On 30 June and 1 July 2022, Goethe University Frankfurt held its first Open Science Forum, which took place at Campus Westend. Public research activities today are closely linked to Open Science. Open Science pursues the goal of promoting scientific progress and making it freely available to the broad scientific community, but also to the civilian public. Leading scientists on the field of Open Science from all over Germany and Europe presented and discussed current projects and initiatives towards good practice examples and sustainable Open Science strategies. Our Research Data Manager Johann Isaak and Science Communication Officer Phyllis Mania were among the participants.

On the first day, Prof. Dr. Frank Miedema (University Utrecht, NL) gave a keynote on the “Transition to Open Science: The Why and the How”, summarising the status and hurdles to implement Open Science approaches in the current academic research environments, while presenting concepts to break up and overcome entrenched structures in academia. Good practice examples were shown and discussed in subsequent talks by Dr. Axel Köhler, Dr. Susanne Müller-Knapp and Dr. Claudia Tredup, Dr. Uwe Schulze and Julia Beitner. The day was concluded with an inspiring panel discussion between researchers from different disciplines at Goethe University, among them ELEMENTS Principal Investigator Hannah Elfner. “The main advantage [of Open Science] is the accessibility of data and to be able to compare them quickly to your own analyses”, she says, adding: “Basically everything we do, we do Open Access, involving all the effort. It takes a lot of time for the students and myself.”

The second day was dedicated to workshops on a variety of topics concerning Open Source Software in science, the Frankfurt Open Science Initiative and an introduction to Open Educational Resources. Subsequent to the workshops, Dr. Wendy Patterson (Scientific Director Beilstein-Institute) delivered a keynote on “Open Science Version 3.0: Breaking Down Barriers for Equitable and Efficient Research Communication”, presenting the successful concept of the Beilstein-Institute towards Diamond Open Access publication journals.

All presentations of the Open Science Forum are available hier.