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tags: ols
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# Infusing a culture of open science within the community of researchers at the Zuckerman Institute

`This is a template for you to summarize your OLS journey so far and the project you worked on during the entire period of OLS-1.`

Example you can draw from: https://openlifesci.org/posts/2019/10/21/culture-track

## 1) Project background
The community of Columbia University’s Zuckerman Institute is composed of neuroscientists at diverse career stages - graduate students, postdocs, and faculty members. The Programs Office, where I work as Scientific Program Manager, was established to build and nurture the community by fostering a professional environment that is welcoming, safer, diverse and inclusive. In order to support a collaborative climate of interdisciplinary research and discovery, transparency and openness are key values that the Programs Office embraces. With the help of the cohort and of my mentor, I have elaborated a strategy aimed at infusing a culture of open science within the community of researchers at the Zuckerman Institute. This strategy includes:
- Assessing the climate of the Zuckerman Institute: where we are, what we need and where we want to go with our open science practices and policies.
- Identifying and engaging critical stakeholders among the Zuckerman Institute community of researchers and leadership who will be involved in this project, following open leadership best practices.
- Exploring pathways for dissemination of open science best practices, and selecting the most suitable one for my organization.
- Making the Open Science initiative at the Zuckerman Institute sustainable with distributed and shared leadership.
My vision is that in the long run, work done in this project will ultimately pave the way to establish the Zuckerman Institute as a golden standard for open science.

## 2) Expectations from this program
Coming into this program I expected to learn from leaders and experts in the field about evidence-based best practices in open science. The expectation for myself was to integrate these practices into an open science program for my community.

What I wasn't expecting to learn was a more holistic intro into open leadership best practices.

## 3) Goals set at the beginning of the project
At the beginngin of this project my overarching goal was to write a strategy outlining a concrete plan for how to integrate open science best practices into an open science program within my community. This program would promote an open research culture in the community.
The strategy is a written document that I will use to obtain critical buy-in from the Institute leadership and the faculty members to initiatie such open science programs.

## 4) Key takeaways of this OLS mentorship program
These are two hugely important lessons that I am very glad to have learned:

- I realized that everything that I have planned to do in this 'strategy document' can and shall be done with an open leadership mindset and framework. "Open by design' means that also the way in which you design your open science program has to be open and transparent. Very meta and probably very obvious...but not to me, not until this point!
- buy-in from the leadership is absolutely fundamental to start such a big institute-wide project; this is why in the final project development plan I moved this point to a high priority one in the chronological list of to-dos

## 5) The main goals achieved in this project
I did manage to write a document outlining a 'strategy to infuse a culture of open science within the community of researchers at the Zuckerman Institute'.
The milestones of this strategy that I had in mind were fairly disorganized; I knew what I wanted to accomplish overall, but I didn't know what would be the most efficient path for doing it - aka: how to subdivide milestones into smaller and smaller feasible tasks. Thanks to the content of the program, to feedback provided by my mentor, and to the connections that I established through his network, I have come up with a detailed project development plan.

### The initial steps
I came into this mentor program already with a fairly developed project roadmap. While it was just a first draft, this allowed me to focus immediately on specific aspects that I wanted to investigate deeper. I would plan every mentor call with a specific agenda, and I would plan to contact selected experts based on specific answers I knew I would want to get out of those interviews.

### What elements helped you get there?
- The OLS assignments were built incrementally so that one could gradually get to an (at least closed-to) final project development plan. Doing those assignments and asking for regular feedback from my mentor was very helpful.
- Fairly early on in the program my mentor put me in touch with open science experts and leaders: I connected with them to learn ins and outs of what it takes to build an open science community.
- Among the cohort members there are a few of us with similar project goals; in the early stages we reached out to each other commenting about our project roadmaps and giving suggestions. Although this process didn't last for long, we somehow found each other as members of other online communities, and we have been learnign about each other's work in this way.

## 6) Next steps

### My immediate next step is to...
Reassess when it is a good time to put this tratgey into action (COVID-19 dependent; right now priorities might be others).

### Longer term tasks
Start with the [first task](https://chiarabertipaglia.github.io/Infusing-a-culture-of-open-science-within-the-community-of-the-Zuckerman-Institute/Project_Development_Plan.html) of the first milestone of the project development plan!

### Staying connected
I would like to stay in touch with the OLS community members, probably via Twitter where I already engage with a few of the OLS community members. I definitely plan to stay in touch with my mentor as he is extermely well connected in open science networks.

## 7) Special mentions and acknowledgements
A huge thank you to:
- my mentor, Mateusz Kuzak for all the feedback provided and the great connections he introduce me to
- Malvika Sharan, Yo Yehudi, and Bérénice Batut, for putting together such a comprehensive open leadership mentor program (seriously, I came in for the open science thing and came out with so much more!)
- all the cohort members for the inspiring convos in the Zoom breakout rooms!