Are you interested in making your research more openly available? Want to learn about open science tools and platforms that can make your research more effective and reproducible? The Bay Area Open Science Group is intended to bring together students, faculty, and staff from the Stanford, Berkeley, and UCSF communities to learn about open science, discuss the application of open science practices in a research context, and meet other members of the community who are interested in (or already are) incorporating open science practices into their work.
We meet on the 4th Tuesday of the month from 2-3pm via Zoom. All are welcome to attend and join the conversation!
This month we will be joined by Dr. Gabi Fragiadakis from UCSF who will discuss the development and applications of the UCSF Data Library. The Data Library is a project that aims to capture, curate, and share biological data generated on campus — enabling data search, exploration, visualization and cross-project analyses through a series of applications in available via a web browser. Dr. Fragiadakis received her Ph.D. and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University, and joined the faculty of the UCSF’s Department of Medicine, Division of Rheumatology in 2019. She is a member of the Biomedical Sciences and Biomedical Informatics Graduate Programs, the Bakar ImmunoX Initiative, the Benioff Center for Microbiome Medicine, and the Bakar Computational Health Sciences Institute. She leads a computational immunology lab studying states of the human immune system across disease contexts using single-cell methods and data integration.
This month we are joined by Ayako Kawano, a PhD candidate in the Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources at Stanford. Ayako’s research examines the impact of air pollution on population health and climate change in low- and middle-income countries using remote sensing data and machine learning methods. Ayako recently won the Stanford University Libraries Data Sharing Prize for her work publishing a long-term dataset of fine particulate matter concentrations in India, which has been used to inform public health programs and policy as well as used in further research projects.
This month, we will be joined by members of Cal Blueprint, a Berkeley run nonprofit that builds pro-bono web and mobile applications for nonprofits. Ethan Tam and the project leads for this semester will join us in a conversation about nonprofit sourcing, current and past projects, and structure open development workflows across student teams.
We will be joined by Tim Glinin from UCSF, who will present a new framework for data sharing designed to address a central challenge in open science: how to incentivize researchers to share high-quality datasets while ensuring appropriate credit and continued scientific involvement. His work introduces an “author-curated data reuse” model and a Collaboration Requirement License (CRL), combining open access to datasets with a structured mechanism for collaboration between data creators and data users. The discussion will explore why only a limited number of well-annotated, high-quality datasets are available in open repositories, what barriers prevent researchers from sharing data in a form that supports meaningful reuse, and how new models may increase dataset publication, improve data quality, and support reproducibility, while positioning datasets as independent research outputs.
The session will be followed by an open discussion, and participants will be invited to join a working group focused on testing and implementing this model. As demand for large, well-annotated datasets continues to grow—driven by advances in AI and data-intensive research—developing effective incentives for data sharing is becoming increasingly critical. Approaches such as author-curated data reuse may also help address aspects of the replication crisis by improving data interpretation, documentation, and collaborative validation of results.
We meet on the 4th Tuesday of the month from 2-3pm via Zoom. All are welcome to attend and join the conversation!
This month Yea-Hung Chen and Ariel Deardorff from UCSF will present on efforts to safeguard disappearing government data. Since early 2025 several federal research datasets have been altered or deleted in response to executive orders from the White House. These actions have raised significant concerns about the accessibility and integrity of government data. For example, in February, several datasets from the US Census Bureau suddenly became unavailable, and others from the CDC were removed and then later restored. In this presentation, we will explore the latest developments in data censorship and the current efforts to rescue and preserve government datasets. You’ll learn about the organizations that have worked to preserve data, alternative sources of government data, and how you can get involved to protect valuable public information.
This month Virginia Scarlett will be joining from UC Santa Barbara to discuss the 2025 UC OSPO Survey. Once considered a radical experiment, open source software is now ubiquitous in the modern technology landscape. In the technology industry, the Open Source Program Office (OSPO) is a common way to centralize a company’s open source strategy, knowledge, and diligence. Meanwhile, OSPOs are just beginning to take root in academia. While guidance for university OSPOs is emerging, many questions remain about how OSPOs best support their university’s strategic priorities and their community’s needs.
The University of California (UC) OSPO Network is working to develop infrastructure for open source education, discovery, and sustainability at UC by pooling our resources and knowledge. To develop our strategic priorities and to assess the state of UC open source, we conducted a survey in April 2025 of more than 230 UC-affiliated open source contributors. This survey sheds light on how and why academics contribute to open source projects, as well as some of the barriers holding them back.
Emily Pavia, Dave Fisher, and James Douglass are members of Stanford's Natural Capital Project (NatCap), a Stanford-based partnership among interdisciplinary researchers, professionals, and leaders around the world that supports nature-informed decision-making about policies and investments. Representing NatCap's software & data management teams, Emily, James and Dave will discuss NatCap's open source software including a suite of computational models for quantifying ecosystem services (InVEST), supporting Python libraries for geoprocessing (PyGeoprocessing) and for generating human- and machine-readable metadata (GeoMetaMaker) and the recently-launched Natural Capital Project Data Hub that facilitates open access to ecosystem services data. Together, these and other efforts by the Natural Capital Project enhance the ability of researchers and policymakers to easily access and reuse data that supports informed decision-making about natural resources.
Are you interested in making your research more openly available? Want to learn about open science tools and platforms that can make your research more effective and reproducible? The Bay Area Open Science Group is intended to bring together students, faculty, and staff from the Stanford, Berkeley, and UCSF communities to learn about open science, discuss the application of open science practices in a research context, and meet other members of the community who are interested in (or already are) incorporating open science practices into their work.
We meet on the 4th Tuesday of the month from 2-3pm via Zoom. All are welcome to attend and join the conversation!
We meet on the 4th Tuesday of the month from 2-3pm via Zoom. All are welcome to attend and join the conversation!
This talk will be centered around the development and administration of a March of Dimes-funded public data-sharing repository for preterm birth research, emphasizing its role in promoting open science and collaboration. She will discuss the organization of a DREAM crowdsourcing challenge that leveraging data from this repository and other publicly available datasets with the goal of predicting preterm risk among expectant individuals. The session will demonstrate how open data initiatives can accelerate discovery in preterm birth.
Read our recent reflection on the themes that emerged from our 2023-24 meetings: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.12702026
Check out our collaborative notes
Want to talk about Open Science with your lab or team? We created a two-page template for teams to learn more about open science and select practices that work for them. Find it on Zenodo.
Bay Area Open Science Group
Are you interested in making your research more openly available? Want to learn about open science tools and platforms that can make your research more effective and reproducible? The Bay Area Open Science Group is intended to bring together students, faculty, and staff from the Stanford, Berkeley, and UCSF communities to learn about open science, discuss the application of open science practices in a research context, and meet other members of the community who are interested in (or already are) incorporating open science practices into their work.
Meetings:
We meet on the 4th Tuesday of the month from 2-3pm via Zoom. All are welcome to attend and join the conversation!
Tuesday, August 23, 2022, 2-3 PM - Open Science Team Agreements
This month, the Bay Area Open Science Group introduces the “Open Science Team Agreement,” a template that research groups can use to discuss, adopt and implement open science practices. Ariel, John, and Sam (the co-hosts of Bay Area Open Science Group) have designed a prototype team agreement (available via Overleaf or Google Docs) and are looking for feedback. Join us to discuss what else should be included, and how team agreements can be used to kickstart conversations on open science. Potential adopters are especially welcome.
Tuesday, September 27, 2022, 2-3 PM - Free Open Access Medical education
Dana Larsen - UCSF
This month the Bay Area Open Science Group is learning about engaging with #FOAMed (Free Open Access Medical education): how medical trainees are utilizing online educational resources.
FOAMed, Free Open Access Medical education, describes online resources which are free and generally represent a crowdsourcing of content, such as blogs, microblogs (Twitter), podcasts, and online journal clubs. While FOAMed has been increasing within medical education, limited data exists on how to utilize this tool to supplement existing curriculum in order to fill gaps in trainees' knowledge and stimulate self-directed learning. In this session, Dr. Dana Larsen, principal investigator of a UCSF Innovations Funding in Education study, will discuss her design-based research project seeking to pragmatically build an adjunct curriculum for nephrology fellows using FOAMed resources.
Tuesday, October 25, 2022, 2-3 PM
Natasha Batalha (NASA Ames)
This month the Bay Area Open Science Group will hear from Natasha Batalha as she shares her experience as a Team Lead on NASA's TOPS (Transform to Open Science) Mission developing a curriculum on Open Results.
Tuesday, November 29, 2022, 2-3 PM
This month the Bay Area Open Science Group will discuss the slew of new federal open science policies coming our way including the 2023 NIH Data Management and Sharing policy and the recent OSTP memo "Ensuring Free, Immediate, and Equitable Access to Federally Funded Research". What does this mean for you and your research? Let's discuss!
Tuesday, February 28, 2023, 2-3 PM - Ruth Schmidt, Project TARA (Tools to Advance Research Assessment), Building Blocks for Impact
Ruth Schmidt is an associate professor at the Institute of Design (ID) at Illinois Tech, whose research sits at the intersection of behavioral science, humanity-centered design, and complex systems. She has been working with DORA for several years to tackle research assessment reform from a behavioral systems perspective, resulting in tools like "Building Blocks for Impact" to provide new structures and language that help expand traditional notions of defining and assessing quality researchers.
Tuesday, March 28, 2023, 2-3 PM - Joshua Buckholtz, Center for Open and Reproducible Science at Stanford
This month the Bay Area Open Science group will be joined by Joshua Buckholtz, Director of Operations and Research Scholar at the Stanford Data Science Center for Open and REproducible Science (SDS-CORES).
Tuesday, April 25, 2023, 2-3 PM - Open Science in Bioengineering with the Fraser Lab, UCSF
This month, the Bay Area Open Science group will be joined by members of the Fraser lab at UCSF. James Fraser, Roberto Diaz, and Christian Macdonald will join us in a conversation about how they incorporate open science values into their bioengineering research, and how they think about getting credit for this work.
Tuesday, May 23, 2023, 2-3 PM - Open Data with Steve Diggs, Senior Product Manager for data publishing at the California Digital Library, UC
This month, the Bay Area Open Science group will be joined by Steve Diggs. Steve recently started at the California Digital Library (CDL) as the University of California Curation Center (UC3)’s new Senior Product Manager for our data publishing portfolio. Steve most recently worked at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography at UCSD where he has served as the Technical Director of the Hydrographic Data Office (CCHDO). Steve will discuss best practices in data publishing, adapting data repositories in response to researcher needs and preserving data to meet compliance requirements.
Tuesday, June 27, 2023, 2-3 PM - ChatGPT and SciHub, an informal chat
Join the Bay Area Open Science Group this month for an informal conversation about “open” information focusing on ChatGPT and SciHub. What do these tools have in common? What do they say about the future of scientific information access and open science?
Here is what ChatGPt has to say on the topic:
Looking for reliable scientific information? Look no further than ChatGPT and SciHub! ChatGPT is an advanced language model that can answer your scientific questions quickly and accurately. Whether you're a researcher, student, or just curious about the world around you, ChatGPT has got you covered. On the other hand, SciHub is a platform that provides free access to scientific papers and articles that are otherwise hidden behind paywalls. With over 80 million papers available, SciHub is a treasure trove of information that can help you stay up-to-date on the latest scientific research. So whether you prefer asking questions or reading articles, ChatGPT and SciHub are the perfect combination for anyone seeking reliable scientific information. What do you think about ChatGPT’s enthusiastic boosterism? Do you consider ChatGPT and SciHub to be the “perfect combination for anyone seeking reliable scientific information?”
Join the conversation and let us know!
Recommended Pre-listen: https://radiolab.org/podcast/library-alexandra
Bay Area Open Science Group
Are you interested in making your research more openly available? Want to learn about open science tools and platforms that can make your research more effective and reproducible? The Bay Area Open Science Group is intended to bring together students, faculty, and staff from the Stanford, Berkeley, and UCSF communities to learn about open science, discuss the application of open science practices in a research context, and meet other members of the community who are interested in (or already are) incorporating open science practices into their work.
Meetings:
We meet on the 4th Tuesday of the month from 2-3pm via Zoom. All are welcome to attend and join the conversation!
Dates for 2021-2022:
Open peer review is the least practiced aspect of open science. Yet it may teach us a lot about how manuscripts can change from their submitted version to their (peer-revied) published version of record. Mario Malicki will give an overview of 21 studies that analysed manuscript changes and his own study in which I analysed changes between 121 epidemiology preprints and
their subsequent published versions. Finally, he will present a call for declaring changes to manuscripts with each published paper.
Milo Johnson (https://miloswebsite.com/, starting a post-doc in the Koskella Lab at UC Berkeley this June)
The linear format of scientific papers is an entrenched, constrained result of history that holds back efficient and effective transmission of information between scientists. Science requires depth, but the reality is that the majority of readers don’t care about the majority of things in a paper. And we know it! At conferences, scientists give 5-minute talks at poster sessions that effectively communicate their work to 95% of their audience, and the other 5% can ask follow-up questions about the details. Can we design a way to write scientific content in a similar way, such that the details are accessible behind a concise narrative? I'll present this idea along with some preliminary technical explorations, and I'll invite y'all to brainstorm with me about how we can make tools to improve communication between scientists!
April 26, 2022
Gather around virtually with colleagues at Stanford and Berkeley for a presentation on The COVID Tracking Project by Kevin Miller, a former team lead with the project who is archiving the project's data and collections for the UCSF Archives & Special Collections. The project was a volunteer-run, community-science program that became a critical source of national pandemic data accidentally and overnight. He will discuss how it was built, and the challenges of archiving such a massive, born-digital collection.
May 24, 2022
Join us in May as we get together virtually with colleagues at UCSF and Stanford to hear from the fledgling Open Source Science at Berkeley student organization. They will be introducing their group and seeking feedback for a planned 1-unit course on developing open-source scientific software. Rachel Clune, Orion Cohen, Tarini Hardikar, and Connie Robinson are chemistry graduate students at UC Berkeley. They share an interest in improving the scientific software ecosystem and teaching computational skills to the Berkeley community
Tuesday June 28, 2022
Examining the Openness of COVID-19-related Randomized Control Trials with John Borghi
Check out our website (https://bayareaopensciencegroup.github.io/) to get on our mailing list, or let us know if you want to present!