After organising two well-attended open science events, first in Ljubljana in 2018 and second in Maribor in 2019, the Young Academy of Slovenia (Mlada akademija) has organised its third open science event in a row. For this year, the occasion was formatted as a series of four online events that took place during the International Open Access Week 2020 between October 19-22. The events were also part of the National Science Month organised by the Slovenian Ministry of Education, Science and Sport. The recordings are available to watch on the YouTube channel of the Young Academy of Slovenia.
On October 19, our guest was Gareth O’Neill, Principal Consultant on Open Science at Technopolis Group and an expert on Open Science for the European Commission and Dutch Government. He talked about Open Access and Plan S, an initiative of scientific research funders working to achieve full and immediate open access to scientific publications.
On October 20, for World Statistics Day 2020, our guest was prof dr. Michael Bosnjak, Director of the Leibniz Institute for Psychology Information (ZPID) and Professor of Research Methods at the University of Trier. He presented tools and services that they offer to facilitate reproducibility, and whilst the tools are designed for researchers in psychology and other social sciences, the presentation will be relevant also for other scientific fields.
The remaining two events in the series were held in Slovenian. On October 21, the discussion topic was the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) with guest Dunja Legat, MSc, from the University Library Maribor who is the representative of NI4OS, the regional EOSC project for South-East Europe and member of the EOSC Skills & Training Work Group. On October 22, we organised a roundtable discussion on research assessment with prof. dr. Janja Hojnik from the University of Maribor (the only Slovenian university that has signed the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment), prof. dr. Gregor Majdič from the University of Ljubljana (the largest Slovenian university), and Miro Pušnik, MSc, Director of the Central Technical Library.
Each of the individual events in the series was watched live by between 20 and 30 researchers and after the event they achieved nearly two hundred views. Therefore, we intend to continue the tradition and organise the fourth annual event next autumn, either live, online, or both.
Ana Slavec
Eurodococ Open Science Working Group Coordinator and Ambassador
Advisory board member of the Young Academy of Slovenia, the association of Slovenian doctoral students and early career researchers