LMU-MPG Open Science Summer School 2024

This year, the 5-day-long Open Science Summer School organized by the Max Planck Digital Library and the LMU Open Science Center took place on September 9-13 in the new MPDL facilities in Laim, Munich. Forty early-career researchers had the opportunity to gain skills and knowledge to make their research more transparent, reproducible, and credible.

The program featured a range of public lectures which provided a fundamental understanding of open science by approaching it from various perspectives. Prof. Dr. Felix Schönbrodt opened the program with a provocative talk about the replicability crisis, which highlighted the need for open science practices. Dr. Tim Errington shared eye-opening insights from the Reproducibility Project: Cancer Biology pointing out the challenges of replicating key experiments in cancer research due to lack of access to data, code, and materials. Many of the studies which could be performed again, surprisingly often failed to achieve similar results. Shifting to an eagle eye’s perspective, Prof. Dr. Richard McElreath held an engaging lecture describing science as amateur software development, explaining how adopting professional software practices could improve the quality of scientific research. Focusing on a more philosophical view, Prof. Dr. Sabina Leonelli explored ethical aspects of open science emphasizing the current limitations of the movement in advancing inclusions and diversity in research.

The lectures provided participants with both theoretical insights and practical examples, setting the foundation for the hands-on workshops. These workshops allowed attendees to implement practices that increase the reproducibility of their daily workflow such as programming in R or Python, literate programming (or reproducible manuscript writing) and version control. Participants also learned the practical aspects of FAIR data sharing and preregistration.

Alongside the educational content, the event fostered a collaborative atmosphere, allowing participants to benefit from meaningful exchanges with other researchers. The Hybrid Get to Know session provided the opportunity for in-person and online attendees to network with each other. Thematic exchanges encouraged participants to share their thoughts and to reflect on the material covered in lectures and workshops enabling participants to deepen their understanding and explore the limitations of open science practices. To close the week, the “What’s next?”- session prompted participants to reflect and plan or their future implementations of open research practices intheir research, anticipating possible social and technical challenges and ways to alleviate them successfully.

Looking back, the summer school was a great success: researchers were eager to engage and learn skills that increase the transparency and credibility of research, the feedback were overwhelmingly positive, and several wrote personally to express the deep impact it had on their approach to science and about their newfound passion for open science advocacy.

All materials of the summer school including the lectures’ recordings and tutorials can be found on https://osf.io/pxgsc/.