General

What is open science?

“Open science is the practising of science in a sustainable manner which gives others the opportunity to work with, contribute to and make use of the scientific process. This allows users ‘from outside of the science world’ to influence the research world with questions and ideas and help gather research data.” Nationaal Programma Open Science

What does the OSCN do?

Open Science Community Nijmegen (OSCN) is a community of scholars and other academic workers devoted to maintaining and developing scientific practices that ensure transparency, rigour, and reproducibilty of research and related academic work (the term ‘science’ is used in its broadest, inclusive sense to include humanities and social sciences, i.e. it more suitably refers to open scholarship).

The OSCN is part of the International Network of Open Science & Scholarship Communities. See also our map of OSC’s in The Netherlands.

In 2019 we conducted a survey about open science among academics in Nijmegen. You can view the results here.

How can I contribute to the OSCN?

Anyone affiliated to the Radboud University, Radboud University Medical Center, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics or Hogeschool Arnhem Nijmegen can become a member of the OSCN. You can sign up for our mailinglist or contact us with ideas, suggestions or interesting events: contact [at] openscience-nijmegen.nl

Materials from past events

Educational materials and courseware

Diversity and inclusivity

What is diversity?

Diversity is the practice or quality of including or involving people from a range of different social and ethnic backgrounds and of different genders, sexual orientations, etc.

What is inclusivity?

Inclusivity is the practice or policy of providing equal access to opportunities and resources for people who might otherwise be excluded or marginalized, such as those having physical or mental disabilities or belonging to other minority groups.

What is the difference between diversity and inclusivity?

In a diverse environment, you’ll find people from a variety of backgrounds. In an inclusive environment, all of the people in the environment will have equal status. Diversity is inviting lots of different people to your party; inclusivity is making sure that each person enjoys the party as much as the next person.

Are diversity and inclusivity part of Open Science?

Yes! Science is only truly Open if it actively involves people from all kinds of diverse backgrounds.

What are the barriers to Open Science for people from minorities?

Although diversity should be a part of truly Open Science, the current Open Science movement poses some barriers to people from certain backgrounds. This is in part due to gatekeeping by people from dominant social groups who hold structural privileges, a phenomenon also known as ##bropenscience (cf. Whitaker and Guest, 2020). For example, recent research and opinion pieces criticising pre-registration and the focus on replication studies evoked a lot of discussion and backlash on Twitter. Gatekeeping is only part of the problem, though, as there are many other barriers that keep people from diverse backgrounds from truly engaging with Open Science.

A recent report by the Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science and a comment by Sanderson Onie in Nature highlight some of the barriers people from marginalised and/or underrepresented groups face when trying to do Open Science, including but not limited to:

  • financial barriers (e.g. registration fees, travel costs, costs for software, access to journal articles)
  • administrative barriers (e.g. visa/travel restrictions)
  • organizational barriers (e.g. an inability to attend events due to a lack of child care)
  • accessibility barriers (e.g. language barriers, lack of sign language interpreting, lack of wheelchair access)
  • structural barriers (e.g. unstable internet access, unstable political environment)
  • lack of knowledge (e.g. lack of training opportunities in doing Open Science, lack of Research Integrity guidelines)

What can I do to promote diversity at my institution?

Kirstie Whitaker and Olivia Guest (2020) include some general tips for promoting diversity and inclusivity in their piece on #bropenscience. We’ve highlighted a few here, but be sure to read their article for more.

  • If you’re organising an event, make sure it’s accessible to underrepresented minorities. This can be achieved by e.g. captioning videos, holding in-person events where underrepresented groups are likely to be awarded a visa and providing child care at in-person events.
  • At any point in time, make sure to pay attention to who is making decisions within a group, find out what you can do to lift up others around you and listen to those who experience structural and systemic biases.

Alex Chan provides tips for how to make your event inclusive, from financial assistance to making the venue accessible and from the snacks you provide to giving people coloured lanyards to indicate how social they want to be.

Finally, Paula Masuzzo also provides useful information for making your events diverse and inclusive: engage with a range of diverse communities, reach out, be kind, seek aid, give aid, support, recommend, acknowledge, advertise, nominate and motivate each other.

What is the standpoint of the Open Science Community Nijmegen on diversity and inclusivity?

At the Open Science Community Nijmegen, we are committed to creating an inclusive Open Science environment in which people from different backgrounds are welcomed and their voices are heard.

We are always open to suggestions from others, so if you have any tips for us to make our events more diverse and inclusive, or for other resources we can include here, please get in touch.

Further reading and resources

Preregistration

What is preregistration?

Preregistration describes the practice of specifying hypotheses, study conditions, pre-processing pathways, and analyses prior to data analysis. The general purpose of preregistration is to increase transparency and increase the ease of evaluation of the sincerity of statistical tests.

Preregistration Materials:

Background literature:

When is preregistration useful?

Some people argue that the point of preregistration is transparency and to limit researcher degrees of freedom and protect against confirmation bias. From that point of view, even if you’re doing entirely exploratory research, it makes sense to preregister that you have no hypothesis or planned analysis. Thus, preregistration is always useful.

Other people argue that the point of preregistration is to distinguish confirmatory and exploratory research. For confirmatory research, a lot of details most be known in advance (e.g. expectable effect size to compute power for given sample size). Under this point of view, preregistration is only warranted if all the necessary ingredients are known; otherwise preregistration is not useful.

To make up your own mind, you might consider the following resources:

What is a Registered Report?

A Registered Report describes a scientific paper in which the theoretical framework, hypotheses, sample size justifications, study procedure and analyses are submitted to a journal and evaluated by expert reviewers prior to data collection. Papers accepted as Registered Reports will be published regardless of the findings as the study provided the study followed the approved study plan. Therefore, Registered Reports reduce publication bias (Scheel et al., 2021).

Registered Reports Materials:

Reproducibility

How do I profit from making my project reproducible?

  • easily find results back when you are asked for them (e.g. by co-authors, supervisors, reviewers,…)
  • easily redo an entire analysis once a tiny bit of it has changed (e.g. ideas of continuous integration)
  • re-use your own code at later stages for new analyses or even in different projects
  • get credit by other people wo re-use your code for their projects
  • get your code checked by other people for potential errors

How do others profit from making my project reproducible?

  • re-use your code in their projects to save time
  • re-use your data to answer their own research questions without the need to spend time and money on acquiring new data

Sharing code

  • osf.io and cos.io Open Science Framework, repository to share data sets

Resources

Research data management

Why is research data management important?

Research data management (RDM) helps to make conscious decisions about research data and keeps data safe. It also encourages open science and enables the reuse of data.

How to start with a data management plan?

You can make a good start on managing your data by writing a data management plan (DMP). For this, Radboud Library has developed a DMP tool, which you can find here: DMP Tool.

Where can I deposit my materials?

You can use the Research Information Services (RIS) interface to register your publication, to upload the full text of your publication to the Radboud Repository, and to to make a dataset available via the certified DANS EASY archive.

What support does Radboud University offer me regarding research data management?

You can find general research data management information, practical help with the DMP Tool, and specific support via Radboud Library.

RDM Support, RU Library: Offers help surrounding research data management, and giving feedback on your (funder-required) data management plan.

RIS Support, RU Library: Offers help surrounding Research Information Services (RIS).

Radboud Repository Support, RU Library: Offers help surrounding archiving your publications in the Radboud Repository.

Resources

Open access

What is open access?

Open access means that academic information (i.e. your publication or data) is freely accessible to everyone in the world. This means that anyone can read, download, copy, distribute, print, search for and search within the information, or use it in education or in any other way within the legal agreements. See also Open Access Explained at Radboud Library.

What are my options to publish open access?

There are different ways to publish in open access. You can either publish at full open access publishers (Gold open access), at hybrid journals (subscription journals that also offer to publish in open access), or via the Radboud Repository (Green open access). The Max Planck institute has its own repository.

Check the directory for open access journals, or the RU journal browser, or Sherpa/Romeo to find open access options and policies per journal. You can also use the Think.Check.Submit. tool to identify trusted journals and avoid predatory journals.

Does it always cost money to publish open access?

No. If you publish Green open access (also called the “green route”) you don’t pay any article processing charge (APC). In this case you need to make sure that your publication or data is findable in an open, online repository (see above). However, do take into account embargo periods of academic journals. They sometimes probihit you from sharing your paper until the embargo period has passed.

In addition, the VSNU (collective of Dutch universities) has made deals with several publishers to give discounts on APCs researchers affiliated to universities in The Netherlands. You can find out more about these deals here.Similarly, the Max Planck Institute also has a list of open access agreements with publishers

Do I have to publish open access?

That depends. As researcher of the Radboud University / Radboudumc you are not obliged to publish open access. However, if you receive funding (part or whole) for your research, your funder may require you to publish open access. For example NWO, EU, WHO, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation are strongly advocating open access. Always check the funding conditions at the website of your funder.

What support does Radboud University offer me regarding open access publishing?

You can find general open access information, specific information about VSNU open access deals, and further support, via the libguide.

Open Access Support, RU Library: Offers help surrounding open access, deals and discounts with publishers.

Radboud Repository Support, RU Library: Offers help surrounding archiving your publications in the Radboud Repository.

Theory building

How does theory building relate to Open Science?

Open Science is aiming for reproducible science: Findings should be replicable in independent studies. Studies whose predictions are based on an underlying (cognitive/ neural/ physical/ social/ …) mechanism/ model/ theory will be more likely to replicate than studies that merely focus a on a previously made observation, without any reason why or under which circumstances this observation should arise. In this way, science based on theories or models is rigorous science.

Resources

What does CC-BY mean?

Creative Commons (CC) licences aims to make creative works more freely available than is possible through traditional copyright. The idea is that works such as publications can be copied and distributed more easily or that others can elaborate on them.

To distinguish the several CC licenses that can be used, you can consult the Guide to Creative Commons for Scholarly Publications and Educational Resources here: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4090922

How can the library support me to choose the correct licence?

You can contact the Copyright Information Point (CIP), RU Library for help surrounding the rights to your or others publishable work.