I'm going to go to the next slide.
Let's see.
The U.S.
is now going to present
from grassroots to standard practices how an open society
shaped university initiatives.
Here you go.
Hello, everyone.
I'm coming here to talk about my experience at the Surrey
University in the UK where I did my PhD in the last four years.
I just finished my PhD.
Thank you.
Basically, is this working?
Next.
This society was founded in 2019,
which is when I started my PhD,
but I wasn't part of it at the beginning.
Sometimes it's difficult to find out what's going on at the university.
It was founded by Marta Topor,
who was a student at the time.
Emily Farron, who is staff,
she's a senior lecturer, I think, at the university.
They wanted to create this society
to tackle this kind of reproducibility crisis
in the field of psychiatry,
but we'd aim to expand to all the other areas.
It was a society run by young researchers
and postgraduate students.
It was open to any students,
but undergrad students are usually not interested
in this kind of society.
At some point, we have over 100 members,
which was very successful for this kind of society.
We were inspired,
but different from the other students.
We were inspired by the different students
and we were inspired by different grassroots initiatives.
We have the UKRN,
the reproducibility network in the UK.
This is a national peer-led community of researchers
that want to tackle this reproducibility,
trusting science,
and improving methodology of scientific methods.
We also have other initiatives,
like reproducibility.
This is a journal club
where people get together to read
papers about methodologies
and how to improve methodologies and analysis.
The Riot reproducible, interpretable, open,
and transparent is also a science club.
I think it was started by King College London.
We have the UKRN,
and the Riot reproducible is also a club
in King College London.
Those were our aims.
Integrate, open, transparent,
and reproducible methods in science.
Help with this rigor
and quality
and this trust in science crisis.
As I was saying,
we have the UKRN,
the Riot reproducible,
and the UNR,
and the UNR.
We have a lot of meetings and discussions
and workshops,
and we also have
conferences
in the university.
We managed to create...
It run for two years maybe?
Two or three years.
Two or three years, yeah.
Yeah, and that was very interesting because it brought like all the university together
so we could discuss with different people, so not only students from different faculties,
but also staff and researchers.
And from these different events that we were creating,
we started in January 2020 the monthly mini hacks by Daniel Curtin here, she's here.
She will be giving a talk later.
But yeah, this was when we started putting a greater focus on the computational methods
of these social sciences, so not only that reproducibility,
but also we wanted for people to have the skills, coding skills that maybe are not so easily accessible
when you are in social sciences or in non-computational fields,
but that are very, very important for those fields.
So it was this cross-disciplinary collaboration and skill sharing
and kind of like hands-on coding so someone would come give like a maybe 20-minute talk
or 15-20 minutes about a topic and then there would be like a collective programming time.
And then it's always better to kind of learn these things in a group, right?
So you can ask questions instead of just watching a YouTube video or reading something online
and then no one is there to guide you.
And yeah, it's also useful to encourage and promote these best coding practices.
So sometimes I'm sure many of you have had this problem when you go to like a research,
academy, software project and you have no idea what's going on and all this spaghetti code
so to try to make people be better at coding.
And also as a way of training and improving your research and your employability
and just your own skills that may be helpful for you in the future outside of the university.
And I guess, yes, the isolation and the learning curve that is worse for some people in different fields
or just depending on what background, what opportunities you've had before, right?
So with the pandemic, there was a lot of things going on, right?
Some of them very bad and in a way we had new opportunities because we all went online
so there was more like a global opportunity of sharing from outside the university.
I guess we always had this option but we weren't really used to do things online.
So we created the mini-hack consortium which is kind of like taking the mini-hacks initiative
outside of the reproducibility society which they were still interlinked but it became its own thing
and we started creating a lot of online courses every month bringing different people from different universities.
We had people from universities in Spain, in Germany, but also in Latin America.
We had a collaboration in Colombia.
We did a two-day hackathon for a neural language processing.
So bringing people who were experts in different things to talk about their experiences
and things that were... maybe they weren't experts in but they've learned about, I don't know,
if you've done a PhD in some science, you know latex but when you're starting in research
you have no idea how to write latex and it all looks very strange and difficult to understand.
So it went very well at the beginning.
We had a lot of people interested.
We have more people joining the workshops so when they were in person
maybe it was more difficult to advertise it across the university
but when we went online we could reach a larger audience so that was very successful at first.
These are some of the tools that we were using both at the reproducibility society and the mini-hack.
So yes, we have all our files and data at the Open Science Framework repository
so if we had any presentations we would record them, we would upload the video so you can go there later
and all the slides and anything that was required at these workshops.
Then we publish all the slides and any outputs of these workshops in F1000 Research
which is an Open Science scientific publisher so then you could also have your own thing in your CV and record, right?
So it would help your... in the future and then obviously we publish all the code in repositories open for everyone to use
and for this advertisement of the workshops we would use Eventbrite which is not open
but it was very useful to reach a larger audience so it's not only the people you know and that already know you
but it also promotes your events to people who have related interests
so there were a lot of people who had no idea who we were and they were just joining
because they saw the topic was related to their field or something.
And this brings me to what happened at the University of Surrey so we created all these events and workshops and things
and then through Emily Farron who was part of the staff she was pushing this to become more policy at the University of Surrey
and more people started joining from the staff, from the researchers areas
and we got... I think they adapted this open batch
the open batch, yeah, to know that your... I don't know what I was going to say
that your project has all these data standards and all these open standards of research
and they created a working group that was leading this change within the university
and they created a community with forums and chats where they could share all these things across universities
or not just in psychology but across all the other faculties
they created a research handbook, they actually created an actual module that people can take about open science
learning about open data and they created this open research annual lecture
and this is basically the continuation of the conference we were doing as students
So to finalise this is what happened to us
We were very successful at the beginning, we had a lot of people, more than 100 people as members of the society
but with the pandemic apart from going global we also had other problems
People were meeting less online, less in person
People weren't going to maybe the faculties and the office to work so we started like putting it apart
and because students come and go people were leaving the university and there wasn't any new people to join
and at half the time that this type of initiatives required which is a long time
So I was left alone with the mini hacks and it just completely faded in my last year of PhD
when I couldn't get more people to give more talks or workshops, I just couldn't find anyone else
But at least the university policy now, maybe more students will come in the future and we'll want to take this on
and we learned a lot so we already have that going on for us
and I don't know if we have any time for questions
Sorry
We do have to be so let's take some questions, thank you
Thank you
So it's a very nice story, it's a pretty good way but is this journey like what you just presented
Yes, yes, so the question is if all of this work that we've done is anywhere and people can take on from that
Yes, so everything we've done, not only the workshops and the events that we did but also like our policies
and our documents of how to organize and how to do everything is in our open science framework repository
so the first point here and people can go back there and see like how did we do the main list, what are the resources that we use
what was the kind of like flow of organizing a society
which is helpful even if you want to create your own society that is not continuing this
That was the second question, second and third
Yes
Thank you very much for the presentation, what's your point of view on the initiative you have in science club with respect to this
The European Open Science Club, is this similar to some of them?
I don't know, I'm not familiar with this
So would it be like similar to this but European level
Okay, so I am not aware of the European Open Science Club but I think it would be very interesting to connect with all the different initiatives that kind of have the same aim in place
and that would probably be useful also to get people to collaborate with this, thank you