An Open Science Primer for Social Scientists

Abstract

“Open Science” has become a buzzword in academic circles. However, exactly what it means, why you should care about it, and – most importantly – how it can be put into practice is often not very clear to researchers. In this session of the SSDL, we will provide a brief tour d’horizon of Open Science in which we touch on all of these issues and by which we hope to equip you with a basic understanding of Open Science and a practical tool kit to help you make your research more open to other researchers and the larger interested public. Throughout the presentation, we will focus on giving you an overview of tools and services that can help you open up your research workflow and your publications, all the way from enhancing the reproducibility of your research and making it more collaborative to finding outlets which make the results of your work accessible to everyone. Absolutely no prior experience with open science is required to participate in this talk which should lead into an open conversation among us as a community about the best practices we can and should follow for a more open social science.