Sep 25, 2017 – Sep 29, 2017 | Lausanne

Open Science in Practice — Catalyst Short Course, Lausanne, Switzerland

Primarily aimed at PhD students from École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), this summer school will give a general overview of what Open science can mean in practice.

In an attempt to restore best practice in the production and dissemination of knowledge, a transition to a more open and reproducible research is desirable and requires new incentives and infrastructures. This transition is mostly a cultural change, which is best supported by initiatives stemming from the scientific community itself (bottom-up approach). To a lesser extent, it is also a technical issue that require the development of new tools based on state-of-the art digital technologies.

This course is aimed at early career researchers who are interested to learn more about what the context of scholarship will look like in the future. The core idea behind this approach is to shift from a rhetoric based on a moral imperative (one shall share knowledge because it is a human right to have access to it) towards a pragmatic discourse that address what researchers are concerned with:

Increased visibility and credit for their contributions (citation, collaboration, reusability, and impact)
Control over the ownership of their work and ability to share their discoveries
Access to the necessary tools and information to conduct good research in the 21st century
Best practice on publication and data lifecycle management

Description
Four morning sessions will be dedicated to background information on Open science in general (Day 1), publications (Day 2), data (Day 3), and code (Day 4). Each afternoon will be dedicated to hands-on activities such as the identification of disciplinary standards (Day 1), channels for knowledge dissemination (Day 2), how to describe and reuse research data (Day 3), best practice for sharing code and methods (Day 3). The last day (Day 5) of the week-long course could be open to everyone from EPFL and will focus on researchers who are already active on campus, or who are interested in Open science. This will be followed by presentations from participants. In teams, they will cover any of the topics they worked on during the workshop.

Location:
École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland

Instructors: Martin Vetterli, Benedikt Fecher (Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society, Berlin), Arnaud Vaganay (Meta-Lab, BITSS), Laurent Gatto (Computational Proteomics Unit, University of Cambridge), Jessica Polka (#ASAPbio), Lawrence Rajendran (Science Matters), Kirstie Whitaker (University of Cambridge), Oleg Lavrovsky (OpenData.ch), Marta Teperek (Cambridge Big Data), Lucia Prieto (UNIL Neurosciences and TReND in Africa), Victoria Stodden (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Gaël Varoquaux (Inria Saclay), Raphaël Grolimund (EPFL), Vittoria Rezzonico (EPFL), Luc Henry (EPFL), Luc Patiny (EPFL), Bart Deplancke (EPFL), Robin Scheibler (EPFL), Francesco Mondada (EPFL), and Marcel Salathé (EPFL).

Target Audience
Approximately 30-40 participants, with 80% EPFL and 20% from other institutions (ETHZ, UNIL). Equal weightage to students from different disciplinary background covering all EPFL subjects.

Registration Fees
100-150 CHF for the 30 attendees, whether from EPFL or elsewhere (for EPFL students, we can only charge for extra costs, such as food, and not for the course content).