OpenFest 2023 Sheffield Showcase session recording: Launch of the Open Scholarship Community Sheffield

Recording of the Launch of the Open Scholarship Community Sheffield (OSCS) from the OpenFest 2023 Sheffield Showcase', which took place on 6 September 2023 and which brought together researchers from the University of Sheffield and Sheffield Hallam University to discuss open research practice.

Abstract:

The Open Scholarship Community Sheffield (OSCS) will be launching at OpenFest 2023 and joins the growing International Open Science and Scholarship Community (INOSC). The vision of OSCSheffield is to be an inclusive, supportive, and active community for researchers to interact, share knowledge and encourage good working practices such that the values, transparency and culture of Open Research become the norm. 

We aim to develop and share knowledge and good Open Research practices that foster, enable, encourage and support Open Research to be undertaken by anyone at Sheffield wishing to do so. We encourage community interactions where those with experience meet with those wishing to learn to share, support, mentor and encourage good Open Scholarship practices. This will encourage collaboration between individuals, groups, institutions and organisations seeking to improve transparency and openness in academic research. Communities align around a shared, or multiple overlapping, purposes and the flow of information is multi-directional, enabling members to achieve tasks they would not be able to do alone and affording a sense of belonging and affiliation to the community. 

Open Research is the future and the community itself who undertake the research are best placed to lead and effect change. By establishing OSCSheffield, researchers will be able to support each other, contribute to the wider INOSC community and benefit from interactions and knowledge exchange with other researchers around the world.

Neil Shephard started his career working in Genetic Epidemiology where he developed an interest in reproducible research. This interest persisted throughout career shifts into Medical Statistics and was found to be a common thread when working in software development in industry. The skills learnt are combined with academic experience and Neil now works as a Research Software Engineer in the Department of Computer Science helping researchers improve the quality and openness of their code.

Anita Eerland has a background in psychology and now works as an assistant professor Communication Science at Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands. She’s been an advocate for Open Science for over a decade and was involved in global initiatives like The Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science (SIPS) and PsyArXiv. In 2018 (while being employed by Utrecht University), she founded the Open Science Community Utrecht together with Loek Brinkman. She is now the chair of the Open Science Community Nijmegen, board member of the Dutch network of Open Science Communities (OSCNL) and the chair of the International Network of Open Science and Scholarship Communities (INOSC).