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BUA Open Science Magnifiers

Berlin University Alliance Open Science Magnifiers

Berlin University Alliance Open Science Magnifiers

Background / Rationale

The project BUA Open Science Magnifiers is carried out in cooperation with the Open Access Office Berlin (OABB) and funded by BUA Objective 3 Advancing Research Quality and Value (an overview of the funded projects can be found here). The project continues the work of the BUA Open Science Dashboards project and further develops the systematic monitoring of Open Science practices. For this purpose, mainly semi-automatic screening tools are used and the results are presented in dashboards. A new addition is a focus on the collection and presentation of specific positive examples in the area of Open Science.

Objectives

The project has two main goals: On the one hand, we will continue to collect and display quantitative information about open science practices in different disciplinary communities within the BUA. On the other hand, we will explore and pilot ways to make visible individual best practices examples of specific open science practices in research communities which are as yet too rare to be quantified.

The objectives of the "BUA Open Science Magnifiers" project are explained in more detail in an OABB blog post.

Methodology and expected results

For fulfilling the objectives, several approaches will be followed, with the OABB playing a leading role in some of these:

  • The Charité Dashboard on Responsible Research developed at QUEST was expanded in the predecessor project (BUA Open Science Dashboards) to include a "FAIR Data Dashboard", which deals in detail with the reusability of data based on the FAIR principles. We will update this dashboard annually and add time series.
  • We will implement an additional "Open Data Dashboard" that deals with various practices relating to the openness and reuse of data. This will, for example, separate Charité datasets according to access paths, track the frequency of data availability statements and record cases of re-use of open data.
  • In the previous project, an interactive visualization of the results from the Berlin Science Survey (BSS), which is based at the Robert K. Merton Center (RMZ), was created. In collaboration with the BSS, we will expand these results to include new survey waves and supplement time series. This will provide an even more comprehensive picture of the Berlin research area and its development and make this information available for strategy development and communication.
  • Together with BUA Objective 2 FosteringKnowledge Exchange, a survey of the transdisciplinary research projects based in the BUA area will be carried out. We will visualize these interactively to give researchers an overview of relevant projects. In addition, this will help the management of BUA institutions to gain an overview of transdisciplinary research in the BUA and to evaluate the effectiveness of BUA activities in this area.
  • We will further develop an existing prototype for a dashboard on open science practices (e.g. open access, open code) of the Department of Geosciences of the FU in a subject-specific way and use this visualization to present the open science practices of a specific subject community.
  • In addition, a further subject-specific cooperation on open science practices in gender studies is planned.

The FAIR Dashboard and Open Data Dashboard sub-projects build on extensive preliminary work carried out by the QUEST Center in the area of open data screening, which was developed in the context of the dashboard and the open data LOM (performance-oriented allocation of funds). As part of this preliminary work, a defined and validated extraction process was developed, which is used to screen full article texts and then manually verify the results. This process was published in the form of an article and a protocol. In addition, the open data criteria on which the decision was based were also developed at QUEST and published as an article.

Further information

Outputs of the previous project BUA Open Science Dashboards

Further references

Funder and cooperation partners

Contact