He. She Open Science Fund The Netherlands Scientific Research Organization (NWO) awards a grant of up to €50,000 to 26 projects. This scholarship goes to two projects by scholars affiliated with Radboud University (RU). These are Wilko Verberek, Assistant Professor in a Animal ecology and physiology Rogier Kievet, Professor Developmental Neuroscience.
Verberk states that the file NWO . Open Science Fund It is a program from NWO to make science easier. Projects that contribute to this can apply for a subsidy. what or what open flag “This is a collective name for all kinds of initiatives that are about making science more transparent and rigorous and sharing the posts publicly so that everyone can read them,” Kievet says.
Importance open flag
Verberk states that there are currently several hurdles in (re)using data. The thing that often happens nowadays is publishing an article and displaying the data in graphs. The original files are not always available. This is an obstacle to data reuse. According to him, it is a shame that so much data is generated and only then used for investigation. By making all the data available, it is easy to discover broadband connections.
Kievit also states that the data currently available is not always reliable. Some of the results we thought we could start with turned out to be not always well reproduced. We want to be more certain about the outcomes on which we base our conclusions and sometimes even our policy. An important step is to ideally visualize and share the raw data.
The opinion of both worlds is important open flag It led to two different projects to increase data accessibility. These projects were funded by NWO . Open Science Fund.
Database without purpose
The Verberk project consists of a database with no clear purpose. Most databases are created with a very specific purpose in mind. This is nice, but the problem is that a lot of metadata is not included. He explains that a scientist can, for example, investigate the effect of an animal’s size on the amount of oxygen that animal needs. To find out this information, the scientist then has to search the literature for volume and oxygen. If another scientist is also interested in this topic, but also wants to investigate temperature differences, he should again study the exact same literature. That’s why Verberk created a database: ‘What we’re proposing is to make all metadata available. We make a kind of tool that allows everyone to answer their own questions. So there is no pre-determined goal for which we put the database, and that is up to the researcher to reach it.
The numbers behind the bar chart
The Kievit project is also about making the data more accessible, but it has a very different approach to Verberk: ‘We’ve suggested a way where you can see the mean, like in a bar chart, but in which the raw data is also still to be found. on her. This raw data is important because the bar chart says nothing about averages. Kievit mentions as an example a bar chart with an average height of 1.76 meters among a group of students. “Such a graph says nothing about the number of students included in this average, whether there were significant differences between the students’ heights and whether measurement errors did not accidentally creep into the mean.” Through the grant, the professor wants to expand the software package and organize data visualization workshops.
