The grant will support the Boston Open Researcher Group to host a series of workshops that will leverage the disciplinary networks of open research enthusiasts to bring their colleagues into the open research community.
Open research practices are gaining traction across the natural sciences, social sciences and humanities. In our experience, these practices are taken up by a cadre of "open research enthusiasts," people who are already committed to open practice and who have the technical ability to open their research.
While there is a lot we enthusiasts can learn from each other, we would like to see open practices propagate further into our disciplines. Events targeted towards open enthusiasts, like the Working Open Workshops, overlook those who have not yet embraced open research practices as well as those open researchers who aren't connected to the larger open research community. On the other hand, events targeted towards newcomers, like Software and Data Carpentry workshops, don't often provide avenues to engage with the open research community beyond the workshops.
We have founded the Boston Open Researcher Group (the BORG) to address these challenges by building a bridge between the established open research community and researchers that are new to open research practices.
- Connect the community of open research advocates in the greater Boston area. Success will be assessed by the number of BORG members listed on our website after the first BORG workshop.
- Send these advocates into their own research communities to encourage open research practices. Success will be assessed in the reports from the advocates at the second BORG workshop.
- Bring newcomers into the Boston open research community. Success will be assessed by the growth in BORG membership over the summer.
We propose to hold a series of workshops throughout the summer of 2018 (Fig. 1). There will be two different kinds of workshops. "BORG workshops" will be larger, centralized events while "satellite workshops" will be smaller events distributed throughout the community. We plan to have three BORG workshops and around eight satellite workshops.
The BORG event flow. Large circles are the larger BORG workshops and small circles are the satellite events.
The first BORG workshop will be focused on gathering the Boston open research community to identify challenges to the adoption of open research practices. We will invite open research advocates from around the area for a day-long workshop. We will introduce our vision for the BORG and then participate in interactive planning activities. Our aim is to decide on goals for the satellite workshops and to create a curriculum and a set of resources to be used in the satellite workshops. This event will be open to the public, but we envision most of the attendees already being active open researchers.
After the first event, we will send our open research advocates out to their disciplinary communities to host satellite workshops. We want to focus these workshops within disciplines (rather than institutions, for instance) to leverage the networks that our open research advocates already have. Furthermore, we hope that disciplinary satellite workshops will be more relevant than a general "open science" workshop might otherwise be. Psychologists will be interested in a different set of open research tools than engineers, which are yet different from those needed by literary scholars. Disciplinary workshops allow the open advocates to speak to the concrete problems that researchers in their disciplines face when adopting open practices.
The second BORG workshop will be designed as a check-in with the open research advocates. We would like to hear how the first few satellite workshops have gone. We will reiterate over some of the planning activities from the first workshop to solve any problems that may have come up in the first round of workshop.
After the second event, more satellite workshops will be held. Depending on the interests of the open research advocates, these could be in new disciplines or a second iteration in disciplines featured in the first round.
The third and final BORG event will be an Open Research Extravaganza, open to the public and advertised widely. We aim to showcase the process of openness rather than impressive, mature open projects or tools for open research. Attendees of the satellite events will be invited to present lightning talks about their experiences getting involved in open research. Plenty of time will also be scheduled for conversation and networking.
Out of a $5,000 minigrant, we propose to spend $3000 on the big BORG events, and $2000 on the satellite workshops. These funds will go towards food for the workshops and any room rental or audiovisual needs as well as smaller costs to help the BORG administer all of these events (such as Meetup.com fees). The satellite workshops will ideally take place within institutions that can provide space, and we anticipate spending around $200 to $250 on each workshop.
Curriculum
Directory
Meetup
GitHub repository
Website
Recordings of presentations (optional)
These summer events will develop a community of open researchers at various stages in their engagement, from seasoned open research advocates to those making their first forays into open research in the satellite workshops. This community is the BORG.
Possible directions for the BORG that have been discussed are
- Regular Boston-wide BORG events like the workshops or the Open Research Extravaganza
- Continued satellite workshops at area institutions led by BORG members
- Cosponsorship of events led by other area open research organizations
- An online discussion forum
- A Boston-area open research mentorship program modeled on the Open Leadership Cohort
We want the BORG to be a sustainable community. A key component of that sustainability is partnerships with area institutions like universities, libraries and companies. The momentum from the summer's activities, supported by the Mozilla Science Lab mini-grant, will help us to make the argument for those partnerships.