On Monday 10 June 2024, the Open Science Community Amsterdam (OSCA) presented the second annual OSCAWARDS to 10 Amsterdam teams, including support staff, researchers, educators, and students. Science belongs to everyone, but how do we ensure that everyone indeed has access to science? In Amsterdam, the VU, UvA, HvA, and SIOS (the Student Initiative for Open Science) work together within the Open Science Community Amsterdam (OSCA) to promote ‘open science’: science that is accessible and transparent. Open science started with researchers in the STEM fields sharing data and software. Today, open science is about openness at all stages of research: social dialogue about research questions, transparency about hypotheses, shared software and materials, open data, and communication about the conclusions we draw from that data. That is why the OSCA awarded prizes in different categories:
Open Access / Open Data / Open Materials / Open Software
Transparency / Metascience / Preregistration / Reproducibility
Citizen Science / Societal Impact / Community Engagement
Open Educational Resources / Open Educational Practices
The evening started with presentations on engagement within and beyond academia. We invited Imme Ruarus from de Waag’s to talk about the citizens network for measuring the air quality in North Holland. Laura Luzia introduced the Pint of Science, a festival aimed to deliver talks on research in an accessible format to the public and Mariana Lanari talked about Archival Consciousness, an investigation into the world of physical and digital archives. As organizers, we felt very inspired to see the impact and diversity open science projects can have and we are looking forward to awarding more open science projects the coming years.
