On the occasion of the Open Access week 2019, the first Mini Open Science Fair jointly organized by ULB and VUB was held on October 23 in Brussels.
The speakers shared their experience about tools they are using, underlining the pros and cons from their personal point of view: DMPonline.be, to create a data management plan very helpful to anticipate research data issues; the Open Science Framework, a platform enabling researchers to manage their projects, preregister their ideas and share their results, data and publications; GitHub, to store, share and collaborate on code, providing data analysis, metadata and user license; Zenodo, an open archive to share and ensure long term access and preservation of research data, providing a DOI to enable data citation; Publons, to give visibility to the peer review activity of researchers.
The SODA project was presented, which aims at creating a national data archive for social science in Belgium, based on the DataVerse tool to manage ingest and access to data.
Two systems of open peer review were discussed, one used by Frontiers, making the review interactive between authors and reviewers, and the other used by the Copernicus Publications platform, making the reviews publicly available, which was considered constructive, quick and efficient.
Some researchers also shared their experience of good practices of Open Science such as: sharing one’s research protocols from the start of the research project, providing transparency about the methodology; involving citizens in data collection, for transcribing historical documents; managing an interdisciplinary scientific open access journal, also aiming at being accessible to the large public.
The presentations gave rise to interesting discussions among researchers, pointing to the need for more information about sustainable open science tools.
Programme and presentations are available here.
Open Access Belgium 