How Open Derby Is Empowering Open Science

#mozsprint 2017 Interview Series

James (@jamespwr) is a PhD candidate at the University of Victoria, BC, Canada. With a passion for open science, communities and reproducible work, James was selected to join Mozilla Open Leaders with his project Open Derby.

I interviewed James to learn more about Open Derby and how you can help June 1–2 at #mozsprint.

What is Open Derby?

Open Derby is a fun, collaborative research project that aims to teach scientists how to utilise open data, version control their code, write reproducible reports, and publish openly. Over 4–8 weeks, a group of graduates, post-docs and PIs work together to answer a novel scientific problem with open data, keeping an open notebook of their progress and openly sharing their data, methods, results, and writing.

Open Derby can be tailored to different scientific fields, so that frequent collaborators can develop an own open science strategy that makes sense for their own research style.

Why did you start Derby?

There are many great resources for learning open tools, but many scientists learn the skills and don’t adapt their own research methods, while some are reluctant to transition to working entirely open. For the same reasons, my fellow graduate students and I have been learning Git, R-markdown and thinking about open science principles for several years, but we haven’t been able to become fully open scientists. To achieve that, we decided that we needed to write a scientific paper from start to finish, using different open tools to figure out what worked best for us: we called it Open Derby and we want to share it with everyone else.

How are you collaborating with other groups doing similar work?

Open Derby was inspired by a similar ‘Research Derby’ idea, where groups of ecologists collaborate for 24 hours to solve a novel conservation problem. We hope that one of the Research Derby creators — Dr. Brett Favaro (Memorial University) — will be able to contribute some data and questions for future Open Derbies.

Dr. Christie Bahlai (Michigan State University) has also been running a similar graduate-level open science course, where students learn to code and write academic papers by collaborating on an open research project. Christie’s advice (and her open R and Git course materials) have been really useful in developing Open Derby.

We have also written to open science leaders in the life sciences to gather data and possible Derby questions, and hope that Derby teams will work with open data providers to test new hypotheses on unanalyzed datasets. After #mozsprint 2017, we will publish our Open Derby handbook and share our idea with coding clubs and research labs across the world.

What problems have you run into while working on this project?

We’re running our first Open Derby at the University of Victoria (BC, Canada) just now, but we had to abandon our first project because of data inaccessibility. We’re on our second attempt just now, but we realised that we needed to provide open datasets and possible research questions so that future Open Derbies are more likely to succeed.

What kind of skills do I need to help you?

If you have taught R, Git, R-markdown, Python, Jupyter to graduate students and understand how these tools can be used together in scientific research, we would love your input. If you work with an open notebook, collaborate with other researchers through Github, or make your academic papers fully reproducible, we would love your advice.

How can others join your project at #mozsprint 2017?

We’re looking for:

• brief introductions to writing manuscripts in reproducible text formats (e.g. R-markdown),
• links to open science tutorials,
• links to open datasets,
• content on Python and Jupyter,
• suggestions for Derby research questions, and
• advice on keeping open notebooks.

Anyone can fork our project and add content to the markdown files — our issue tracker has some more specific tasks that need completing.

If you’d like to be more closely involved with the project development, I’d be happy to add collaborator permissions on the main repo. We’re a small team — 3 graduate students are writing the materials — so more help is always welcome.

jpwrobinson/OpenDerby

Or maybe you just want to run an Open Derby — get in touch with me and let’s get started!

Join us wherever you are June 1–2 at the Mozilla Global Sprint to work on Open Derby and many other projects! Join a diverse network of scientists, educators, artists, engineers and others in person and online to hack and build projects for a health Internet. Get your tickets now!