Scientific community as a whole is currently involved in a great theoretical and practical effort to improve knowledge related to brain functioning and brain diseases. Goal of Open Science initiatives is to optimize extracting information from experimental acquisitions, seamlessly collating pieces coming from different methodologies and support free circulation of knowledge, in order to facilitate communication and improve reliability of research.
Think Open @ CIMeC is an open - science oriented platform to organize and share research products within CIMeC and from CIMeC to the rest of the world.
Mission
Think Open @ CIMeC goal is to build, maintain and keep updated a virtual space, compliant with latest privacy and intellectual property rules, where researchers can share research products coming from every step of the research routine, i.e.: preliminary procedures and experimental setup, acquisition planning, data coming from healthy volunteers or patients, data analysis strategies and code, scientific publications.
Think Open @ CIMeC virtual space supports integrating scientific products coming from different methodologies, which could be explored from within CIMeC as well as external collaborator and holds up gathering of multi-center neuroimaging studies.
Think Open @ CIMeC pursues circulation of information in an environment which is compliant with research integrity and open science principles.
Subjects
Research Integrity
In order to regulate and strengthen transparency in building research products to be shared, open science initiatives usually suggest following several principles related to research integrity. As part of the University of Trento, Think Open @ CIMeC pursues dissemination and adoption of the following principles, discussed and defined by ALLEA - All European Academies (2018):
- reliability in ensuring the quality of research, reflected in the design, the methodology, the analysis and the use of resources;
- honesty in developing, undertaking, reviewing, reporting and communicating research in a transparent, fair, full and unbiased way;
- respect for colleagues, research participants, society, ecosystems, cultural heritage and the environment;
- accountability for the research from idea to publication, for its management and organisation, for training, supervision and mentoring, and for its wider impacts.
Knowledge sharing
Open science initiatives support sharing of generic knowledge related to everyday scientific practice. Think Open @ CIMeC endorses sharing every kind of knowledge through good practices, including:
- preregistration of a research product, specifying in advance experimental setup, hypothesis to be tested, data acquisition plan;
- publication of code to visualize, explore and analyze data in a collaborative way, preferably on open - source online platforms;
- Open Science Seminars about specific subjects related to Open Science initiatives.
Data sharing
Re - use of already acquired data is one of the pillars of open science.
Think Open @ CIMeC develops and disseminate to researchers theoretical and practical tools to facilitate re - use of already acquired data:
- discussing and updating guidelines and tools related to protect participants’ privacy, consent and sharing purposes, as stated in General Data Protection Regulation 2016/679;
- disseminating and supporting the adoption of data and metadata description standard (e.g.: BIDS - Brain Imaging Data Structure) to facilitate data - fusion and proper sharing towards outside CIMeC;
- helpdesk for preparation to sharing acquisitions, transforming “raw” data collection without specific descriptors to well-formed datasets including rich and FAIR (Findable Accessible Interoperable Reusable) principles compliant metadata.
Open Access
To achieve free, open circulation of information researchers should share their research products published in scientific journals.
Think Open @ CIMeC, as part of University of Trento, supports every way to Open Access through the following activities:
- dissemination through seminars and discussion panels of two main open access ways: green (self-archiving in open - access compliant repositories) and gold (publishing in full - open access journals) roads;
- helpdesk in preparing a research product for publication, picking the correct journal, going through potential bureaucratic issues.
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