Danny Chan is the President of Biotech Without Borders, a non-profit community biology lab in New York City. Besides trying to defend his time to pursue independent research centered around protocol development for the DIY science community, he enjoys video games, eating new food around the city, watching movies with his partner, and playing table-top RPGs.

Sridhar Gutam is a Senior Plant Physiologist at ICAR, the Indian Institute of Horticultural Research, and also the Convenor at Open Access India. His main area of interests are Plant Physiology, Plant Phenology and Plant Phenotyping as well as Open Access, Open Data, Free and Open Source Software.

Stephanie Gauttier is an Assistant Professor at the Grenoble School of Management (GEM) doing research at the intersection of information systems, human-computer interaction, and ethics. She is the Vice-Chair of the COST Action CA 19117 Researcher Mental Health Observatory and is active in initiatives related to supporting researchers' mental health. For the Marie Curie Alumni Association, Stephanie co-created a peer-to-peer mental health mentoring network.

In today's episode, Jo talks with Abigail Dean about her personal experience from working in the conservation and environmental research field to citizen science projects to web design and social media. Abigail shares her insights about the importance of being able to communicate research and science in a digestible way to the general public that doesn't have a science background.

A conversation with Sarah Nyanchera Nyakeri

A conversation with Lambert Heller

Dr. Mimi Zhou is a conversion copywriter who works with coaches and service providers to unleash the full impact of their words. Clients love that she can swiftly see the missing pieces in their messaging Read more…

A conversation with Dasapta Erwin Irawan

A conversation with Donny Winston

A conversation with Mark Hahnel.

A conversation with Nithaya Chetty.

A conversation with Christian Nawroth.

A conversation with Rike Bucher.

A conversation with Nicholas Outa.

"Hardware is a vital part of experiments process and advances in instrumentation have been central to scientific revolutions by expanding observations beyond standard human senses." But making hardware and especially sharing hardware is neither an easy nor a recognized task in academia. In order to tackle this issue, some of us started a Research Data Alliance (RDA) interest group.

This collective preprint is an active document intended to encourage reflection on academic writing. It is meant to evolve as a result of continuous input from interested contributors. Everyone is welcome who wants to contribute.

Nadja Neumann tells us about her journey from molecular biologist to research advisor and podcast host. With a PhD in Molecular Biology and a strong commitment to scholarly communication and open science, Nadja is keen to find ways to bridge the gap between the research community and other stakeholders to create an open, equitable, and efficient exchange of knowledge. Currently living her passion by working with research support at Karlstad University, Nadja's areas of expertise are strategic publishing, bibliometrics, data management, and sch

Talking about preprints and AfricArXiv in particular, we are honored to be featured in University World News along with colleagues and institutional partners Joy Owango (TCC Africa-Training Centre in Communication ), Stephanie Dawson (ScienceOpen), Mark Hahnel (figshare), Catherine Ahearn (Knowledge Futures Group).

The Budapest Open Access Initiative is celebrating its 20th anniversary and is marking this occasion by releasing four major recommendations, informed by community input, to guide #openaccess in the next 10 years.

Maureen Archer is President of the training and consulting firm Professional English Inc. and helps professionals (incl. researchers) improve their English skills and confidence for career advancement. With Jo, she talks about the career path that led her to her current profession, common challenges and obstacles with the English language as perceived by non-native English speakers, as well as some of the key skills researchers should have in communicating their ideas, thoughts, and results.

Tatyana Deryugina talks with Jo Havemann about the ongoing war in Ukraine, her outreach to Russian scholars to encourage them to oppose the war and take feasible action, as well as some of the responses she received.

The ReMO COST Action stands in solidarity with the people of Ukraine. We add our voices to the joint declaration of Eurodoc and the Marie Curie Alumni Association and strongly condemn the Russian Federation’s acts of violence and aggression against the people of Ukraine. We also concur with the COST Association’s call for international efforts to help ensure the safety of Ukrainian researchers and innovators.

PLEASE: Let us support the opposition in Russia by maintaining ties with Russian colleagues in Research and Cultural professional contexts and intl collaboration.
Please read the Engl Translation of Elena Stein's post: …

The website #ScienceForUkraine serves as a platform to support Ukrainian researchers with accommodation, research hosting, and funding. How you can help If you hear about dedicated positions with short-term availability dedicated to Ukrainian researchers on Read more…

We, Russian scientists and scientific journalists, declare a strong protest against the hostilities launched by the armed forces of our country on the territory of Ukraine. This fatal step leads to huge human losses and undermines the foundations of the established system of international security. The responsibility for unleashing a new war in Europe lies entirely with Russia.

Julieta Arancio, Alex Kutschera and André Maia Chagas share details about their mentorship program for Open Hardware projects.

"By 'life' we mean a thing that can nourish itself and grow and decay."

– Aristotle

Rethink your publishing strategy. Instead of making it all about numbers and prestige (High Impact factor and Journal, find answers to the questions of Why, What, When, and How to make your research results available and based on that decide Where to publish.

Wangari talks about her experience as a professional in mental health, her work at Eider Africa, and the importance of community values for holistic well-being.

"You cannot protect the environment unless you empower people, you inform them, and you help them understand that these resources are their own, that they must protect them."
– Wangari Maathai

"An experiment is a question which science poses to Nature, and a measurement is the recording of Nature’s answer."

– Max Planck

Laure shares steps in her career including her contributions to ORCID as founding executive director that led her towards building the Mighty Red Barn consultancy. We explore the purpose and role of [open] scholarship and respectful community building as well as collaboration in engaging with societal challenges.

Access 2 Perspectives now hosts conversations around various topics from Open Science to Science Communication.

Owango, Joy, Munene, Aurelia, Ngugi, Wangari Joyce, Obanda, Johanssen, Havemann, Johanna, Saderi, Daniela, & Korzec, Kornelia. (2021, December 9). Open Reviewers Africa – A workshop to empower the next generation of African Peer Reviewers. FORCE2021: Joining Forces to Advance the Future of Research Communications. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5770712

Munene, Aurelia, Ngugi, Wangari Joyce, Owango, Joy, Obanda, Johanssen, Havemann, Johanna, Saderi, Daniela, & Korzec, Kornelia. (2021). Open Reviewers Africa. FORCE2021: Joining Forces to Advance the Future of Research Communications. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5762096

Heads of states and various stakeholders have convened at COP26 to formulate solutions to the impacts of climate change. Addressing these enormous challenges requires access to scientific research, including that conducted by environmental non-government organizations (eNGOs).

Digital tools that support open science practices play a key role in the seamless accumulation, archiving and dissemination of scholarly data, outcomes and conclusions. Despite their integration into open science practices, the providence and design of these digital tools are rarely explicitly scrutinized.

Havemann, Jo. (2021). Research Capacity - Reality, Equality, Equity. FORCE2021: Joining Forces to Advance the Future of Research Communications (FORCE2021). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5736934

Here are a few quick search results in counter-chronological order for “illegal pharmaceuticals" (example search). Be aware that each platform works with a specific search approach and algorithm which is why we recommend for you to always compare and screen search results on more than one or two platforms:

Havemann, Jo. (2021). Open Science Pie. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4587729

Our team member Rima Maria Rahal was invited by Rebecca Johnson and Rachel Taylor from Glasgow ReproducibiliTea, watch here the recording of her presentation. ‘Science in Crisis? Open Science as a Reform Movement’ Open Science Read more…

Open Science is a concept promoting transparency, reproducibility, equity, and fairness in knowledge acquisition and dissemination for ecologically sustainable livelihood of a global society in accordance with Good Scientific Practice (GSP) by utilizing digital tools and services.

It's been a deeply memorable experience to be interviewed by Ghazali Ohorella, the host of the Gomaluku Podcast and the thought leadership show #HotToIndigenousNOW where he provides a safe space and uplifting platform for indigenous mentors and leaders from around the world.

Our colleague André Maia Chagas is inviting you to fill and share a little informal poll on Twitter about open source hardware documentation in academic papers: https://twitter.com/Chagas_AM/status/1337346638084452355?s=20 Articles on #openhardware have different documentation standards, making it Read more…

Originally published at ijoerandbeyond.org/open-education-mirrors-the-open-science-reform-movement/ | Open Educational Resources (OERs) are a game-changer for education, for a plethora of reasons spanning aspects such as accessibility and dissemination. Here, I want to focus on the promise of Read more…

Under the title Encouraging Preprint Curation and Review, ASAPbio has held a design sprint to increase exposure for new and existing ideas for encouraging preprint curation and review. The event was held in collaboration with Read more…

Aravinth Panch, A2P team member and co-founder of DreamSpace Academy in Batticaloa, helped Sri Lanka Institute of Nanotechnology (SLINTEC) Colombo to develop a rapid test kit for COVID-19 as reported in newspapers in Sri Lanka.

Imagine: from your taxpayer's money, you pay for the highways in your country. And then imagine a company would come along, put up a toll gate and charge you so much money that only the richest cars could afford to use this highway. We would never allow this to happen on our roads, would we? But then why are we allowing this to happen to our scientific knowledge?

Pivot Global Education was commissioned by the Universities South Africa’s Entrepreneurship Development in Higher Education along with the Department of Higher Education and Training (South Africa) to assess and map the development of entrepreneurship throughout the country’s public universities by evaluating structures, supports, delivery and successes in entrepreneurship development.

During the current SARS-COV-2 pandemic, the scientific approach is ostensibly unable to keep up with the rapid pace at which the crisis is spreading. After developing a research idea, it usually takes years to publish Read more…

[originally published at zbw-mediatalk.eu] Due to precautionary measures in regard to the coronavirus, the second day of this year’s Open Science Conference got canceled. Luckily, the panellists Johanna Havemann, Anne-Floor Scholvinck, Daniel Spichtinger and August Read more…

[originally published at opensciencemooc.eu] We are deeply saddened by the sudden death of our colleague Dr Jonathan (Jon) Tennant. Jon was a visionary, deeply committed to making science accessible to everyone. For years, he worked Read more…

University and research institute labs around the world have repurposed their inventory and skills set to produce self-made sanitizers. Here are two examples, from Nigeria and Sweden: Download the WHO Guide to local production of Read more…

With the current coronavirus pandemic, the urgent need for Open Access to research results will increase scientific public domain knowledge to COVID-19 related literature hence enabling African researchers to develop African-centered solutions towards combating the SARS-CoV 2 virus, while at the same time strengthening the local biomedical resources of African countries and increasing their preparedness for future outbreaks. This applies to both global and regional levels. Previous virus outbreaks, such as the recent Western African Ebola and Zika epidemics, ...

The International African Institute (IAI, https://www.internationalafricaninstitute.org) in collaboration with AfricarXiv (https://info.africarxiv.org) present an interactive map of African digital research literature repositories. This drew from IAI’s earlier work from 2016 onwards to identify and list Africa-based institutional repositories that focused  on identifying repositories based in African university libraries. Our earlier resources are available at https://www.internationalafricaninstitute.org/repositories.

There is a lot of information circulating about COVID-19 – some more reliable than others. For many individuals, it is stressful to sort through differing messages – often in languages that are not their mother-tongue. Read more…

COVID-19 relevant information and resources by country License: CC-0 Click on individual nodes and view information by country info hotlines governmental informational websites, Twitter feeds & Facebook pages fact checking online resources language indicator DIY Read more…

Maia Chagas, A.; Molloy, J.; Prieto Godino, L.; Baden, T. Leveraging Open Hardware to Alleviate the Burden of COVID-19 on Global Health Systems. Preprints2020, 2020030362 (doi: 10.20944/preprints202003.0362.v1). Abstract With the current rapid spread of COVID-19, Read more…

Scientists often run three or more highly complex projects in parallel. On top of that, a growing number of publishers and funding agencies require scientists to make their raw data available upon publication according to Read more…

What do you think are integral parts of research integrity? What topics are entailed and should be discussed in all or some research disciplines to what detail and with what specific aspects? >> board.net/p/A2P_Research_Integrity List of Read more…

We are inviting you for a virtual collaborative writing sprint around Scholarly Communication and soft skills development for researchers. Agenda: board.net/p/A2P_COVID19-Quarantine_OpenScience-sprint Facilitated by Access 2 Perspectives team membersTopics: access2perspectives.com/topics/Contact: info@access2perspectives.org (Jo Havemann)Licensing: CC-BY 4.0 Access Read more…

Refer to the Wikipedia article 2019–20 coronavirus pandemic or the World Health Organization’s situation reports for most recent reported case information. Protect yourself and others from infection by following these suggestions: Handwashing Respiratory hygiene Self-isolation and self-quarantine Social distancing Read more…

AfricArxiv is a free, open source and community-led digital archive for African research output in the form of a non-profit open source platform for African scientists to upload their working papers, pre-prints, accepted manuscripts (post-prints), and published papers as well as associated data packages and article versioning. AfricArxiv is dedicated to enhance and open up research and collaboration among African scientists and non-African scientists that work on African topics.

I worry that ‘I don’t know what I don’t know. That is the situation of many students when faced with research data management issues. After years of practice in the neuroscience data analysis and 6 Read more…

The following interview was originally published at zbw-mediatalk.eu and licensed under Creative Commons BY 4.0. Enjoy the read! Fostering transparency, open access and global dialogue in research are crucial to deal with local as well Read more…

The first webinar of the Open Science MOOC focused on Module 5: Open Research Software and Open Source and was pesented by our team colleague André Maia Chagas.   View the slides of this presentation at Read more…

A couple of days ago on May 15th in Leipzig, Germany at the Mx Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (MPI-EVA), Corina Logan had invited Denis Bourguet and Thomas Guillemaud from Peer Community In to give Read more…

Since Open Science has become a recurring buzzword for recent meta-scientific developments, this article summarizes what these developments entail. What are the reasons for discussions about Open Access, Open Data and Open Peer Review? Which technological changes can we expect and which impact will they have on society and the research community? 

As Open Data and the F.A.I.R. Principles are more and more becoming a standard in scientific processes, transparency and reproducibility of the whole research workflow are starting to be recognized as good scientific practices (see Read more…

The changing world of scholarly communication and the emerging new wave of ‘Open Science’ or ‘Open Research’ has brought to light a number of controversial and hotly debated topics. […]

Havemann, Johanna. (2019, February). A Case for Open Science Hardware. Zenodo. doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.2564076

Disclaimer as of Nov 15, 2019: Official announcement from the Open Science MOOC Steering Committee – Introducing the Open Science MOOC by Jon Tennant. This article was originally published on genr.eu | DOI: 10.25815/6hyr-g583 The Read more…

This article was originally published at ese-bookshelf.blogspot.com by our colleague Duncan Nicholas. After more than a year of work, the Open Scholarship Strategy document has been published in full. The work was inspired by the Foundations Read more…

Justin Ahinon and Jo Havemann, both founders of AfricArXiv, talk in this article about the development of Open Science Services in Africa, initiatives, the current situation and chances in the future. This article was originally Read more…

In an attempt to secure and protect unbiased Open Science in Europe our team member, palaeontologist and Open Access activist Jon Tennant has taken another stand against Elsevier. Elsevier is the biggest and most influential Read more…

An article by Nick Wehner, Director of Open Initiatives at OCTO | Open Communications for The Ocean – originally published at marxivinfo.org. Numerous studies have found that Open Access papers are cited significantly more than the global average. Across Read more…

Towards the end of September, the Open Science Fellows Program  will enter its third round at Wikimedia Germany. Once again, 20 scientists will be supported in making their scientific research and teaching open and thereby contributing Read more…

At this year’s re:publica, we had a session on Open Science Hardware. Our focus was on hardware and software solutions, tools and services, resources and projects that adopt the Open Source approach and have one goal: Read more…

Introducing our new course on Policy Writing and Communication for Scientists, Alexandra Athansopoulous-Köpping shares her views on the importance of the topic and its relevance to research.   In the last season of Game of Read more…

This post was originally published in Swedish at the Vetenskap & Allmänhet website. “VA is an independent Swedish non-profit membership organization that works to promote dialogue and openness between researchers and the public.” This English version was Read more…

On his blog Green Tea and Velociraptors our team colleague Jon Tennant questions the ethics of the widely practiced copyright transfer from authors of peer reviewed articles that are based mostly on public funding to commercial publishers.  Read more…

Tim Blais is the creative everything at A Capella Science and has a Master’s degree in Theoretical and Mathematical Physics from McGill University in Montreal, Canada. In the Scientific American blog Joanne Manaster suggested his project Read more…

The infographic shows how to achieve 100% Open Access for free and legally; available on figshare.

For a 2-day course on Good Manufacturing Practice earlier this week, I prepared the following presentation. The lecture started with a recap of Good Scientific Practice, followed by Good Laboratory Practice as prerequisites for reliable and transparent Read more…

Our institutional partner TCC Africa offers trainings in Science Communication across the African continent, course topics ranging from proposal writing to resource mobilisation, data analysis and communicating to non-scientists. Two participants from a recent BHEARD Read more…

In a recent SciDevNet article, Ochieng’ Ogodo reported on the discussion outcomes from this year’s Regional Conference on Balanced and Inclusive Education (BIE) aimed to offer suggestions for addressing Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 4 (Education). The meeting was hosted in Read more…

This podcast was originally published at PhD Career Stories. Professor Alfred Orina Isaac is a Pharmaceutical Scientist at Kenya Technical University with a specific interest in Neuroscience. His research is focused on neurotoxicology and neuroprotection mechanisms in Read more…

  In April this year, the following 10 changemakers gathered at Ruhr University for TEDxRuhrUniversityBochum:   (1) Ganesh Muren presenting his social enterprise Saora Insustries, which delivers a solution for sustainable, affordable and environment-friendly drinking water. (2) Jakob Read more…

Researchers give papers for free (and often actually pay) to exploitative publishers who make millions off of our articles by locking them behind paywalls. This discriminates not only against the public (who are usually the ones that paid for the research in the first place), but also against the academics from institutions that cannot afford to pay for journal subscriptions and the ‘scholarly poor’. I explain exploitative and ethical publishing practices, highlighting choices researchers can make right now to stop exploiting ourselves and discriminating against others.

Scientists around the world showed their support to the OA-Africa network and joined the ocean acidification day on June 8, 2017. Ocean acidification is now identified as major threat to marine ecosystems and is one of Read more…

Originally published in naturejobs. The March for Science turned a spotlight on the importance of research. But it won’t have a lasting effect unless we improve science communication, says Judith Reichel. On Saturday, April 22nd, Read more…

This podcast was originally published at PhD Career Stories. Dr Dennis Fink changed his career path in 2011 after his PhD in Marine Microbiology at the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen. In todays “PhD Read more…

In case you are struggling to name one actual living scientist, here are a few: #actuallivingscientist Tweets !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],p=/^http:/.test(d.location)?’http’:’https’;if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src=p+”://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js”;fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,”script”,”twitter-wjs”);

This podcast was originally published at PhD Career Stories. If the reader is to grasp what the writer means, the writer must understand what the reader needs. – Judy Swan & George D. Gopen   Read more…

In his blog Green Tea and Velociraptors, Jon Tennant describes his approach to writing a peer review […] I remember the first time I got a review request in the second year of my PhD. An Editor Read more…

This podcast was originally published at PhD Career Stories.   “Hello and welcome to today’s podcast on PhD Career Stories. My name is Johanna Havemann and I will tell you a bit about my path Read more…

Have you set an agenda and goals, what you would like to achieve with your science-related Twitter account? What do your followers expect from you and – most importantly – who are you addressing? No matter if you Read more…

Our short answer is “YES”. Do you need arguments in favor of Open Access (OA) in Research? Here you go: More citations per article OA articles are available free of charge not only to scientists Read more…

Would you agree that the Digital Age and the Academic Internet are bringing the scientific world closer together? OpenCon is the annual gathering of #OpenAccess, #OpenEducation and #OpenData enthusiasts and gives rise to numerous satellite events across Read more…

People tend to have only one perspective. What makes this world interesting and worthwhile is to once in a while move out of your comfort zone and put yourself into the shoes of someone else. Read more…