On 1 December 2017, the 3rd Oxford OpenCon satellite event, organised by Crossref, the Bodleian Libraries and the Centre for Digital Scholarship of the University of Oxford and of course OpenCon, was held in Oxford. GYA Co-Chair Moritz Riede was invited to present on the activities of the Global Young Academy in the area of open science as well as on his own efforts to set up his experimental physics laboratory around the principles of open science. See his presentation here.
Further speakers included Jane Winters (Professor of Digital Humanities at the University of London), Louise Bezuidenhout (Research Fellow at the Institute for Science, Innovation and Society at Oxford and CODATA-RDA schools) and Hugh Shanahan (Senior Lecturer in Computer Science, Royal Holloway University of London). Further topics covered during this OpenCon Satellite included Digital Humanities, Earth Science, Bioinformatics, the FAIR principles, Open Publications, Open Data up to Evidence-Informed Policy Making. All presentations can be found on CrossRef’s slideshare account.
The meeting format offered much room for discussions of these topics, not only around the efforts in Oxford, but more generally about what can be done to move the system towards becoming more open, from the results of science and research, to educational materials, to digital research data. The breadth of present disciplines highlighted both the significant difference in requirements for advancing open science, but similarly the general wish to make better and fairer use of what is generated during teaching and research. Best practice examples from around the world were discussed, e.g. in biomedical research in the USA, as well as the challenges, for example to access research software in low and middle income countries and the need to ensure that open data does not lead to exploitation.
