Beginning at the end with open scholarship curricula

The growing emphasis on research transparency, data sharing, and reproducibility demands that researchers adopt open science practices. However, barriers such as limited awareness, training, and resources continue to hinder adoption while policies continue to be announced and implemented. The Center for Open Science has developed the “Introducing and Practicing Open and Reproducible Scholarship” program to address these challenges by providing free, adaptable, and practical materials designed to equip researchers and educators with the tools and knowledge necessary to navigate this evolving ecosystem.

To ensure that the program met critical researcher, funder, and institutional needs COS staff utilized “beginning at the end” exercises to identify the primary skills that researchers need to learn in order to be compliant with trending data policies and how they are most likely to apply them. We developed new modules designed to organically connect these policies to the rigorous research practices needed to comply with them, and applications of those practices within our research lifecycle support tool, the Open Science Framework (OSF).

This talk will describe our curriculum design process, our findings in relation to prioritized skills, and the measures we took to keep audience needs as the primary reason and focus of each module. We will also share our efforts to enable advocates and experts to utilize the modules within their own communities through careful pedagogy considerations, documentation, and resource availability. Finally, we will describe our ongoing efforts to evolve and improve our resources and partnerships across scholarly communication communities.