Hello everyone,
We hope this email finds you well!
We are writing to invite you to yet another RDA ECEIG "Ask me Anything" meeting; the Early Career and Engagement Interest Group (ECEIG) has been formed within RDA with a focus on connecting with and supporting early career professionals both within and outside RDA. The "Ask me Anything" meetings are hosted on a monthly basis, addressing topics that might be of general interest to ECRs - this month's AMA is dedicated to:
Open Life Science: Empowering communities with open* principles
As scientists, we are provided training and guidance in how to conduct research in the lab, design algorithms, analyse data and publish them. However, scientists are rarely expected to apply important skills such as open science principles for tooling and road mapping their projects, planning reproducible workflows, involving others in their work, and leading an inclusive community. Modern bioinformatics communities stand in the interface of computational and biological research. This interdisciplinary position requires us to develop collaborative projects by implementing such “open by design” principles in our research projects systematically -- skills that aren’t necessarily taught at university or graduate school level.
This talk will introduce the Open Life Science (OLS) program and report important observations and outcomes from running the first cohort of the program. The talk will follow the same format as the cohort calls.
More about the Open Life Science and the cohort calls
Open Life Science is a volunteer-driven training and mentoring program aimed at empowering early career researchers and potential academic leaders to become open science ambassadors. Participants join OLS with a proposal to work on an open science project and attend a series of one-on-one mentoring calls over 16 weeks, alternating with full cohort calls that provide training on specific open science and leadership skills. OLS’s work is underpinned by a community of over 50 mentors and expert guest speakers.
Cohort calls cover a broad spectrum of topics relevant to leading an open project, ranging from open science topics, community building, project and contribution management of GitHub repositories, and caring both for yourself and others in your community. Calls are designed to be interactive and engaging, utilising a mix of Zoom’s break-out room features to facilitate group discussion, collaborative document editing, and guest speakers from academia and industry giving short talks.
If you are interested in attending May's AMA Call please note that registration is required! Please register here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/open-life-science-empowering-communities-with-open-principles-tickets-105531916804
Additional information:
The talk will be held online on Wednesday, May 20th at 14:00-15:00 UTC / 10:00-11:00 EDT
*Click here to find out the time of the event in your time zone.
Short bios of the speakers
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Bérénice is a bioinformatician (post-doc in the Freiburg Galaxy Team), analyzing biological data and developing tools for data analysis, mainly via Galaxy. Bérénice is also passionate about training, regularly giving workshops (data analysis, tool development, etc). She started and still co-leads the Galaxy Training Material project. She is a co-deputy training coordinator for ELIXIR Germany (de.NBI), a Software Carpentry instructor and a founder of Street Science Community, an outreach program. With Yo Yehudi and Malvika Sharan, she founded and organizes the Open Life Science program.
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Yo is a Software Sustainability Institute Fellow, founder of Code is Science, EngD student at the University of Manchester studying the effects of community and usabilty on open source software, editor for the PLOS Open Source Toolkit, board member of the Open Bioinformatics Foundation, and a software developer at the University of Cambridge, working on an open source biological data warehouse called InterMine.
Twitter handles
Open Life Science: @openlifesci
Bérénice Batut @bebatut
Yo Yehudi @yoyehudi
Looking forward to talking with you!
The Early Career and Engagement Interest Group (ECEIG) co-chairs,
Devan Ray Donaldson, Fotis Psomopoulos and Elli Papadopoulou