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We believe open science can accelerate data-driven solutions and increase diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging in research and beyond.

Supporting open science �as a daily practice

We champion open data science: the tooling and people enabling reproducible, transparent, inclusive practices for data-intensive research.

Julia Stewart Lowndes PhD, Director

In collaboration with Erin Robinson

and the Openscapes community

The Future Is Open, AGU 2022 Plenary Panel

Artwork by Allison Horst

Slides: openscapes.org/media | openscapes.org

Thank you! I’m Julia Stewart Lowndes, founding director of Openscapes, this talk is really a chance to celebrate a taste of the work we do as an Openscapes community, and it’s a collaboration with Erin Robinson and many others in the Openscapes community.

I’m talking today about Supporting open science as a daily practice. We do that at Openscapes by championing the tooling and people enabling reproducible, transparent, inclusive practices for data-intensive research. We believe open science can accelerate data-driven solutions and increase diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging in research and beyond. Our main focus is researchers and the teams that support them -

AGU Session: https://agu.confex.com/agu/fm22/meetingapp.cgi/Session/161588

Abstract: What does open science look like in daily work? We’ll share stories from NASA, NOAA, and academic teams that are leveraging, collaborating, and supporting others with open science as a daily practice. Examples will weave inclusive technical and social approaches - how code, version control, notebooks, peer-teaching, screensharing, onboarding, appreciation, and shared credit contribute momentum towards broad community goals.

Guiding Questions for presentations:

What is open science to you and your organization?
How are you practicing open science in your research/activities?
How is producing research that is more accessible, inclusive, and reproducible transformative to science?
What barriers do you see being the most challenging in implementing open science in your research/activities?

Guiding questions for discussion:

What challenges may a scientist face when trying to meet the expectations of open science?
What help or guidance (tools, technology, training) exist to support scientists of all types in working in open science?
What is the future of open science?
In an ideal world, what would science look like 10 years from now?
What would you tell an early career scientist who is afraid of taking this leap?

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Openscapes helps researchers move from lonely science as they explore and navigate the open science landscape safely with their teams.

Culture shift = technical + human

Open science is a landscape full of open source software, data, and communities, and many paths forward. Openscapes helps researchers move from lonely science as they explore and navigate the open science landscape safely with their teams.

I launched Our flagship activity, the Openscapes Champions in 2018, which mentors cohorts of research teams shifting their practices towards Open science. We work with professional research groups in government, academia, nonprofits, helping people move from the sad lonely animals like the foreground in the bottom left so that they start to explore and navigate this landscape safely, without too much trampling or reinventing. With my partner Erin Robinson, we have created the Openscapes approach and built a movement that extends beyond the Openscapes champions and supports expanding the mentor community through our NASA Openscapes work, so that we can support even more research teams.

Our role is to welcome them at the trail head, helping them seem themselves as a team and identify where they are all starting from

What is open science to you and your organization?

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Our approach: Open science as a daily practice

“ ‘We’ speaks to the collective, to collaboration, to community, to the relational work at hand. Addressing the climate crisis...will take everyone. We cannot, we must not, go it alone.”- Johnson & Wilkinson, All We Can Save

Engage a “future us” mindset

Make the implicit explicit
Onboard learners as contributors
Psychological safety & growth mindset

Empower & amplify open leaders

Create space & place for real relationships
Develop technical & leadership skills
Reuse, experiment, peer-learn & teach

https://thefaylab.github.io/lab-manual

https://openscapes.github.io/pathways-to-open-science

2. How are you practicing open science in your research/activities?

Our approach focuses on open science as a spectrum and as a daily practice. This is about developing a mindset for Future Us, and empowering and amplifying open leaders. thinking about how our work transcends our own laptops and developing a “web-first” approach, whether that is public or within our smaller teams. As we introduce open science practices and give space for folks to reflect on their workflows many teams identify onboarding documentation. What are the shared practices we have as a group, and how do we welcome others to that workflow? The Fay Lab at UMass Dartmouth is one example of this; this has been “forked” by many groups at NOAA Fisheries

Inspired by many leaders and community organizers, particularly in climate justice

We help create space and place for people to come together and explore and learn. We spend time on technical and leadership skills, cultivating relationships and real connections. And we support Culture change towards openness, learning, teaching, iterating.

When I was doing full time research in marine ecology, RMarkdown changed my world-view in terms of being able to develop build websites with my analyses as easily as I could build a static word document to email. Now, this tool is Quarto that works across R and Python, and is truly game-changing for documentation.

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NASA Openscapes: Supporting Open NASA Earth Science in the Cloud

NASA Openscapes: Lessons Learned supporting Cross-DAAC User Services to migrate to the Cloud (IN22C-0321). Aaron Friesz, Alexis Hunzinger, Amy Steiker, Catalina Oaida Taglialatela, Luis López, Cassandra Nickles, Bri Lind, Mahsa Jami, Celia Ou, Julia Stewart Lowndes, Erin Robinson, NASA Openscapes DAAC Mentors.

nasa-openscapes.github.io

NASA Openscapes Mentor Community

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…and also momentum

Biggest barriers

Paid time to learn new skills/habits

“I can’t find 2 hr/wk to improve my workflow”
“We’re stuck working hard and we don’t have time to work smart”

Mindsets - individual & institutional

“I am not a coder/data person”
“I’m not an expert or a teacher”
“Workflows are seen as ‘our’ problem”
“Horizontal nature of open science at odds with hierarchical nature of academia/gov”

Reuse not reinvent (practices, products)
“Learn together first” (higher morale, onboarding, succession planning)
“Show not tell” (screensharing, art, stories)
Grassroots <> leadership

n mfs-openscapes.github.io; see openscapes.org/blog for more, incl how Cal EPA Waterboards “forked” Openscapes!

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Thank you!

Join us:

Twitter: @openscapes

Find us online:

openscapes.org�nasa-openscapes.github.io�openscapes.github.io/approach-guide

Openscapes artwork by Allison Horst

Julia Stewart Lowndes, PhD

@juliesquid

Thanks to the people who made this possible!

Not pictured: more people!

Diverse, inclusive teams and communities are key

Slides: openscapes.org/media

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Further resources (incomplete list):

White Paper: The Value of Hosted JupyterHubs in enabling Open NASA Earth Science in the Cloud - Friesz, Robinson et al 2022
Openscapes Flywheel: A framework for managers to facilitate & scale inclusive Open science practices - Robinson & Lowndes 2022 (preprint, in review)
NASA-Openscapes.github.io - NASA Openscapes Mentors
Hello Quarto: share • collaborate • teach • reimagine - Lowndes &Çetinkaya-Rundel 2022 Keynote (video)
A Journey to Data Science: Tools for Equity and Diversity in STEM - Fenwick 2022 (video)
Open software means kinder science - Lowndes 2019
Supercharge your research: a ten-week plan for open data science - Lowndes et al. 2019
Our p ath to better science in less time using open data science tools - Lowndes et al. 2017
3 lessons from remote meetings we’re taking back to the office - Cabunoc Mayes et al. 2020
Toolkit for Incentivizing Open Science - National Academies (NASEM) Report; Openscapes blog post
All We Can Save - Johnson & Wilkinson 2020, eds
Braiding Sweetgrass - Kimmerer, 2013
From Open Data to Open Science - Ramachandran, Bugbee, & Murphy 2021
Unmet needs for analyzing biological big data - Barone et al. 2017
Data-intensive ecological research is catalyzed by open & team science - Cheruvelil & Soranno 2018

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Consistent feedback and iteration has shaped development of migration tools and support mechanisms

End-Users

NASA Openscapes Mentor Community Values

DAAC Staff

Open Science Community

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Researcher-centered, focused on teams.

Practice and feel safe working openly with yourself and your team; then ease into more.

Create space & place to explore & learn. Cohort Calls, Seaside Chats, Co-Working; GitHub, R, Python, Quarto, Google Drive,

Slack; Efficiency Tips & Inclusion Tips.

Cultivate relationships & real connections.

Welcoming folks with diverse backgrounds; meeting where they are; skills to empower immediate work; kinder science.

Open culture: Learning, teaching, iterating.

Not a checklist - a continual practice. Imperfect, messy. Takes time.

Openscapes approach

https://openscapes.org/approach

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Reuse what works; grow the movement

earthaccess Python library

Dev’d from feedback from Mentor and researchers

earthaccess handles authentication with NASA’s Earthdata Login (EDL) API and provides HTTP and AWS S3 sessions that can be used with Xarray and other PyData libraries

to access NASA EOSDIS datasets directly allowing scientists get to their science in a simpler and

faster way, reducing barriers to cloud-based data analysis.

Lopez 2022: https://github.com/nsidc/earthaccess

Artwork by Allison Horst

Beautiful, welcoming logo

Hex design borrowed from R community (we have stickers!!)

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Supporting Open NASA Earth Science in the Cloud

https://nasa-openscapes.github.io

earthaccess Python library

Learning events, tutorials, lessons learned

Cheatsheets & guides

Centering inclusion, accessibility, reproducibility:

The Value of Hosted JupyterHubs

White Paper:

NASA Openscapes Mentor community across NASA Earth science data centers

3. How is producing research that is more accessible, inclusive, and reproducible transformative to science?

One example is our work with NASA Openscapes, where we’re supporting open NASA Earth science research in the Cloud. NASA Openscapes Mentors are here at AGU and have presented posters on 3 parts of their work: leading inclusive learning events for researchers and NASA Earth science data center staff, developing open resources that learners can come back to, and lessons learned; a python library; cheatsheets and guides.

This cross-DAAC collaboration has been really powerful because we were able to create space and place and take deliberate actions get that flywheel to turn.

2i2c

Work of the Mentor Community

How to grow it - working on real researchers in the science teams

Luis showing this real example of work the Mentor community has done

We are really grateful for our NASA Mentors, and to NASA who is supporting their time so that open science can be a paid part of their jobs.

We’re supporting Support Mentors towards establishing a common set of NASA Earthdata tutorials that they can then build off their DAAC-specific and science examples

Again, these recurring themes. Wanted to reuse existing so needed to identify what is unique to NASA earthdata and what’s not, tease that apart to reuse existing. Only contribute to combine and fill gaps rather than reinventing

We center researchers, and we focus on this feedback loop between tooling and people

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Skipped from WIDS talk

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“It was a really great week. The tutorials were AMAZING. Everyone did a great job, and everyone was very nice. I really appreciated welcoming environment. I don't have a strong python background. But i was supported in learning all around”

Blog summaries:

earthdata.nasa.gov/learn/articles/2021-cloud-hackathon

podaac.jpl.nasa.gov/announcements/2021-12-15-The-2021-Cloud-Hackathon

65 2i2c JupyterHub AWS instances

50 forks of the GitHub repo

8 hack-team projects presented on Day 5

NASA Openscapes: 2021 Cloud Hackathon

https://nasa-openscapes.github.io/2021-Cloud-Hackathon

10+ tutorials co-dev’d (Python, Jupyter, GitHub, Quarto)

15+ talks & workshops led by Mentors, reusing tutorials & role- modeling Open Science; added to Earthdata Cloud Cookbook:

https://nasa-openscapes.github.io/earthdata-cloud-cookbook

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My origin story: squids, submarines, and satellites

@juliesquid PhD research

Photo: Greg Auger, 2009

Me, a panicked PhD student in 2007: < reading cephalopod literature looking for how to reformat dates in Matlab >

couldn’t decouple my research from data questions
my research questions have never been asked before, same for my data

My team, trying to reproduce our own work in 2013:

< endless email chains “FWD:Re: updated figs” with attachments “analysis_final_v5.xlsx” >

didn’t have shared mindsets / systems, everyone quietly stuck in their own lonely ways
lost information when folks offboarded, hard to onboard new team members

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“As fisheries scientists, we know that when we’re in rough seas, it’s important to keep the ship afloat AND get out of the storm.

Openscapes helps teams steer out of the storm of email chains with 37 versions of the same spreadsheet and to the calmer waters of open science and meaningful collaboration, using tools like R.”

Adyan Rios

NOAA Southeast Fisheries Science Center

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Learn, reuse, remix, support others, grow the movement

https://openscapes.org

https://openscapes.org/series

https://openscapes.org/approach-guide

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Quarto is a new, open-source, scientific and technical publishing system Goal: to make the process of creating & collaborating dramatically better

I keynoted the global launch of Quarto

Cetinkaya-Rundel & Lowndes, RStudio::conf, July 2022
NASA Openscapes: first Quarto external users
slides, video, blog

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Join and amplify the open movement

Open educational resources – for reuse/remix

Curriculum, code, slides, demos, art, onboarding

openscapes.org, openscapes.org/series, openscapes.org/approach-guide

Supercharge your research: a 10-week plan

Lowndes et al. 2019

Open science as a daily practice

Reuse not reinvent (practices, products)
“Learn together first” (higher morale, onboarding, succession planning)
“Show not tell” (screensharing, art, stories)
Grassroots <> leadership
Ask your colleagues how they are doing. Where are they stuck? Listen.
Listen, learn, borrow what works, reimagine

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Kinder science

"Future us" mindset

Slow down to speed up

Power of yet (growth mindset, Carol Dweck)

Onboard learners as contributors

Make the implicit explicit

Reuse not reinvent

Open science as a daily practice

Creativity & art

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Psychological safety (Amy Edmondson)

Paid time to learn/teach/experiment

Many little things (not one big thing)

Open documentation is key

Empathy

Listening, mentoring, coaching

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Biggest barriers

Paid time to learn new skills/habits

“We’re stuck working hard and we don’t have time to work smart”
“I can’t find 2 hr/wk to improve my workflow”

Mindsets - individual & institutional

“I am not a coder/data person”
“I’m not an expert or a teacher”
“Workflows are seen as ‘our’ problem”
“Horizontal nature of open science at odds with hierarchical nature of academia/gov”

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Tooling

tools & practices

People

teams & community

Culture shifts: technical + human

Open Data Science:

The tooling and people enabling reproducible, transparent, and inclusive practices for data-intensive science

A beautiful feedback loop: Using similar tooling promotes and streamlines teamwork. And teamwork better equips you to learn new tooling. With this shared mindset, the idea of team becomes ever-broadening, along with your abilities to adapt to an evolving softwarescape.

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My story: building confidence as an open science contributor & leader

Ocean Health Index open edu resources

rOpenSci R package contributor

RStudio collaborator

Carpentries instructor

Eco-Data-Science co-founder

RLadies Santa Barbara co-founder

Open science community speaker

Mozilla fellow, Open Leaders

Openscapes founder, director,

collaborator

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Researcher-centered, focused on teams.

Practice and feel safe working openly with yourself and your team; then ease into more.

Create space & place to explore & learn. Cohort Calls, Seaside Chats, Co-Working; GitHub, R, Python, Quarto, Google Drive, JupyterHub, Slack; Efficiency & Inclusion Tips.

Cultivate relationships & real connections.

Welcoming folks with diverse backgrounds; meeting where they are; skills to empower immediate work; kinder science.

Open culture: Learning, teaching, iterating.

Not a checklist - a continual practice; invest in trust, psychological safety, growth mindset; Imperfect, messy. Takes time. Role-modeling.

Openscapes approach

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https://openscapes.org/approach

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updated from Wickham & Grolemund

Feeling so empowered and seeing open data science as this incredibly powerful way to work.

Our pub has really resonated with a lot of people who have seen this this is possible and want to do it too

Transition: So this was all happening leading up to the publication of our 2017 BSILT paper.

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And it really parallels how I’ve thought about open data science, which I have been defining as the tooling and people enabling reproducible, transparent, inclusive practices for data analysis.

In this illustration here it is again teams and communities that ring this central part of the scientific process, and it’s data analysis that connects data and communication steps that bookend the scientific process.

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Introducing data science and as a collaborative effort has changed my work

This illustration is an update of the classic wickham illustration data -> communication, with the central part of of data to understanding being ringed by communities that ew

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Julie: And another part is helping teams see open science and data science as part of their daily workflow. This means recognizing and expecting that tooling and practices already exist and are available to them to make their analytical life more efficient, resilient, and also enjoyable.