is organized into two parts, based on the degree of effort needed to implement the suggestions and use of materials. Two webinars were conducted to help the institutions to use the Kit. We registered a great adhesion to this initiative on the part of the institutions.
See here: http://www.acessolivre.pt/semana/?p=1503
Blimunda Project
Blimunda Project is an initiative carried out in Portugal, since 2010, by the Library of Faculty of Science and Technology, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, with the purpose of determining Portuguese scientific publishers and journals policies regarding self-archiving in Institutional Repositories. The project arose in the context of the Open Access Science Repository of Portugal (RCAAP) and was sponsored by the Foundation for National Scientific Computing (FCCN). This Project contributed to the "awakening "of publishers and journals towards Open Access and its benefits.