The transformation of academia into a more open and inclusive ecosystem depends not only on new policies or technologies but also on a fundamental shift in how we nurture early-career researchers through mentorship. This values resilience and integrity as much as productivity. Introduction In the vast, often complex, competitive, and
Improving scientific mentorship with "Open Labs" — science better
Open Labs would be a place for experienced scientists to post their open questions and curiosities — a list of the ideas they don't have time to pursue personally but wish someone would.
Center for Open Science
At the Center for Open Science, our mission is to increase openness, integrity, and reproducibility of scholarly research. Promoting these practices within the research funding and publishing communities accelerates scientific progress
Stop Mentoring First-Time Contributors
If you’re an open source maintainer lucky enough to have a significant number of contributors you need to learn to mentor efficiently. First timer issues are not the right good way to get people involved in your project nor mentoring individual first-time contributors. Instead, do things that help all of them.
Now Hiring: Senior Open Source Maintainer
A rare opportunity to make a real impact in a fast-paced, high-visibility role.
How contemporary academic structures constrain scientific creativity and hold back early-career researchers
We argue that contemporary scientific systems progressively constrain high-risk and conceptually innovative research while being increasingly structured around short funding cycles, productivity-based evaluation criteria and risk-averse frameworks that favour predictable and non-transformative research outputs. Drawing on recent empirical literature, we show how such systems can place disproportionate pressure on early-career researchers by incentivizing safe, tractable and easily evaluated outputs. Structural academic mechanisms such as peer review and funding, escalating publication costs and institutional inequalities interact with precarious employment and hierarchical dependencies. In this environment, we contend that strategic conformity becomes a rational career path. This risks suppressing creativity and critical thinking precisely at the stage when scientific independence could otherwise emerge. Consequently, the probability of substantive contributions by early-career researchers is declining, while talent may increasingly abandon academia or cluster within a limited number of well-resourced institutions and national systems. By adopting a systems-level perspective, we argue that scientific creativity is not merely an individual trait but an emerging property of a supportive academic landscape and that maintaining or restoring it may require substantial structural reforms. These include promoting stable research pathways, decentralized decision-making and evaluation frameworks that better recognize collaboration, originality, persistence and nonlinear career trajectories. Without systemic change, we risk stifling the potential of early-career researchers to go beyond the confines of existing methods and approaches and deliver transformative advances. This would limit their capacity to meaningfully change our understanding of the world or benefit society, with impacts that fall short of their potential.
Software Stewardship Lab
A non-profit research lab dedicated to ensuring the stability of the Open Source ecosystem we all rely on.
Beyond Articles: Rethinking Diamond Open Access for a Data-Driven Research Future | CODATA Blog
What would it take for Diamond OA to evolve into a holistic, equitable, and data-rich scholarly ecosystem — one that meaningfully includes early-career researchers?
Open Science 2.0: Building Understanding in an AI-Mediated World - The Scholarly Kitchen
Open Science 2.0 must focus not only on access, but also on trust, interpretation, learning, and effective communication. The challenge facing the scholarly publishing ecosystem is ensuring that what is open is also trustworthy, understandable, and genuinely useful.
Cataloguing and theorising open research practices in the arts, humanities and social sciences: Problematising and diversifying ‘Open Science’
Background Discourses of ‘Open Science’ have been criticised for privileging the quantitative and positivist methodologies of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) research at the expense of qualitative, interpretive, critical-theoretical, practice-based, and other forms of research more common in the arts, humanities and social sciences (AHSS). Methods In this article, which emerged from a work component of the MORPHSS (Materialising Open Research Practices in the Humanities and Social Sciences) project, we document the process, outcomes and practical implications of work to develop a catalogue of open research practices in these disciplines, which proceeded via a wide-ranging literature review followed by targeted desk research and a conceptual mapping exercise. Results Key findings include the fact that open research practices in AHSS are diverse, extending beyond the suite of practices emphasised within dominant accounts of Open Science. We identify among these practices a range of forms of openness including those focused on mobilising the involvement and expert knowledge of diverse participants and communities. Conclusions Presenting a typology of forms of openness in AHSS that is consistent with the epistemic logics of these disciplines, we conclude that openness in AHSS is highly situated and context-dependent, as well as resisting quantification and binary measurement. Drawing on these conclusions, we offer a series of recommendations for institutions, open research monitoring initiatives, funders, publishers, learned societies and researchers to enhance the inclusivity of their policy and practice around openness.
Introduction to Open Science
This course introduces the principles and practices of open science, with an emphasis on reproducible research workflows, transparent reporting, and collaborative scholarship. Students will critically examine reproducibility, explore tools that support openness (such as Git, GitHub, and Quarto), and apply these tools in hands-on assignments and a final open project. Students will also explore how open science practices vary across disciplines, including education, humanities, social sciences, industry and government, and STEM contexts. This course emphasizes applying open science principles to real-world data problems in alignment with the principles of producing reproducible research.
Sustain
Sustain brings together practitioners, sustainers, funders, researchers and maintainers of the open source ecosystem. We have conversations about the health and sustainability of the open source community. We learn about the ins and outs of what ‘open source’ entails in the real world. Open source means so much more than a license; we're interested in talking about how to make sure that the culture of open source continues, grows, and ultimately, sustains itself. Newsletter
We just launched the Open Source Endowment, the first endowment dedicated to supporting Open Source maintainers, with $693,000 raised already. The world depends on Open Source, but making our ecosystem sustainable is a complex task. I hope that, with community consultation, the Endowment can help 🙏
A VC and some big-name programmers are trying to solve open source's funding problem, permanently | TechCrunch
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