Open Science - Rado Seminar – What is Open Science anyway?

What is Open Science Anyway?
(and why should you care?)
Cecilia Baldoni
Rado Seminar
14.02.2025

Content

What I am talking about today:

What is Open Science?
Why should you care?
MPG Resources and Community

What I am not talking about today:

Shrews

Why am I talking about Open Science?

Open Science in Practice

Our Department Great Examples!

What People Think Open Science is

What Open Science is (and more)

The Challenges

Barriers to Open Science:

Norm Dissonance

“I’m already doing great (and open!) science. The problem is the others who aren’t.”

What are the Norms?

Norms:

Communality
Universalism
Disinterestedness
Organised Skepticism
Quality

Counternorms:

Secrecy
Particularism
Self-Interestedness
Organised Dogmatism
Quantity

We Need Data

The Challenges

Barriers to Open Science:

Norm Dissonance
Minimal accountability
Incentives for individual success are focused on getting it published,
not getting it right
Time and effort

The Challenges

Barriers to Open Science:

“I’m too busy, and what’s in it for me anyway?”

The Sad (and shocking) Truth

Meaningful Research: The 4 R’s

The 4 R’s:

Reliability – Can we trust the findings?
Reproducibility – Can someone else run the same data and get the same results?
Repeatability – Can the same experiment show the same result when repeated?
Replicability – Can another lab do the same study and get the same result?

How do we do Science better?

Science should be:

Transparent and Verifiable
Reusable, not Disposable
Rigorous, not (just) Publishable

This is Open Science!

What are the actual Benefits for You?

It saves you Time (yes, you heard it right!)
It strengthens your Research Record
It makes Collaborations easier
It reduces the risk of Retractions and amendments

These are all great benefits for society and for the scientific community, but what’s in it for you?

1.journals already require you to submit your data and code when publishing, If you document and organize it well from the start, you’ll actually save time during submission. 2. Data and code sharing can lead to more citations: People can cite you just by using your data, if it’s in a public repository, because it gives you a doi 3. When research is well-documented and shared, collaborations start faster and require less back-and-forth explaining methods. for early career researchers, Some universities already consider Open Science contributions in hiring & promotions. 4. I think most of us have this scary idea of an amendment, or a retraction. But the truth is that mistakes happens all the time, we are human. But if your code is shared and transparent,it help prevent errors from going unnoticed, and honestly, it shows no “intent” just honest mistake.

“Well, I don’t care about that!”

Well, Future you cares!

Open Science isn’t just about others, it’s about making research usable for your future self and your lab.

Practical “Future you” Benefits

The cultural shift

How do we get there?

Max Planck Society Resources

Do you know these resources?

Open Science in Practice: list of services from the Max Planck Digital Library
Edmond: the Open Acess research data repository for Max Planck researchers
Research Data Management: information platform for Max Planck researchers
Keeper: for archiving long-term datasets
For PhD students (and postdocs!) PhDNet Open Science

Are you interested but don’t know where to start?

Come talk to me!

Thank you.

ZachWeiner