This year, I attended again the barcamp open science in Berlin. Due to corona, there were less people than last year, but the experience was still really cool. It is always nice to meet people and chat about open science. In all sessions there were pads where people could add their notes. There are also interviews on Open Science Radio.
The day started with the ignition talk by Birgit Schmidt, who works at University of Göttingen, State and University Library, you can also get the slides. She summarized the actual state of open access science publishing and put emphasis on putting this into the bigger picture and connected this topic with issues about funding as well as open peer review.
I attended four sessions: One about findability of research software, one about diamond open access and two about digital humanities. It seemed to me that this year the barcamp was more focused on certain topics, which way either because of less participants due to the beginning of the corona crisis or because the people attending were more focused on their topics.
Findability of research software is in my opinion a very interesting topic. For an information scientist, software is not findable just because it is on GitHub. On GitHub there are no identifiers, no keywords and often it is also not clear whether the software is still maintained or works with on an actual environment. Therefore I can easily relate to the summary we found in the pad:
Diamond open access was new to me. Basically it means that you try to keep the licenses of the articles also in your hands and try to do all the publishing process within the community in order to get rid of big journals. So the only infrastructure you have to provide externally is a publication system. For this, there exists especially one system: ojs (open journal systems), which is free software and runs on a server. I really liked this approach because it tackles some problems that still exist with open access nowadays like publication fees and the fact that publishers take your intellectual property away from you. The downside of course are the costs for the infrastructure: I do not have a clear number, but there needs some effort to be put into the hosting and providing of the system, so you also need (public) money or great efforts from within the community in order to run these systems. There are actually some projects even at DIPF doing this and I think it will be interesting to see in the future what happens to these projects.
The workshops about digital humanities were sometimes a little bit challenging. We had started with several discussions what might be problems when it comes to open research in digital humanities and we also have to acknowledge that other fields (especially in the natural sciences) are ahead of the humanities. This lead to interesting discussions in the workshops and still the problems that most of the people attending the open science barcamp do have a background in natural sciences or engineering, where open science is way more established than in the humanities.
I think in digital humanities there are actually two things happening: First, there is the will of a lot of people to make their research more open (I can see this when I talk to people during my dissertation). On the other side, we are also in the middle of the digitization of the field, so there is a lot of stuff tried out as well as researched. I would also argue it is not true that there is not so much open science going on in DH. Just think about all the projects to digitize old writings or the corpora created in linguistics. We see a lot of these processes and actually I think it is really interesting to be in these processes now to see what is possible and what is not possible in the future.
Summing up, it was a great event like last year, and thanks a lot to the organizers.