The Open Science event was organised by NTU Library and CRADLE (Centre for Research and Development in Learning) on 15 Aug 2019. About 100 participants from different disciplines and departments of NTU attended the talk. The talk was about the Open Science movement which aims to remove barriers for sharing research outputs at any stage of research life cycle.

The event started with a welcome speech by Ms Goh Su Nee, Deputy Director (NTU Library, Office of Information, Knowledge & Library Services). She spoke of the timeliness of this event as Singapore funders such as Ministry of Education’s Social Science Research Thematic Grant and National Medical Research Council are starting to require data sharing. There are also more NTU researchers who are responding to data availability requirements from publishers by making their data available on DR-NTU (Data).

The first speaker, Prof Daniel Ansari started with the emphasis of the importance of reproducible research. ‘Reproducible research’ here refers to research that can reproduce the same results, given the same data using the same methods. On the other hand, ‘replicable research’ refers to research that can reproduce the same results using a different sample. Reproducibility and replicability issues exist not just in social sciences but other subject disciplines as well. The current focus on results instead of the research process can inadvertently lead to Questionable Research Practices (QRPs), such as harking, P-hacking and publication biases. He shared that preregistration could perhaps help to mitigate some of these risks. Platforms such as Open Science Framework, ‘AsPredicted’ facilitate the process of preregistrations. Another important way to address QRPs is data sharing. He strongly encourages researchers to replicate their own data as a way to self-examine, and to also participate in large-scale replication.

The second speaker, Nanyang Assistant Professor Suzy Styles compared the pros and cons of using different data repository platforms. She also shared her experience in integrating her Open Science Framework account with DR-NTU (Data). Click here for an example of her preregistration datasets.

The final speaker, Nanyang Assistant Professor Gianluca Esposito advocated that the sharing, using and re-using research data during the whole research process to be an essential approach to make one’s science stronger. He shared how he made his data more re-usable by including comprehensive metadata, data documentation, file-level description and tags in his datasets by showing one example on the NTU research data repository DR-NTU (Data).

The last segment was sharing by librarian, Ms Er Bee Eng, Assistant Director (NTU Library, Office of Information, Knowledge & Library Services) about scholarly publishing services offered by library. There were also posters displayed for the participants to look through.

The participants had an overview of ‘Open Science’ which can help them to implement the principles of openness in their own ways.

Presentation slides:

  1. Open Science -what is all the fuss about? By Prof Daniel Ansari
  2. Using institutional repositories as part of the Open Science ecosystem by Nanyang Asst Prof Suzy Styles
  3. Sharing, using and re-using data in social neuroscience by Nanyang Asst Prof Gianluca Esposito
  4. NTU Library- your Open Science partner by Ms Er Bee Eng

 

This post was written by Ms Lavanya Asokan with input from Ms Goh Su Nee.