Meeting the Melbourne Open Science Community

Scott Ritchie

It’s been a big week for Open Science in Melbourne! Last saturday saw Melbourne’s first ever Open Science workshop, organised by Noon Silk, a Mathematics Masters student studying Quantum Physics at the University of Melbourne.

Fourty-five researchers and advocates of open science turned out for an early Saturday morning start to learn about various open science tools, including git and github, SciRate, Authorea, the SageMathCloud, and the NeCTAR Research Cloud. 

After a series of interactive workshops, the afternoon wound down with of presentations from organisations and proponents of Open Science, including our very own Scott Ritchie, Maia Sauren from the Open Knowledge Foundation, and Ian Mulvany from the eLIFE open access journal.

Here at the Research Bazaar we are heavy enthusiasts of open science, understanding that it helps foster collaborations and produces tools to make researchers’ lives easier. We were thus excited to get involved with the Open Science Workshop. I went along to introduce Software Carpentry along with the our upcoming bootcamps - training researchers in the basic labs skills required for scientific computing.

I also had the pleasure of announcing our Research Training Conference coming up next year, where we will run interactive workshops for many of the widely used open science tools. 

A summary of the day, along with all of the presentations can be found here.