The Eurodoc conference 2017 was themed “Open Science – Challenges and Opportunities for Early Career Researchers” and brought together a blend of Open Science visionaries, international experts and stakeholders relating to Open Science. Speakers were invited from Early Career Researcher associations from all around Europe who shared with us best practices, personal experiences and ways forward to a more open academia.
Open Science means allowing everyone free access to research results. Science must become more accessible, inclusive, transparent, collaborative and costeffective for it to thrive. Peer-review processes, scientific journals and articles repositories are the main structures that will need to be redesigned to welcome the Open Science innovation in a functional and sustainable way. Researchers of every field, as continuous contributors to the development of science, can increase their scientific outcome via more effective publishing strategies. The Eurodoc 2017 conference provided great insight to the processes behind open access science, highlighting the advantages, risks and problems involved with Open Science.
The conference was open to all Early Career Researchers who are interested in learning more about Open Science and what challenges and opportunities it brings with it. Our speakers gave us a closer look at the problems of today’s scientific communication, and explored how Open Science offers ways to overcome issues of inequality, research integrity and results reproducibility. Much attention was given on the relevance of Open Science for day-to-day working conditions of Early Career Researchers and what concrete steps can be taken by decision-makers and individual researchers to promote Open Science. The presented measures were aimed to have immediate implications for individual researchers and can help contribute solving global challenges.
The conference took place from 26-27 April and was hosted by the University of Oslo. Generous funding from the Norwegian Ministry of Education and several Norwegian higher education institutions (UiO, NIH, NTNU, NMBU, HSN, UiT, UiS, UiB) was received.
