Halloween update for the Open Science SPOOK

Apologies for that terrible title - the author has now been fired.

The big news this month is that we finally released the first audio accompaniment to the MOOC for Module 5 on Open Research Software and Open Source. This is to help people who might find reading from screens difficult, as well as to provide an alternative for people who simply prefer audio over reading for these things. It’s a half hour introduction to the world of open source software, and simply based on the content already available here.

This is available on:

If you have an account on any of these, please make sure to like/follow/star or whatever to show if you like what we are doing. And also to share with any friends or colleagues who might be interested. The content is openly licensed (of course!), which means that anyone can re-use it for whatever they wish. The more the better!

Other news

In the last post, we asked you whether we should re-brand the ‘C’ in ‘MOOC’ to Community, to better reflect our values around learning as a peer-to-peer community-based process. Based on feedback from the wider community, this seemed like a good idea, and now we have informally re-branded to reflect this.

We also revamped the resources page, with a curated list of tools, posts, and other cool open science-related things for you all. Let us know if you would like anything else included here!

Learning how to Open Source your work

We already have some great practical tasks available for you to upgrade your researcher skill-set. These are part of Module 5 too, and include:

  1. An introductory guide on how to set up your first GitHub project,

  2. How to make such a project archived and citable, and

  3. How to integrate Git with Rstudio.

These three tasks are a great way for you to help increase the efficiency of your research workflows, while simultaneously making sure you get more appropriate credit for your work.

The second release for this module is now also available online:

DOI

Things you can do to help out

  • Make sure to like our Facebook page for more regular updates.

  • Share this presentation below that helps to describe the purpose of the MOOC. This can be re-used and presented by anyone who wishes! Let us know if you feel it can be improved in any way too.

<footer>Available in: PDF or .odp or .pptx formats </footer>

  • Click this link that allows anyone to automatically join our growing GitHub team for the MOOC development.

  • Make sure to join our open Slack channel and join in the discussions there, as well as introducing yourself. We now have more than 270 users here, which is incredible!

  • The next module to develop will be the first on Open Principles, and we are all cracking on already with content development here. If you are interested in helping out with this and joining our amazing Production Team, please let us know! While this is open to everyone, we especially welcome people from typically under-represented groups as part of this.

  • Share information about the MOOC with your friends and colleagues, including asking them to sign up to our mailing list! We are on Twitter too for those of you who use it.

  • In the future, we want to create an introductory video for the whole MOOC. If you would like to be part of this, simply send us a short video recording of yourself (and/or your colleagues) saying something like “Hi, my name is XXX, and I/we love Open Science!” This can be in whatever language or setting you want - the more the better!

We appreciate all of your ongoing support, and will continue with developing the content and putting it out there for use as soon as it is ready.

Cheers!

Jon and the Open Science MOOC team