The SRUK London Constituency and the UK Chapter of the Marie Curie Alumni Association are proud to invite you to London’s 8th Meet the Researcher!!
The event will bring together three experts who, in the relaxing atmosphere of a pub, will share their views on reproducible research, the challenges they face and the remaining steps to make research truly open. Join us for this exciting event, the first of the year!!
Reproducibility is at the core of any scientific research. Such is so that more and more, journals and funding bodies are making a stronger emphasis on open research, open access and open data. Achieving amazing things is not enough: these have to be accessible to anyone, in full, so other experts, and also the wider public who often pay for that research with their taxes, can judge the validity and value of those achievements.
WHEN: Wednesday 15th January, 18:30
WHERE: Hoop and Toy Pub, 34 Thurloe Pl, London SW7 2HQ (next to South Kensington tube station, with the Piccadilly, District and Circle lines)
Achieving the full potential of research
by Dr Karen Stroobants
Website: http://karenstroobants.com/about-me/
Twitter: @KarenStroobants
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karen-stroobants-b3314155/
Will researchers be able to tackle the major challenges of our time, including climate change, superbugs and plastic waste? They certainly have the capacity to tackle these issues, but a lot of potential remains unlocked due to a `closed` research culture that prevails in academia, despite the digital age and its opportunity for openness.
After seven years as an active researcher, with many insights from this experience, I am now working full-time on improving research culture, openness in research and inclusiveness in research environments. I will share with you some of my insights into how research`s full potential can be unlocked, the barriers to overcome to achieve this, and concrete actions that can bring us closer to this goal.
Realising truly open science practice, maximising the reproducibility of research and establishing full inclusiveness of research environments, will be crucial in unlocking this full potential.
Software as a keystone of modern reproducible research
by Dr Diego Alonso Álvarez
Website: https://www.imperial.ac.uk/admin-services/ict/self-service/research-support/rcs/research-software-engineering/
Twitter: @Dalonsoa
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dalonsoalvarez/
Research increasingly depends on software to produce usable outcomes, being these the invention of a new drug, a better understanding of social relationships or how black holes work. This dependency on software brings exciting opportunities to facilitate open and reproducible research as software, contrary to complex lab equipment, can be transferred easily from one researcher to another on the opposite side of the world.
In my role as research software engineer at Imperial College London, I work hand in hand with researchers on any disciplines to help them make their software accessible, sustainable and of good quality. Sometimes this is me creating the software; others it is about training them to do it right themselves.
During my talk, I will try to convince you of the value of good quality, open software for research, the enormous impact it can create… And also some of the risks it brings.
Challenges in open science – from a researcher’s perspective
by Dr Mayank Patni
Website: http://www.bristol.ac.uk/engineering/people/mayank-patni/index.html
Twitter: @mayank_patni
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mayank-patni-b7831431
“Discovering amazing things, showing them off in conferences, publishing articles in journals, counting citations, updating CV and writing proposals to attract more funding”.
I strongly believe, as researchers, we have confined ourselves only to the above activities. In the pursuit of self-development, we do not worry about finding ways of disseminating our research to a wider community and contributing to the progress of the society. In such cases, stringent open access policies by funder become important as it facilitate research outputs to be freely accessible by academic and non-academic audiences. However, most major research funders usually focus on two elements: open research data and open access to scientific publications; but open science is much more than that. It is about extending the principles of openness to the whole research cycle and aiming to remove the barriers for sharing any kind of output, resources, methods or tools, at any stage of the research process. The rationale behind open science is complex, and therefore, numerous concerns and issues exists, particularly from a researcher’s perspective.
In this talk, I will be touching upon various socio-cultural, technological, political, legal and economic challenges faced by researchers to make their research truly open.