NASA TOPS (TOwards Open Science) Open Science 101 is a brand new online course about Open Science. It originates in the 2023 "Year of Open Science" at NASA and is part of a broad set of initiatives at NASA to promote and practice Open Science. I followed the course and wanted to share a few observations.

For those not aware: "Open science is the principle and practice of making research products and processes available to all, while respecting diverse cultures, maintaining security and privacy, and fostering collaborations, reproducibility, and equity." (source).

First, I must say that I am impressed by the consistency of the project! The team behind NASA TOPS made several open community calls to engage globally with the Open Science community. The calls allowed one to apply to become editor or reviewer for the course and were thus in line with the spirit of Open Science. I did not apply to any role as I unfortunately don't have much time "for the time being".

Overall impression

The course covers a lot of ground. It reviews basic knowledge in using, creating, and sharing data, code, and publications. Even though it is a theoretical course, it provides a lot of examples, links to open material such as GitHub issues, blog posts, open source code, etc.

Another interesting duality of the course lies in the grassroots approach to Open Science, from which originate the development of open licenses, preprints, and the widespread use of online software repositories, for instance. On the other hand, there is also a number of directly applicable skills for most scientists such as the preparation of software/data management plans.

I was also really happy to see the course cover, for instance, authorship practices. This is knowledge that could be useful to students and researchers during their training. The recommendations are excellent and extend beyond open science!

Having a thorough course material such as the one found in the TOPS Open Science 101 course, which made it feel a bit lengthy at times, could provide a form of theoretic minimum in the field of Open Science. The fact that NASA is a renowned institution is a bonus in any case.

Proceeding through the lessons

The course is divided in five modules: "The Ethos of Open Science", "Open Tools and Resources", "Open Data", "Open Code", "Open Results". Each module is split into lessons, each of which is split into activities. It allows one to focus on a single topic at a time (this might be an edx feature, I never followed such a course before). The text content inside an activity is loaded after the page structure, so it is sometimes a bit annoying to wait for it to appear.

At some points during a module, and at the end of each lesson, there is a small quiz made of multiple-choice questions.

For some of those quizzes, there are frustrating quiz answers: For instance, reading the README file is considered an incorrect reply to the question "Select how you can resolve the problem when using open software: software is not working as expected.". I consider re-reading the README file of the software useful and appropriate in that case though. This is not a big criticism for the course in any case, but failing such a question can lead to poor grades even though I could have defended my reply in an oral exam for instance. For an online course this is unavoidable.

A few surprises

I found a few surprising things in the course, in a negative way. I thought it would be good to share those as well, keeping in mind that it does not change my overall positive look on it!

1. Request for citations are at odds with Open Science. It is indeed good practice and sometimes necessary from an ethical point of view to cite software, but a license requesting citation is not an OSI approved license. While it is not stated in the course that request for citations can be present in an open license, an explicit reminder of the incompatibility would have been nice.
2. The course presents several Open Access methods (gold, green, etc) but does not mention the issue of double dipping, in which publishers receive money from authors (in the form of article processing charges) and from libraries or readers (in the form of a subscription or of individual purchases).
3. Even though Twitter is relatively popular in academic circles, I consider that using links to Twitter as supporting material is a problem as not all of Twitter is accessible without being logged in.
4. Some tools seem to be considered a de facto standard, such as mentioning that "dependencies may be found in a environment.yml file". This proposition involves some baggage to make sense: environment.yml is the default name for storing an environment definition for the conda package manager.

A probably more minor point, that is not actually an issue with the course itself but with the promotion of Open Science in general. Practicing Open Science carries some cost, mostly in time, for the scientists. Preparing nicely formatted datasets, writing blog posts, sharing methods ahead of publications, or animating a popular YouTube channel are good Open Science practices. The benefit of sharing, through some form of recognition does not come to all open scientists though, some threshold of success is necessary for it to provide positive feedback (in terms of citations, awards, reputation, grant application success or a stable position). My opinion is that it is still worthy and "better" to practice Open Science, but equipped with this knowledge.

The very positive surprise came for me at the completion of the course. At the end of each module, one can get a "completion certificate". Interesting, but not easy to share with the world. Upon completion of all modules, though, the corresponding badge is sent to my ORCID profile. And so, along with 156 other people at the time of writing, I can show an official credential for Open Science on my scientific profile. The full list.

Recommendation

I recommend the course to all scientists, students (sorry, "Early Career Researchers - ECR") or senior. The course material is useful to all! My first motivation was to learn and refresh my knowledge. But I like to think that having the credential in my CV will help me promote Open Science at my institution and in my professional networks!

Having the course online means that I could take it despite having a busy schedule, at my own pace and whenever was feasible.

TL;DR "+1 would take again".

PS: I stopped using disqus. I'll try to enable a feature to link my blog articles and my fediverse/mastodon account. In the meantime feel free to comment here.