Scientific Culture Change from Above and Below at UBCO: Implementation of a Comprehensive Open Science Library Information Literacy Program for Undergraduates
Creators: name: Hanna, Sharon
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2020
Subjects: Open Science Instruction
Information Literacy
Student Movements
Undergraduate Instruction
Open Science
Youth
University of British Columbia

description: Many agree that science must change to become more open. But change is difficult, and<br> universities bound by size and conservative traditions may be slow to introduce incentives and<br> rewards for the practice of Open Science (OS) (Lancaster 2016). Johannes Vogel, director general of the Museum für Naturkunde and Professor of Biodiversity<br> and Public Science at Humboldt University in Berlin, recognizes the power that young people<br> have to mobilize movements and suggests that they can help to open up science. In his article<br> “Scientists need to learn from the young”, Vogel (2019) states, Science must learn to listen, open up and again become part of the community. Such a<br> transformation … will cost time and money, including the restructuring of the incentive<br> systems in science itself. Students have long been catalysts of social and political change, so why not introduce them to<br> OS at an early stage? The University of British Columbia’s Okanagan Campus in Kelowna, B.C.,<br> Canada recently took the bold step of funding a two-year strategic project that includes the<br> creation, deployment, and evaluation of a comprehensive Open Science library information<br> literacy (IL) program specifically for undergraduates. Project leads from the Library and the<br> Department of Biology intend to make the core tenets and practices of OS second nature to<br> future graduates and global citizens. We believe that this initiative is unique in North America: it<br> breaks new ground both as an effort from the university to foster change at the grassroots and<br> as a model for comprehensive undergraduate IL instruction in Open Science. Given the nascent nature of the Open Science (OS) movement, scant literature on best<br> practices in library OS IL instruction exists. Extant publications on this topic (e.g. Lopes et al.,<br> 2019) tend to focus on IL instruction of researchers pursuing graduate studies – that is, EU<br> Level 2 or higher. One exception is Ayris &amp; Ignat, who suggest involving undergraduates (EU<br> Level 1 students) in citizen science projects (Ayris &amp; Ignat, 2018). The beginning stages of the project are being implemented in the 2019/2020 academic year as<br> a nine-module program that will interweave Open Science principles and practice into the<br> Biology undergraduate curriculum, and five of the modules will have been delivered by the end<br> of the 2019/2020 academic year. Ultimately, the project will attempt to secure further funding to<br> instate the program as a micro-credential; expand it to other areas of study, starting with<br> Psychology and Human Kinetics; and establish undergraduate research awards conditional on<br> adherence to Open Science practices. This talk will outline the undergraduate program’s modules and documents the creation,<br> delivery, and evaluation of an introductory module for first-year Biology students on the Canvas<br> online learning platform in Fall 2019. The module, “OS 101”, will give students an overview of<br> the practical challenges of conducting reproducible research, the societal impact of<br> irreproducible research, and philosophical and ethical issues surrounding Open Science.<br> Completed modules will be made available as Open Educational Resources in markdown<br> format on GitHub.