If you have a question that is not in this list, please ask openscience@tudelft.nl.
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General questions
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- Through sharing your publications and other research artefacts with a wider audience and inviting collaborations, you increase the visibility of your work and expand your network.
- TU Delft is modernising the way academics are recognised and rewarded. The TU Delft Recognition and Rewards Perspective 2021-24 aims to ensure that contributions to open science are valued in scholars’ results and development conversations and that open science skills are prioritised.
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- At TU Delft, the Strategic Plan Open Science 2020-24 supports the creation and consolidation of policies, infrastructure, services, training programmes and communities to enable our scholars to practise open science.
- In the Netherlands, National Plan Open Science (NPOS) supports and coordinates the initiation and implementation of open science activities by bringing together research stakeholders; VSNU’s “Room for everyone’s talent” position paper names stimulating open science as one of the main pillars in the recognition and rewards reform in academia.
- Internationally, the Hong Kong Principles for assessing researchers, which is endorsed by an increasing number of institutions worldwide, calls for the adoption and rewarding of open research practices.
- Fundersunders like NWO and the European Commission are committed to ensuring the adoption of open science practices in projects they fund.
- An increasing number of publishers request the sharing of code and data with publications.
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- You can discuss with your industrial partner the importance and mutual benefits of open science practices for your collaboration - open science platforms and tools (e.g. Open Science Framework) are often designed for more efficient large scale multistakeholder collaborations. Many platforms and tools also allow embargoes to be placed over the rich information until all contributors to the research project are ready to make them open.
- You should also inform your contract manager that all agreed open science practices should be covered in the contract, e.g. when and where results from the project will be published, the publication of data and code, etc.
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- If you work with data and software, build good data and software management habits, e.g. document your code as you go (instead of leaving it all till the end of your project), establish your own rules to naming files. You will set up a more efficient workflow which will save time in the long run.
- There are also many tools that make this easier - consult experts if you’d like to find out more
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- Your work is a lot richer than your papers. Sharing more parts of your research earlier to more people allow others to appreciate your work and contribute to and reuse it..
- You can obtain individual DOIs for your data, software, presentations, and other types of resources, and you will be cited when others use your research output.
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- Even results from research papers published in subscription-based journals can be misused
- Specific licenses allow you to specify how your work can be reused by others - learn more about the Creative Commons and open source software licenses. Consult the copyright helpdesk if you have questions about licenses.
Education questions
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- Open education is a collective term for teaching methodologies and practices that focus on the use and reuse of Open Educational Resources (OERs).
- OERs are teaching, learning and research materials in any medium – digital or otherwise – that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions (definition adapted from “A Basic Guide to Open Educational Resources (OER)” by UNESCO).
- The benefits of open education for teachers:
- OERs are additional/alternative teaching materials that are accessible, to students and teachers, at all times
- You can use OERs to organise courses and course materials more effectively and efficiently, by making use of existing materials instead of having to build your own from scratch
- Students can use OER to create their own learning experience - it allows you as a teacher to better adapt to the changes in the classroom and the ways students learn
- Open education encourages you to establish your teaching expertise within your field, by publishing and sharing work and practice, and be recognised for your contributions
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- No. e-learning courses and MOOCs are essentially collections of educational resources taken together to form courses. If e-learning/MOOCS are shared in the public domain or with an open license, they are OERs (but otherwise they are not).
- OERs don’t need to be digital- many OERs are sharable in a digital format but also printable. Printable OERs are particularly important in, for example, some developing countries, where internet bandwidth and connectivity challenges are common.
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- As you would with any commercial education resources, e.g. commercial textbooks! As the lecturer or programme/course coordinators, you currently probably have to pick the textbooks your students will follow, videos that you will play in class, lecture plans to adapt from your colleagues, etc. The processes through which you decide to use OER in your course will be similar.
- There’s an explosion of available content (both open and commercial), and it can be more demanding to search for, evaluate and select the appropriate materials. TUD library’s education support team is working with national and international partners to help teachers find and select OERs, and these tools will provide at least first levels of quality assurance.
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- Depending on the license of the OER, you may:
- Mix pieces of OER together and add additional material
- Adapt OER to better fit with your course/context, e.g. by changing examples to ones that are more easily understandable by your students, or translating materials into another language
- Extract assets, e.g. illustrations, graphs, in a completely different context
- Find out more about OER licenses, and/or consult the copyright helpdesk.
- Depending on the license of the OER, you may:
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- You can apply a Creative Commons (CC) license to your work - the different CC license statements detail which types of reuse is allowed. For example, a CC non-commercial license states that the licensed material cannot be used for commercial purposes.
- When someone asks to reuse your OERs, ask the person to credit you properly for your work and to follow the terms of the CC license you’ve applied to the work.
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- OERs are shared under open licenses, e.g. a Creative Commons license. These licenses specify how and where you and others can reuse and/or adapt the OER - learn more about licenses.
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- Yes, you would need the commercial material’s copyright holder’s permission to use it as part of an OER, and their permission to then also share this material under an open license.
- Whenever you use others’ materials (commercial or not) as part of an OER, remember to follow the steps to properly attribute the work (if required by license statement).
- You should also be mindful of extra restrictions on reuse for some open licenses, e.g. if you are reusing materials licensed under a ShareAlike license (e.g. CC BY-SA), then your OER must be published under a compatible license.
Research questions
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- Making your work understandable by others also helps other members in your team/lab or your existing collaborators build upon your work.
- Those who read your paper would be interested in your data/software/hardware.
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- If they do come across and use your raw data or code in their work, they would have to cite you!
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- Perhaps - but that’s also part of the scientific process! Having more pairs of eyes on your data/software/hardware increase the robustness of your work. If others spot errors and let you know, you can fix these errors and improve the quality of your work.
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- Please visit the Research Data Management FAQ page.