Open Access Week is here again, and in this context, I’d like to share 6 winning bids from an Open Access / Open Data / Open Science training call of the EU-funded FOSTER Project (Facilitate Open Science Training for European Research). FOSTER is made up of 13 partners from 8 countries. Its primary aim is to produce a European-wide training programme that helps equip researchers, postgraduate students, librarians, project managers and other stakeholders with the skills to integrate Open Science practices into daily research workflows in line with the EU objectives on Responsible Research & Innovation and its policies.

FOSTER promotes Open Science / Open Access / Open Research Data community training actions and it has a budget to help make things happen. The first training call was issued in January 2014. To see the list of all winning bids taking place in 2014, see the FOSTER training calendar.

Before you consider hosting an Open Science / Open Data or Open Access event of your own, I have selected six events to show the breadth and scope of Open Science events of the previous call for inspiration. You may want to host a similar training activity in your country, attend one of these (but be quick as many are in October), or even submit your own bid for the recently published call. This selection has not been made based on the results achieved, but rather on their objectives, audience and approaches. So here’s a taste of what the community is doing to change hearts and minds about Open Access, Open Data and Open Science in general. Will they inspire you to train your researchers, administrators or Horizon2020 project managers?

Open Access (OA) Ambassadors, Max Planck Digital Library, Max Planck Society, 8-9 December 2014

As one of the largest research networks in Germany, the Max Planck Society will focus on developing a network of PhD student OA ambassadors to represent each of its 80 institutes. By doing so, its ambassador training programme aims to i) disseminate and multiply the principles of OA and open data among peer researchers; ii) to integrate OA principles in the work-flow of Max Planck Society early stage researchers; and iii) to create sustainable change towards OA in the long term. These ambassadors will be trained for 2 days to become the OA experts and contacts for their institutions, in future holding workshops and lectures in their institutions and directly supporting young researchers in the implementation of OA practices in their daily work.

This event addresses a clearly defined target group of PhD researchers at Max Planck. The ambassador programme helps develop champions and ambassadors to multiply the reach and implementation of OA across a large community of researchers in Germany. It does this in a unified way by training the trainers together, who will in turn represent, support and pursue further Open Access and Open Data initiatives in their institutions in the future.

For more information, see http://oambassadors.mpdl.mpg.de/

FOSTER: Discovering Open Practices for PGR and Early Career Researchers, The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), Kings College London (KCL) and Queen Mary University of London (QML), 4 September 2014

Here, three London universities collaborate to run a one-day training event for 100 PhD and early career researchers. The event covers the benefits of practicing open research early in an academic career. It addresses a wide range of topics such as open access to research, data sharing, research data management and impact metrics. The event brings keynote thought-provoking speeches together with student open advocates sharing their open research experiences with practical afternoon workshops. These workshops encourage discussion and feedback on how to implement new practices in 1) Open Access, 2) Open Data Management and 3) Research Impact and Analysis in a practical sense. They demonstrate hands on practical solutions and services in these areas, and invite feedback from researchers. This both helps raise awareness of current service provision and helps to improve efforts by engaging with researchers for feedback.

For more information, see Discovering Open Practices: one-day conference on open research information for PGRs and Early Career Researchers

Boo(s)tcamp Open Science, KU Leuven, 24 October 2014

“Generation Open” is the theme for this one-day Open Science Boo(s)tcamp for junior researchers. The day starts with a crash course for newbies on Open Access & Open Data policies, guidelines and tools.

Three more specific sessions follow: Learn to speak Open looks at the benefits of both openness and putting this into practice. This session is then followed by Ask the Funders: a panel discussion and Q&A with national and international EU funders with OA mandates. Meet the Experts shares Open Science testimonials from the Life Sciences, STEM and Humanities communities who provide practical tips on how to open up research and explains why it’s worthwhile.

This workshop for the open generation or young researcher takes on both an active and passive approach in raising awareness of Open Science and how to become OA compliant. It provides a mix of policy, guidelines and practice to inform the young author on the one hand. On the other, it allows young researchers to interact with policy makers from funding agencies on OA mandates at an Ask the Funder panel and also provides practical experiences from researchers of various disciplines to help change hearts and minds.

For more information, see http://www.kuleuven.be/research/bootcamp/programme.html

Open Humanities @ The Humanities and Technology Camp (THATCamp), 22-23 September 2014, Goettingen, Germany

This event takes a disciplinary approach to Open Science by addresses the Humanities domain. A series of Open Humanities training and barcamp sessions are organised as a satellite to a national conference, one of Europe’s largest humanities conferences the 50th Convention of German Historians, Historikertag. This has the potential to reach a large amount of researchers and makes it more cost-efficient. Open Humanities programme is comprehensive as it addresses the following topics: Open Humanities, Open History, Open Humanities Data and Open Access for Digital Arts and Humanities in Europe.

It has a dynamic approach by using barcamp methods combined with other more traditional ones. Open Humanities also considers how to disseminate its results, including video, by publishing results via a new publishing platform for academic blogs: Hypotheses.org. This blog will be a first step to creating an Open Humanities training package to be integrated in an existing infrastructure of DARIAH, the Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities, for example.

For more information, see http://goettingen2014.thatcamp.org/schedule/

Workshop on Open Workflows, Stichting VU-VUmc (VU University Amsterdam, Faculty of Economics and Business Administration), 5-6 September 2014

This two-day workshop concentrates on quantitative social scientists.  It gives guidance to researchers as to the motivations for adopting open science principles in their research practice as well as tools on how to do so.  Key themes are transparency, reproducibility and open access as part of introducing a new more open workflow to the social scientist.

For more information, see http://darribas.org/WooWii/slides/05-online_pub.html#17

Co-Science – Gemeinsam Forschen und Publizieren mit dem Netz, German National Library of Science and Technology / Technische Informationsbibliothek (TIB), Oct 2014 – Feb 2015

This contribution organises 6-10 webinars about open science/collaborative science based on the handbook CoScience – Gemeinsam forschen und publizieren mit dem Netz. Moderated discussions will take place with experts that are enriched and expanded by slides and demonstrations of software applications. Topics include raising awareness and learning from good practices in the areas of making research data and publications openly available with examples from a range of disciplines, making full use of available online tools for data gathering, processing, presentation, as well as (collaborative) writing, dissemination, and discussion. The webinars and material have the potential to be of re-use / accessible to the broader international Open Science community in other learning environments.