Poster presented at the Research Data Alliance Plenary Meeting 13 in Philadelphia, PA April 1-4, 2019.
In October 2018, Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh, PA, USA) hosted its first Open Science Symposium (event website: https://events.mcs.cmu.edu/oss2018/). The two-day event was a collaboration between data specialists in the University Libraries and life sciences faculty and was funded by a grant for life sciences from the DSF Charitable Foundation. The first day was a symposium featuring talks, discussions, and a scientific speed dating reception. The second day was a series of hands-on workshops on open science tools and platforms. The event brought together researchers from across the sciences including faculty, graduate students, post-docs and data professionals in neuroscience, biology, computer science, and engineering. Guest speakers, 18 in total from both Carnegie Mellon as well as other from outside the university, included researchers with success stories of open science, creators of open source tools, and publishers and funders working to support emerging open science practices. The speakers were organized into four sessions (Open Science in Research, Open Data and Reproducibility, Open Tools and Platforms, and Open Access) and gave brief talks followed by a panel Q&A at the end of each session. Over the course of the day several important themes emerged regarding research data and open science: 1) incentives and standards for data sharing need to come from the ground-up within the disciplines; 2) new collaborative methods for data collection and analysis are reshaping the way that science is done, including the ‘observatory model’ of centralized data collection, citizen science, and data science; 3) open data does not equal reusable data - standard formatting and documentation (plus hard work and incentivization) is necessary to make data truly reproducible and reusable, not just open. The poster will present these themes together with examples from life sciences research presented by the symposium presenters. Presentations from the event have been documented on Open Science Framework: https://osf.io/54gue/. Carnegie Mellon University Libraries is currently growing their support for open science through expert services and infrastructure for researchers. The 2nd Open Science Symposium will be held on Nov. 7, 2019 in Pittsburgh.