- Patricia
In October 2022, I was one of the lucky people invited to explore a Resident Fellowship with OLS. In the announcement blog, I claimed that I wanted to achieve the following with my Fellowship:
This is a double announcement of two exciting (and linked) items:
This post summarizes our OLS journey, the project we worked on during the entire period of cohort 7, and what our plans for the future are
- Patricia, Gemma, Saranjeet Kaur, Aman
From 2 to 4 May 2023, our sponsors and friends at the Software Sustainability Institute hosted their annual flagship event, Collaborations Workshop. CollabW23 is a special event and truly collaborative with many interactive sessions. This year, it was run as a hybrid format and it was great to see the effort of bringing people together in person and remotely.
- Richard
“✨Joining OLS mentorship is not just about learning and growing; it’s about being part of a supportive community that empowers you to reach your full potential.✨” Richard Dushime
Open Seeds participants of OLS-7 are graduating this week! Read on to find out how you can attend Open Seeds OLS-7 graduation calls to celebrate and learn more about their work, and how you can join as a participant in the next cohort, Open Seeds OLS-8.
- Paz
We have launched Open Seeds OLS-8 Cohort, our signature open science mentoring and training program.
We’re delighted to share that OLS has two new staff members: Tajuddeen, who has joined OLS as the coordinator for our collaborative ECB grant, and Debs, who has joined the OLS team as a junior web developer. Between Tajuddeen, Debs, and Jilaga (OLS’s Outreachy intern for re-branding), Nigerians are now the most highly-represented nationality in the OLS team!
- Yo
For many, 2023 is the Year of Open Science. OLS and MetaDocencia (MD) are delighted to announce that we will be participating in the Year of Open Science by delivering Open Science training for NASA, using materials originally developed by a huge group of open researchers worldwide, alongside American Geophysical Union (AGU).
- Nneoma
Exciting news! We wrapped up our rebranding excercise by refreshing our logo and introducing a new name for our mentoring program; Open Seeds! The new logo reaffirms our core values Growth, Community and Nurture, with a cohesive colour palette. We’re excited to launch our refreshed brand identity and continue our commitment to advancing open research and scholarship.
- Bérénice, Malvika, Yo, Emmy, Paz
We are excited to kick-off the new round of Open Life Science with another incredible cohort of mentors, mentees, and experts. We are honored to bring together members of diverse identities and backgrounds who represent expertise from different domains of research, who are working to address a wide range of relevant questions in their field and are motivated to bring a culture change in their areas. Many of them are long-standing Open Scientists who aim to use this opportunity to apply open science and community-based principles in their projects through this program.
- Nneoma
OLS is undergoing a rebranding project to make it more inclusive and accessible to researchers from various fields of study. The project is led by a design intern from Outreachy, who brings a fresh outlook to the process. So far, we have conducted research and documentation to understand OLS’s ideal targets and collaborators, and the current brand positioning. The biggest challenge faced is generating a new brand name. OLS is reaching out to its community for support and to vote for their preferred brand name choice from a shortlisted two.
We are excited to announce that the team and proposal described in this blog post has been awarded funding by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative!
Open Life Science (OLS, https://openlifesci.org/) is hiring a Programme Manager to coordinate and manage a global, multilateral grant-funded project with the aims to (1) deploy and manage open cloud infrastructure for under-resourced communities in Latin America and Africa, (2) create training and build capacity within these communities, and (3) identify a participatory service model for this infrastructure.
Complementing our Resident Fellows and the Software Sustainability Institute’s International Fellowship pilot, we’re happy to announce that the SSI has agreed to support three additional international Fellows that will be hosted by Open Life Science.
In September 2022, OLS had a leadership retreat in Scotland, where all four directors gathered together to discuss future plans and strategic director for our organisation. One of the key activities we identified was a desire to work with community members in a more official capacity, beyond the mentorship program that is our core. As a young organisation with funding, we have a relatively high level of flexibility when it comes to defining our mission and how we deliver it.
OLS-6 is approaching the penultimate week of their OLS journeys! Read on to find out how you can participate in their graduation to celebrate and learn more about their work, and how you can be part of the next cohort.
- Bérénice, Malvika, Yo, Emmy, Paz
We are excited to kick-off the 6th round of Open Life Science with another incredible cohort of mentors, mentees, and experts. We are honored to bring together members of diverse identities and backgrounds who represent expertise from different domains of research, who are working to address a wide range of relevant questions in their field and are motivated to bring a culture change in their areas. Many of them are long-standing Open Scientists who aim to use this opportunity to apply open science and community-based principles in their projects through this program.
- Bérénice, Emmy, Malvika, Paz, Yo
Back in January 2022, we shared that we were looking for a Community Researcher and Programme Coordinator to join our team, thanks to support from the Wellcome Open Research Fund.
- Bérénice, Emmy, Malvika, Paz, Yo
En enero de 2022, compartimos que buscábamos un/a investigadora comunitaria y coordinadora de programas para unirse a nuestro equipo, gracias al apoyo del Fondo de Investigación Abierta Wellcome.
TU Delft OPEN Publishing, the Open Access academic publisher of TU Delft, publishes Open Access (OA) journals and open textbooks and open books. It is a part of the open science programme of TU Delft that consists of seven interrelated projects: Open Education, Open Access, Open Publishing Platform, FAIR Data, FAIR Software, Open Hardware and Citizen Science.
- Ismael
How can we foster a responsible research ecosystem?
The Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) in the Netherlands runs once a year a Massive Online Open Course (MOOC) on Open Science on the edX platform: Open Science: Share your research with the world.
OLS-5, aka Cohort Hope, is approaching the penultimate week of their OLS journeys! Read on to find out how you can participate in their graduation to celebrate and learn more about their work, and how you can be part of the next cohort.
- Esther
This post is guest-authored by Esther Plomp, OLS-3 and 4 mentor.
- Nadine
Project background
My main motivator to initiate this project was to be able to do research on formal measures of emergence & complexity that
We are excited to kick-off the fifth round of Open Life Science with another incredible cohort of mentors, mentees, and experts. We are honored to bring together members of diverse identities and backgrounds who represent expertise from different domains of research, who are working to address a wide range of relevant questions in their field and are motivated to bring a culture change in their areas. Many of them are long-standing Open Scientists who aim to use this opportunity to apply open science and community-based principles in their projects through this program.
OLS is hiring a Community Researcher and Programme Coordinator.
OLS is absolutely delighted to share the news that as of January 2022, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative has awarded OLS a total of USD 574,945.30 over the next two years. This grant will provide OLS with a truly valuable opportunity to improve sustainability for the organisation and community, and allow enough time to focus on planning for the longer term.
- Esther
This post is guest-authored by Esther Plomp, OLS-3 and 4 mentor.
We are delighted to share that Wellcome Trust has awarded the Open Research Fund to Open Life Science (OLS). This will enable research and sustainability of the program for the next two years. Under the title Systematic evaluation of community development through open science training and incentivising contextual mentorship in health research, OLS has received GBP 99,999 to create a funded position for a programme coordinator and researcher, as well as pay for the overhead cost for the next four cohorts.
We recently opened the call for application for individuals and groups to join Open Life Science’s fifth cohort, OLS-5, starting in February 2022. The applications can be submitted until January 15, 2022 (midnight in any part of the world) on Open Review (application guidelines and templates).
OLS-4 is approaching its last cohort call, which means that we are preparing for the graduation of our current cohort and setting things up for the OLS-5 in 2022.
We are excited to kick-off the fourth round of Open Life Science with another incredible cohort of mentors, mentees, and experts. We are honored to bring together members of diverse identities and backgrounds who represent expertise from different domains of research, who are working to address a wide range of relevant questions in their field and are motivated to bring a culture change in their areas. Many of them are long-standing Open Scientists who aim to use this opportunity to apply open science and community-based principles in their projects through this program.
This post is guest authored by Afzal Ansari and Abdulelah Al Mesfer, two recent graduates of OLS-3.
We’re super excited to be launching the fourth cohort of Open Life Science, our open research training and mentorship programme!
This post is guest authored by Katharina Kloppenborg, a recent graduate of OLS-3.
This post is guest authored by Eva C. Herbst and Dylan Bastiaans, OLS-2 graduates. See the OLS issue with project journey
We are excited to kick-off the third round of Open Life Science with another incredible cohort of mentors, mentees, and experts. We are honored to bring together members of diverse identities and backgrounds who represent expertise from different domains of research, who are working to address a wide range of relevant questions in their field and are motivated to bring a culture change in their areas. Many of them are long-standing Open Scientists who aim to use this opportunity to apply open science and community-based principles in their projects through this program.
- Emma
This post is guest authored by Emma Karoune, a recent graduate of OLS-2.
- Yo
Since the beginning of OLS-2, we’ve been using Otter.ai to provide realtime closed captioning of our cohort calls to make them more inclusive of our participants. In the process of developing a more accessible format for OLS’s calls, we came across a surprising number of nuances to the different services and options one can choose from. With the help of Kaitlin Stack-Whitney and Malvika Sharan, I put together a preprint with some guidance based on what we learned, including how to handle Zoom break-out rooms that (currently) don’t get captioned at all.
It’s hard to believe, but OLS-2 is in its final stage right now, which means that OLS-3 is just around the corner in 2021.
Open Life Science has recently been awarded three grants - one from the EOSC-Life Training project and two more small grants, which will partially support the OLS-3 and OLS-4 cohorts (more information will follow soon).
An important part of collaborative research, and indeed of open science, is compassion. We’re too-often inclined, as a community, to act as though science - that it is supposed to be evidence-based or data-driven - is somehow pure, objective, and above bias. In reality, science is produced by humans, and falls prey to the same implicit biases that humans have. This is reflected in the science and research we do, and in the communities of scientists and researchers who create the science.
This is the last part of the 3 parts OLS project and community report: Where we want to go. In the first two parts, we covered: Where we are and How far we have come.
This is the second part of the 3 parts OLS project and community report: How far we have come. The first part covered: Where we are and the last part will be Where we want to go.
Around June 2019, OLS was originally dreamed up. Mozilla had launched a call for applications to Open Leaders X, the program that incubated OLS and several other related open leadership initiatives. In July 2019, we submitted a collaboratively prepared application written at the BOSC 2019 CoFest (see the draft), and in September we were delighted to learn we had been accepted to create our program as a part of Open Leaders X. Slightly more than a year has now passed, and we would like to share the first annual OLS project and community report with you.
We are excited to kick-off the second round of Open Life Science with another incredible cohort of mentors, mentees, and experts. We are honored to bring together members of diverse identities and backgrounds who represent expertise from different domains of research, who are working to address a wide range of relevant questions in their field and are motivated to bring a culture change in their areas. Many of them are long-standing Open Scientists who aim to use this opportunity to apply open science and community-based principles in their projects through this program.
It’s been a long and exciting journey, from applications opening in October 2019, announcing selected applicants in early January, and kicking off the program’s first cohort call on the 29th of January. Since then we’ve had an amazing range of guest speakers from around the world, sharing their expertise on topics in the OLS syllabus, as well as a variety of breakout and discussion sessions, interspersed with mentor calls every other week. We wrapped up our learning calls with a cohort call on self care, ally skills, and careers.
Like many other organisations, we’ll be posting a few short recommendations in light of the COVID-19 outbreak, sharing advice for people participating in our program and ways we can act to minimise difficulties over the next few months.
We are excited to welcome this fantastic set of mentees who are not only located in different parts of the world, but also represent different identities and backgrounds, aim to address a wide range of questions in their field, and are motivated to bring a culture change in their areas. Many of them are long-standing Open Scientists who aim to use this opportunity to apply “Open by Design” principle in their projects through this program.
The OLS program is offered to the researchers and potential academic leaders who want to become ambassadors for Life Science in their communities. Developed as a part of the Mozilla Open Leaders X, this 15-week long personal mentorship and cohort-based training enable sharing knowledge, connecting communities and empowering individuals involved in this program.
We would like to draw the open science and research software communities’ attention to two of the Open Leaders programmes. Both programmes aim to equip participants with the knowledge and experience to lead their own projects openly through 1:1 mentorship and learning from peers, experts, speakers and other members in the programmes.
- Malvika
This post is the case study from my participation at the Mozilla Open Leaders Cohort 7 from January-May 2019
- Bérénice
Our Open Life Science program is based on the Mozilla Open Leader program. Mozilla Open Leaders started 3.5 years ago to make openness the norm in innovation and research. We went through the rounds to find projects that would fit in our program, share them with you and show you the diversity of possibilities.
We (Malvika, Yo and Bérénice) applied in August 2019 for the Mozilla Open Leaders X and were accepted (thank you Abby!) in this great program to build the Open Life Science program. We enjoyed writing this application and we would like to share it in this post.