The UK Reproducibility Network (UKRN) is teaming up with the Open Research Calendar to help collate open research events under a single accessible resource.
An ever increasing number of conferences, seminars, and courses are being organised around topics of open research, reproducibility, replicability and trustworthiness of science. The recent move by many institutions to make these meetings entirely virtual has enabled new levels of access, but how can the avid researcher keep track of all these opportunities?! One potential answer lies in community members volunteering their event information to a unified tool, which exists as a single resource for others to track. This is the ethos behind Open Research Calendar (@openresearchcal).
Open Research Calendar was developed by a team of researchers during the Advanced Methods in Reproducible Science 2020. The idea was generated by attendees of the 2019 meeting, and jumped upon by 2020 attendees as something to “play with” during “hack” time. The tool was designed, developed and launched in under 5 days by a team formed of (alphabetically) Cassandra Gould van Praag, Bradley Kennedy, Alexandra Lautarescu and Esther Plomp. Within the first 6 months of its launch, the Open Research Calendar gained over 450 followers and received 80+ submissions for events from across the globe. Interest continues to grow, and the tool has even been adopted by other communities to collate their events.
Open Research Calendar recently received support from UKRN to elevate the infrastructure, support development, and raise awareness of this exciting resource within our community. Open Research Calendar facilitates the community in sharing their event information into one easily accessible database, and benefit from increased exposure. Entries are automatically translated into a google calendar event and tweeted out to online followers. The collection of events can also be followed in the Open Research Calendar Google Calendar, which can be subscribed to or embedded in external web pages. The development team said:
We are really excited by the opportunity to work with UKRN to develop this tool and make it a staple within the open research community. We will now be able to focus on improving the user experience and smoothing our workflow. We have learnt a lot in the last 6 months of user testing, and we’re excited to see where we can go next with more contributions and feedback!
Find out more about Open Research Calendar via Twitter and connect with the team or contribute via the Github repository.
Example tweet from open research calendar advertising an event added by the community.
The Open Research Calendar Team and others at the Advanced Methods in Reproducible Science 2020 meeting, Cumberland Lodge, UK.