Penn State’s first ever Open Science Bootcamp

More than 50 students, staff, and faculty participated in Penn State’s first ever Open Science Bootcamp August 9-11, 2023. Dr. Tim Errington, Senior Director of Research at the Center for Open Science, gave a keynote presentation about his work on the Reproducibility Project: Preclinical Cancer Biology. Participants learned about tools for preregistration, data management, replication studies, producing reproducible workflows using R and Python, where to share data, how to identify and avoid questionable research practices, and how early career researchers can incorporate open science practices into their research. Participants also engaged in active discussions about how to build and grow an open science community at Penn State. The Bootcamp was sponsored by the Child Study Center (CSC), Department of Psychology, the Department of Statistics, the Center for Social Data Analytics, the Center for Language Acquisition, the College of the Liberal Arts, the Institute for Computational and Data Science (ICDS), and the Social Sciences Research Institute (SSRI).

Dr. Rick Gilmore, CSC Open Data and Developmental Science (ODDS) initiative director called the Bootcamp “an exciting launch of what we hope will come to be a vibrant community of researchers committed to open science practices and principles.” Gilmore along with Dr. Frank Hillary (Psychology), Dr. Nicole Lazar (Statistics), and Dr. Briana Wham (University Libraries) are leading an effort to create a formal open science center.

For more information about the Bootcamp, including copies of all talk slides, see https://penn-state-open-science.github.io/bootcamp-2023/. To view a photo album from the event, click here.