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Science experiments for high school students?

How might high school and college students contribute to the open science movement?

  • I was listening to a WGBH podcast and Michael Nielsen, author of Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science, mentions that open science involves “changing the culture of science, changing the incentives facing young scientists.” Given that, how can high school and college students fit into the scene?

  • Answer:

    This is a great question and deserves a longer answer than mine. 1. Be informed on what people are currently working on in open science. Michael's book is a great starting point. There's also lots of projects being done at the Open Knowledge Foundation: http://okfn.org/projects/ 2. Join a local group of open science enthusiasts if you're lucky enough to be near any. As a college student in Cambridge, Mass., I was briefly involved in Free Software Foundation and Wikimedia meetups. 3. Start an open science interest group at your high school / college. MIT has the http://web.mit.edu/open run by myself and , and we've done quite a bit to get people interested in and informed about open science at MIT! We brought Michael Nielsen to give a talk there in 2011, started a petition on behalf of Aaron Swartz, ran a collaborative physics calculation club, and have had many discussions online and in person about how our group can further the goals of open science. 4. Ask your professors to publish their research in open-access journals and release datasets. Unfortunately students don't have much say in the publication process, but it never hurts to voice your opinions. 5. Contribute to crowdsourced science projects like http://www.galaxyzoo.org/. There's many more of these at http://www.citizensciencealliance.org/ and https://www.scientificamerican.com/citizen-science/. 6. Join http://freeculture.org/about/ 7. Volunteer or work for a research group doing work related to open science. The http://civic.mit.edu/ and https://cyber.law.harvard.edu/ come to mind, but I'm sure there's many more. 8. Read this post by the EFF: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/01/three-things-students-can-do-now-promote-open-access

Yan Zhu at Quora Visit the source

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Yan's answer is a great overview; I'll just chime in with one concrete answer of a specific project I'm involved with: the http://openscienceframework.org/project/EZcUj/wiki/home. We have roles for all sorts of participants, including students, citizen scientists, and so on.  The goal of the Reproducibility Project is to empirically estimate the reproducibility of a sample of  studies from the scientific literature - specifically, the first three 2008 volumes of three prominent psychology journals. We're trying to learn the overall rate of replicability, what factors correlate with replication success, what the obstacles are in conducting replications, and similar questions. The easiest way for citizen scientists to contribute is to "code" articles - read papers and extract information about what was tested, what statistics were run, and so on. People who code at least 10 articles earn authorship. If you want to leap straight into coding studies, here's the form for gathering that data: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dGRpdDkwU01NeXlUS3ZVVGVvb2ltdWc6MQ If you're a student of psychology, or can contact a psychology professor about advising you in conducting a replication yourself, that's also a great way to participate. If you're curious but not sure where to start or how to help, you can fill out the https://ucsf.us.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_1Rl41w596GMLhad where you can indicate how you might like to get involved and what expertise you have, and someone from the project will get back to you.

Catherine Olsson

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