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OS4Physicists

Course plan and materials for the Open Science Course at the Physics Department, Utrecht University

Course goal

In Open Science for Physicists (OS4P), students evaluate the best practices, concepts and conditions used by physicists in their professional activities and workflow, working either inside or outside academia .

Instructors

This course is first developed by Sanli Faez (@sanlifaez) and Erik van Sebille (erikvansebille) in 2023, with the help of Hendrik Snijder (@hendelhendel), at the Physics department of Utrecht University.

Tanja Hinderer, Sjoerd Terpstra, Hosein Nemati, and Marc Schneiter have contributed to the second edition taught in the academic year 2024/25.

What to expect?

The OS4P course is about real-life skills and experiences of researchers in a rapidly evolving academic landscape. With the advancement of open science, students do not only need to update our idea of "how science works", but also need to know which tools are available and which skills will be necessary. Therefore, this course is a combination of lectures and hands-on exercises to get a good feeling of these new developments. Some of the open science practices are still not widely embraced by some people in the scientific community. These frictions could influence the post-graduate career of our students. To appreciate and form an opinion on these practices, these dilemmas are presented to the students through discussions and hands-on assignments, which are purposedly made imperfect just like the real world. In this course, we often ask why a certain choice is made or commonly practiced. Such questions are not always the most comfortable or easy to answer. We do out best to create a brave environment where such uncomfortable issues can be discussed openly and critically. We hope that all students engage in these discussions with curiosity and an open mind. As the course emphasizes learning from engagement, which is difficult to quantify, grading is done as pass/fail.

Covered Topics:

These topics are covered during the OS4P lectures:

  1. Ethos of Open Science: How does science work? Why open science? How did we get here?
  2. Git for Collaboration: Setting up a collaborative environment (readme, templates, community rules, version control, licensing and credit)
  3. Big Research Collaborations: Big science (CERN, VIRGO, IPCC, ...), co-authorship and asking for credit
  4. Open Innovation: Open design, Open source hardware, Open collaborations, Prototyping
  5. Knowledge Discovery: AI-based literature exploration
  6. Public Engagement: Public engagement: story-telling and presentation; activism and trust in scientists
  7. Reproducibility: Reproducibility: documentation for reproducibility (and data storage)
  8. Open Science Reflections: Revisiting the credibility cycle (grantwriting, scientific careers, post graduate position, professional and entrepreneurial careers, and the role of open science)

For details of the topics and lectures covered in each week, please look at the Syllabus Specific instructions for the academic year 2023-24 are listed in the essential info

Learning goals:

By following this course students make an attempt to

  1. understand the advantages and pitfalls of open science
  2. learn to set up and contribute to digital collaborative environments like GitHub repositories
  3. understand the structure of big research collaborations like CERN, and how to thrive in such an organizational system
  4. learn to set up a reproducible research environment for their projects
  5. learn to develop a prototype for a measuring device
  6. understand the role, responsibilities and interaction of scientists with scientific communities and the general public
  7. appreciate the business opportunities for scientists outside academia
  8. reflect on the position of open science in the current academic culture and career opportunities.

Assessment

The exercises for this course are team-based. See the list of assignments for an overview.

Teams will be reshuffled for each exercise so that pass/fail is individually determined by collecting a basket of satisfactory project results. Exercises are partially assessed by peers and partially by course instructors.

Learning outcomes: At various occasions during the course, students are assessed for the ability to

  • reimagine their own research in an open science workflow
  • be able to set up a github project for the course, with an individual portfolio of forks of team projects
  • produce an application for joining an international collaboration
  • create a workflow for an analytical or experimental exercise that others can reproduce
  • give a presentation about their other assignments using skills learned in the course.
  • design and/or develop a prototype experiment
  • perform a systematic review with the help of machine learning
  • reflect on changes in their understanding of the scientific process and the role of open science

Scheduling

Open Science for Physicists will run in period 1, and is scheduled on every Thursday afternoon from 13:15-17:00, between September 12th and November 1st.

Course materials

The course materials will be made available on the course repository and are regularly updated during the course. Important announcements will also be posted on the UU Blackboard system.