The rising importance of open science and open data

Keynote presentation at the Mid-Atlantic Chapter of the Medical Library Association 2021. During our continued struggle navigating the COVID-19 pandemic, open science practices have become increasingly crucial in building a more transparent and reproducible scientific research landscape. Open science practices, such as sharing of research outputs, detailed methods documentation, open and collaborative workflows, and open access publishing, can accelerate the rate at which information on scientific discoveries and innovations are available to the public and other scientists, and enable reproducibility and reuse. In this talk, we highlight the positive implications of embracing open science practices in scientific research. In particular, we share examples of open science projects during the COVID-19 pandemic and reflect on how the pandemic has changed the way research and collaboration are done. We highlight a few activities in the Open Science & Data Collaborations program and research data management services at Carnegie Mellon University that support open science practices in biomedicine and beyond, and provide several practical recommendations for how conference attendees can incorporate these practices into their own workflow.