Have you ever been at a barcamp before? If I am totally honest with you, me… never ever! The first time I heard the words “barcamp” I was not sure what it even meant until my colleage — who told me about it — explained it to me. So it is how I attended for the first time in my life a barcamp, more specifically: Barcamp Open Science (archiv), celebrated last 12 March, 2018, in Berlin, Germany (Hashtag: #oscibar) and I have to say that the experience was just amazing. The format of a Barcamp is actually really easy, lots of people come together and have the opportunity to offer interesting sessions to the others. Depending on the number of participants the session take place or not. That means that a barcamp has a high degree of “improvisation” with quality.

The sessions that the participants at the barcamp Open Science attended were:

  • Open Science Tools;
  • Publishing at libraries;
  • Painpoints at Open Science;
  • Scholia profiles based on Wikidata;
  • How do we motivate / reward doing Open Science;
  • Research software publishing/repositories;
  • Transparency Limits + problems;
  • Human Rights & Open Science;
  • Metadata / Codebooks;
  • Software Citation and Recognition;
  • Talking to scientists Open Peer ReviewParlament; Open Knowledge Maps;
  • How Can Open Science Be Fun;
  • Move from trusted platforms to P2P;
  • Valid reasons for opting out of open science;
  • CC0/PD vs. (CC)Licences for Open Science;
  • ORCID – the Open Researcher and Contributor ID (and how to use the BASE search engine to get your publications into ORCID);
  • Elements of an Open Science Indicator;
  • Doing research outside academia / Citizen Science.

All the sessions that I was attending were really interesting; but the session that I most liked was: “Fun In Open Science” by Dr. Ingo Keck. At this session I got the oportunity to realize why and what I really like of Open Science. The idea to be collaborative is at the end a new kind of competition. No matter what field you are in, from development assistence to tech, collabotation is going to be the future because it brings a truly innovation. There is no need for all of us to reinvent the wheel. There is not need for all of us to repeat what already has been done. In a field like science, scientific research is based on collaboration, and we can learn much from this model to facilitate institutional and business collaborations.

If we look around us, we can see that words like: transparency, collaboration, open access, authenticity, etc., are getting more and more important on our societies. The rising of awarness about what other peple are doing is incressing on popularity. Citizens around the world are demanding more access to information  from public institutions together with more transparency. From my point of view, there are more good actors than bad actors, and this raising of conscience is going to bring us all forward.

I would like to finish this post inviting you to see the video that the participant of the session “fun in open science” made: