Critical issues presentations/Opening up science with the Wikimedia Fellowship

Submission no. 108

Title of the submission

Opening up science with the Wikimedia Fellowship

Author of the submission

• Julia Kloppenburg

Country of origin

Germany

Topics

Outreach, Projects, Research

Keywords

• science
• fellowship
• partnerships
• institutions

Abstract

Imagine a world where science is for everyone and every aspect of the research process is openly available and reusable for the public. This is the idea of Open Science! The tremendous benefits that Open Science means for the free knowledge movement and society as a whole are obvious.

Despite an increasing amount of incentives for opening up science that are set on a political level (such as the fact that research funding is increasingly bound to the requirement to publish Open Access , for example by the European Union in the funding program Horizon 2020) it is still only a comparably small number of scientists that actually make their academic work open. Despite certain barriers within the scientific world, in a lot of cases, the researchers simply don’t know much about the benefits of Open Science and how to implement it in their own work.

This is where the pilot project “Wikimedia Fellowship: Open Science” commences, that Wikimedia Deutschland initiates in 2016 in cooperation with the Stifterverband, a joint initiative by companies and foundations in Germany that wants to promote improvements in science and education.

The Fellowship targets young researchers, who are in an early stage of their academic career and consists of partial funding as well as qualification. It aims to impart knowledge about the idea of Open Science, collaborative working methods as well as digital infrastructures such as the Wikimedia Projects as they could be integrated into the academic workflow and serve as platforms for scientific research and publishing. Once the participants have successfully completed the Fellowship, they will possess profound knowledge which enables them to open up their academic work and make it accessible to others. Moreover, our intention is that from a long-term perspective they will serve as ambassadors in the field of science and introduce the benefits of open science to their peers. Thus we want to trigger a social change and promote openness in academic research and teaching that will be beneficiant to the Wikimedia movement.

The session is ideal for Wikipedians and Wikimedians

- who want to learn about new formats and strategies for addressing institutions in order to spread the idea of free knowledge.

- who want to learn more about Open Science and it’s significance for the Wikimedia world

- who want to learn more about how to jointly develop a programme in a partnership

Result

Not accepted