https://www.challenge.gov/?challenge=ostp-year-of-open-science-recognition-challenge
This recognition challenge seeks to spotlight the stories and teams behind projects that have addressed a challenge or advanced a solution, while embodying open science principles and practices.
Submitted Dec 1 2023
Openscapes movement building: kinder, open science for future us
E, C, F, D. Funded in part: NASA 20-TWSC20-2-0003. Julia Lowndes is Openscapes founding director who co-leads & supports initiatives. Erin Robinson co-leads NASA Openscapes & helped scale Openscapes with the Flywheel. Eli Holmes is NOAA Fisheries Open Science lead, a 3-year initiative by the NOAA Fish Office of Science & Tech. Ileana Fenwick is Pathways to Open Science lead & a fierce advocate for HBCU equity. Luis López is NASA Openscapes cloud infrastructure lead & develops open source tools.
Openscapes is the story of open science as “kinder science for future us”. It is an approach and a community that empowers research teams to conduct data-intensive open science – through technical skill-building, collaborative teamwork, and inclusive community development. We help grow open science leaders who tackle seemingly insurmountable challenges, support each other, and grow the movement.
Openscapes is led by researchers whose work-lives were so profoundly improved by open science we are dedicated to helping others. It was founded by Julia Lowndes via a 2018 Mozilla Fellowship following her research team’s path to better science in less time and co-developed by Erin Robinson into a scalable and sustainable program with funding from NASA Earthdata (20-TWSC20-2-0003). We built Openscapes as a value-based initiative that builds momentum like a flywheel. Today there are hundreds of us helping turn the flywheel daily – aligned with their jobs and as part of long-term goals around climate and social change. This includes Eli Holmes, the new NOAA Fisheries Open Science Lead; Luis López, a data software engineer who leads open source infrastructure for NASA Openscapes; and Ileana Fenwick, a PhD candidate who leads the Pathways to Open Science Program for Black marine scientists.
The challenge: There is an idealized notion in open science that if we had the right tools or data, that would be enough. However, open science asks people to work together in new ways. And for that, people need growth mindsets and to continually reflect and improve skills – no matter their job title. Building psychologically safe collaborations where team members are not rejected or embarrassed for speaking up with their ideas & concerns takes time, and is critical to participation in open science. Luckily, these are skills we can grow, and Openscapes approaches this challenge in a unique movement-building way.
Benefits show up as real change in how individuals, teams, and organizations operate: researchers’ daily efficiency and wellbeing benefits whole organizations as there is less time wasted, errors are identified and fixed earlier, and staff have less burnout and turnover. NASA Openscapes is an example where we support NASA data centers to collaborate across historical silos and create common workflows for Earthdata Cloud. We built a mentor community across 11 NASA data centers that helps support researchers through co-creating a Cookbook of common tutorials and the earthaccess Python library, hosting training events including through our flagship Champions Program, and practicing open science daily via contributions to open source code, documentation, and open communities. Other agencies including NOAA Fisheries & California Water Boards have watched NASA’s successes and partnered with us to learn as a cross-organizational community shifting institutional culture, mentoring staff, and designing open science modernization plans. To date we’ve upskilled 135 Champions teams, 90 Mentors, 480 active Cloud users in our 2i2c JupyterHub, and 80 Black scientists in Pathways. Connecting open communities enables further innovation: like when a chat at the ESA conference led to building the earthdatalogin R library to include more researchers in open science in the Cloud.
We work using the Openscapes Flywheel, from the concept where transformations occur from consistently doing key activities that add up over time. This and our Pathways Sheet are open source planning tools that help align open science values with practical daily decisions around reproducibility, collaboration, communication, & culture. Open research outputs also include publications, preprints, white papers, and software (kyber). We prioritize amplifying stories, and sharing early, imperfect work-in-progress as well as open documentation & curriculum (>100 blog posts, >80 talks, >15 e-books). We encourage and role-model reuse: these are used and forked by many groups for self-paced learning and teaching.
The big obstacles we see for open science are time, and paying people for their time. “I don’t have 2 hrs/wk to improve my workflow” is something we hear often, when there is approved time to attend events but not to implement what is learned. This obstacle ties with incentives for open science contributions, tenure & promotion, and friction in transferring funds. Paying people as part of their jobs and via honoraria is a priority for Openscapes, as a way to not have open science work be “extra”, invisible, or exclusive.
Openscapes was designed to connect people and empower them with open science skills, tools, and communities to make real change towards climate and social solutions. Future turns of the Flywheel will continue active learning & new collaborations – “to address our climate emergency, we must rapidly, radically reshape society. We need every solution and every solver” - All We Can Save. We are inspired to be in this radical reshaping and invite you to join us.