LMU Open Science Center

RE: @FachportalPaedagogik@eduresearch.social

📚 Proud to share a new LMU study led by OSC Member Prof. Dr. Katrin Auspurg! It shows that reproducibility in social science is often limited by missing or poorly documented materials.

💡 What's the solution? To navigate these reproducibility challenges, journals should require that data and analysis materials be systematically provided and archived long-term. In turn, research data providers should clearly identify data versions and keep older versions permanently available.

#OpenScience #LMU #Reproducibility #SocialScicence

We ♥ Replications!

The OSC is excited to be a partner in the upcoming LOVE REPLICATIONS WEEK 2026: an online event where you can learn about doing reproduction and replication studies 📚

When? Next week! March 2-6, 2026
Join daily online for talks and tutorials to learn how to:
🔹 Do reproduction and replication studies
🔹 Choose and justify replication targets
🔹 Collaborate with students on replication projects
🔹 Write reproducible reports and get certified reproducible results

Find out more about the program and register here: https://forrt.org/LoveReplicationsWeek/

Reliable research starts with results that can be reproduced! ✅

#LoveReplicationsWeek #Replication #Reproduction #OpenScience

@FORRT@mastodon.social @aufdroeseler@nerdculture.de @lukaswallrich@sciences.social @susanneadler@scicomm.xyz

We ♥ Free Software!

On this Love Free Software Day, we want to express our gratitude to the maintainers of the free and open-source tools we teach with and about, research with, and rely on every day.

Thank you for building and sustaining:
🔹 OpenAlex – An open catalog of the global research ecosystem, connecting publications, authors, and institutions.
🔹 R – A powerful open-source language for statistical computing and data visualization.
🔹 Quarto – A modern publishing system for reproducible reports, documents, and websites.
🔹 Git – The backbone of version control and collaborative workflows.
🔹 Renv – Enabling reproducible R project environments.
🔹 Zotero – Making reference management and citation effortless.
🔹 RDMO – Supporting structured and sustainable research data management.

And the tools that help us run research, organize events, and understand our impact:
🔹 formR – For designing and managing online studies.
🔹 Pretix – For seamless event registration and ticketing.
🔹 Matomo – For privacy-respecting analytics.

Free software is not just infrastructure, it is a collective achievement built on openness, transparency, and shared knowledge.

To everyone who maintains, documents, debugs, and improves these projects: Thank you. Your work matters so much to us.

For researchers wanting to use these tools in their workflow, find all our self-paced tutorials here: https://github.com/lmu-osc?view_as=public

#LoveFreeSoftware #OpenScience #FOSS hashtag#Reproducibility #ResearchTools

Celebrating Love Data Week, we presented an introduction to Open Data & Research Data Management at LMU Munich, highlighting practical resources and real-world data stewardship experiences.

📽️ Recording & slides: osf.io/ytc7m/

Contributions:
LMU Research Funding Unit, University Library, and SFB 1369.

Prof. Dr. Felix Schönbrodt (@nicebread@scicomm.xyz), LMU Open Science Center’s Managing Director, joined a workshop on “Instructional Design”, held by Antje Manske at the Leibniz Institute for Psychology (@zpid.bsky.social).

Here were some of the key topics:
- ADDIE, a framework for instructional design that stands for these five phases: Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, and Evaluation.
- Agile Instructional Design, an iterative and learner-centered approach to creating materials that emphasize collaboration and continuous feedback.
- Bloom’s taxonomy, a framework that classifies observable knowledge, skills, attitudes, behaviors, and abilities into categories of learning goals.

These skills and themes will be applied to an agile course on Research Data Management 📊.

Workshops like this help us continuously improve how we teach Open Science and empower researchers through better learning design.

#OpenScience #InstructionalDesign #LMUOSC

We’re excited to share that the cBRAIN Lab🧠, led by Inga Katharina Koerte at LMU Klinikum München (LMU Munich Hospital), has successfully completed our Switch to Open Program (SwOP) led by @MalikaIhle@scicomm.xyz!

Over several months, we delivered tailored training and consultations using a flipped-classroom approach supported by our self-paced tutorials.
📚 Tutorials: https://github.com/lmu-osc

As part of the collaboration, we also co-developed and published a standard open research practice guide for the lab—now available as a reference for new projects and as an onboarding document for incoming team members.
📄 Guide: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.16262260

We shared the lab’s achievement at the Neuroimaging Core Unit Munich (NICUM) Summer Festival to encourage other research groups to adopt and adapt similar practical guides (https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7360737896632336385/?actorCompanyId=91742131).

During our final offboarding session, we reviewed progress and revisited our customisable open research cycle diagram.
🔄 Diagram: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15630229

Team members reflected on their individual projects, identifying which checklist items were essential, recommended, or aspirational for each stage of the research cycle. Together, we built a group consensus and outlined a timeline of next steps toward the lab’s ideal open research standards.

It has been incredibly rewarding to see the sustained motivation and progress of our first “switched” group. Huge thanks to Alberto Villagran, OSC Fellow and cBRAIN’s Computer Scientist, and Anja Betz, cBRAIN’s Lab Manager, for their invaluable support throughout this process, as well as to Reema G., for her FAIR data sharing expertise.

We also gratefully acknowledge our funder, the Volkswagen Foundation (VolkswagenStiftung), for believing in the project and advancing open, responsible, and reproducible research practices.

#OpenScience #OpenResearch #LMUOSC

The LMU Open Science Center participated in the AI-Hub@LMU’s annual flagship event “KI-Symposium 2025” on November 10, 2025 💡 We presented a booth that invited visitors to reflect on key questions about the intersection of Artificial Intelligence (AI) 🤖 and Open Science 🔍

Our booth encouraged dialogue around AI and how it affects Research Quality, Reproducible Research, and FAIR Data Sharing. Visitors were also interested in the following topics:

⚖️ Can we balance openness and large amounts of new information?
A participant expressed concern that Open Science would open the floodgates to an overwhelming amount of materials being shared. An important focus of open science should then be increasing the share of reliable science, emphasizing quality over quantity.

🧠 How can openness help us confront human biases?
Another discussion centered around human biases, such as the unconscious bias to interpret data in ways that confirm one’s hypothesis, and how Open Science tries to mitigate these biases.

🔒 Where do we draw the line between openness and privacy?
A discussion on ethics in AI brought up the challenging issue of sharing health data openly while protecting patient privacy. A question was raised about whether AI possesses agency and then what would concepts like responsibility and accountability for AI look like.

By sparking these conversations, we set out to explore how openness and AI can evolve together 🌍

#ArtificialIntelligence #AI #OpenSience #OpenResearch #LMUOSC #LMU

Want to ensure your research data doesn’t contain errors and can be understood by other users and your future self? 🗂️ This tutorial by the LMU Open Science Center can show you how to document and validate your research data in R, making your research data more reusable.

The Tutorial of the Day: Data Documentation and Validation using R 📑 https://lmu-osc.github.io/data-documentation-validation-R/

Data documentation such as data dictionaries provides the contextual data needed to understand, navigate, and reuse research data whereas data validation involves verifying the collected data before it’s used. By documenting and validating your data, you can:
✔️ Create clear and comprehensive data dictionaries
✔️ Use summary statistics to spot data quality issues
✔️ Validate your data to catch errors before analysis
✔️ Produce professional reports that integrate documentation and analysis

Check out this tutorial to start making your research data more understandable and shareable! 💡

This tutorial has a CC BY license, so you can freely reuse and adapt it for your own courses or workshops by giving attribution.

#OpenScience #OpenResearch #Tutorial #OSCTutorials

How to promote the sharing of data for wider reuse when sensitive data cannot be shared? 🔐 The LMU Open Science Center offers a tutorial on how to create shareable and useful datasets when working with sensitive data.

The Tutorial of the Day: Generating and Evaluating Synthetic Data in R 🤖 https://lmu-osc.github.io/synthetic-data-tutorial/

Synthetic data are artificially generated datasets that mimic the structure and patterns of real data. By excluding personally identifiable information, it allows researchers to share data responsibly. With synthetic data, you can:
✔️ Explore and test new ideas on shared data when real data are restricted
✔️ Showcase the reproducibility of your methods and results by providing, along with the synthetic data, the code that analyzed the real data
✔️ Provide more information and visibility on your work and prompt collaborations
✔️ Generate realistic datasets for educational purposes

Create privacy-safe and shareable data today! 📊

This tutorial has a CC BY license, so you can freely reuse and adapt it for your own courses or workshops by giving attribution.

#OpenScience #OpenResearch #Tutorial #OSCTutorials

Struggling to keep your research data organized and make it reusable? 📂 The LMU Open Science Center has a tutorial to help bring order and accessibility to your datasets.

The Tutorial of the Day: FAIR Data Management 📚 https://lmu-osc.github.io/FAIR-Data-Management/

FAIR data management is all about handling data appropriately from their collection to easily make them Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable upon publication. With FAIR Data Management, you can:

✔️Make sure your data never gets lost
✔️Structure your files and folders for easy collaboration
✔️Make your data reusable by documenting it with e.g. a data dictionary
✔️Have all metadata on hand to publish your data in a dedicated repository and get your work found and cited

Start organizing your research data the FAIR way today! 🔍

This tutorial has a CC BY license, so you can freely reuse and adapt it for your own courses or workshops by giving attribution.

#OpenScience #OpenResearch #Tutorial #OSCTutorials

Need to calculate the sample size needed to detect the smallest effect size of interest before collecting data? 🧠 The LMU Open Science Center offers a tutorial to help you improve study design and conduct power analyses through simulation.

The Tutorial of the Day: Simulations of data in R for Advanced Power Analyses 💪 https://lmu-osc.github.io/Simulations-for-Advanced-Power-Analyses/

With simulations for complex study designs , you can:
✔️Gain confidence in your study’s robustness
✔️Investigate how multiple predictors interact in models
✔️Visualize how design changes affect statistical power
✔️Calculate your needed sample size

Take your power analyses to the next level and start learning today! 🚀
This tutorial has a CC BY license, so you can freely reuse and adapt it for your own courses or workshops by giving attribution.

#OpenScience #OpenResearch #Tutorial #OSCTutorials

🌍 During our Open Science Summer School 2025, Prof. Dr. Felix Schönbrodt (@nicebread@scicomm.xyz) gave an eye-opening lecture titled “Open Access, Preprints, Postprints - or ‘How to do Open Access For Free’,” 🔓 exploring the many ways researchers can reclaim control over how their work is shared.

Listen to Prof. Schönbrodt’s full lecture here: https://osf.io/5rsxb, review the slides here: https://osf.io/c2mrb

Here are a few key insights:
📗 Open Access takes many forms, from Green Open Access (self-archiving preprints or postprints) to Gold models where publications are made openly available immediately by the publishers, against an article processing charge paid by the authors.
🔍 Green Open Access refers to freely depositing your article in an institutional or discipline-specific repository that is freely-accessible by readers. Wonderful tools like the Open Policy Finder https://openpolicyfinder.jisc.ac.uk/ help you check which version of your article, where, and when publishers allow you to deposit a freely accessible version of your article.
💎 Diamond Open Access is a publishing model that is free for both readers and authors, supported by community-driven and non-commercial initiatives.

Open Access redistributes ownership of scientific knowledge back to the academic community and the public who fund research. 📖

#OpenAccess #OpenAccessWeek #WhoOwnsOurKnowledge #OpenResearch #OpenScience

🌍 Who really owns the knowledge we create? 🔓 For Open Access Week 2025, let’s reflect on what it means to take back ownership of research and how it’s shared.

Earlier this year, our Von “DEAL” zu “Diamond” symposium discussed how universities can move beyond commercial publishing models toward community-driven, non-profit systems. Two key approaches stood out:
💎 Diamond Open Access (OA): A community-driven model where publishing is free for both authors and readers. It’s supported by institutions rather than profit-based publishers.
🌐 Peer Community In (PCI): A non-commercial platform for open peer review and publication recommendation, allowing scholars to share and evaluate research transparently and collaboratively.

The conversations highlighted a key message: true openness in science isn’t only about access — it’s about autonomy, equity, and ensuring that knowledge serves the common good. 📚

Check out the materials (in German) from this symposium here: https://osf.io/r49ng/files

#OpenAccess #OAWeek #WhoOwnsOurKnowledge #OpenResearch #OpenScience

🌍 Under the theme “Who Owns Our Knowledge?” for Open Access Week 2025 🔓, we’re spotlighting two initiatives reshaping how knowledge is shared and evaluated: CoARA and OpenAlex.

🧭 CoARA (Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment): A global movement that promotes fairer research evaluation by recognizing diverse contributions and focusing on qualitative assessment over irresponsible use of metrics. In line with these principles, the Research Quality Evaluation (RESQUE) framework (https://www.resque.info/) offers practical tools and indicators for assessing research quality responsibly. It emphasizes the use of indicators for rigorous and reproducible science and offers user-friendly tools that enhance hiring and tenure decision-making processes. One of the coordinators of the RESQUE framework is our managing director, Felix Schönbrodt (@nicebread@scicomm.xyz)!

🔎 OpenAlex: An open, comprehensive index of the world’s research. It works by providing a database of research outputs which includes information like authors, affiliations, and citations, without paywalls. Based on OpenAlex, the LMU Open Science Center creates a bibliography of open science work from our members and maps the network of connections across our Open Science community: https://www.resources.osc.lmu.de/bibliography/.

By embracing initiatives like CoARA and OpenAlex, we move closer to a research culture where openness, equity, and integrity define how knowledge is created and shared. 💡

#OpenAccess #OAWeek #WhoOwnsOurKnowledge #OpenResearch #OpenScience

🌍 It’s Open Science Week! 🔓
From October 20–26, 2025, we join the global community in celebrating open access to knowledge and research.

💡 This year’s theme is “Who Owns Our Knowledge?” It invites us to reflect on how research and education are shared, who creates knowledge, and whose voices are recognized in shaping it.

Throughout this week, we’ll be highlighting our open science initiatives, events, and the open tools and resources that help us make research more transparent, inclusive, and accessible to all.

Join us as we continue pushing for a more open future in science and scholarship. ✨

#OpenAccess #OAWeek #WhoOwnsOurKnowledge #OpenResearch #OpenScience

Ever wondered if your study design will hold up before collecting real data? 📈 This tutorial by the LMU Open Science Center on data simulation will help you test, refine, and strengthen your statistical plan by creating artificial datasets.

The Tutorial of the Day: Introduction to Data Simulation in R 📊 https://lmu-osc.github.io/Introduction-Simulations-in-R/

Data simulation is the process of generating artificial data to better understand how real-world data behaves and to explore the statistical models we use to analyze it. With data simulation, you can:

✔️ Test how your statistical tests behave in different scenarios
✔️ Explore what sample size is needed to detect a simulated effect (a.k.a. run a power analysis)
✔️ Write the code for the confirmatory analyses of your study to later get your first results in minutes
✔️ Create a dataset you can share along your code for unbiased code-review

Build confidence in your research design through simulation with this tutorial! 💻

This tutorial has a CC BY license, so you can freely reuse and adapt it for your own courses or workshops by giving attribution.

#OpenScience #OpenResearch #Tutorial #OSCTutorials

Curious about creating a reproducible workflow for your research? 🔍 The LMU Open Science Center provides several self-paced tutorials about tools that make your work more efficient, reproducible, and collaborative.

The Tutorial of the Day: Introduction to R 📊 https://lmu-osc.github.io/introduction-to-R/

R is a powerful, open-source language for data processing, analysis, and visualization. With R, you can
✔️ Turn messy data into clear insights
✔️ Create easily interpretable, ready-to-publish graphs
✔️ Write and share reproducible research reports
✔️ Run advanced statistical analyses
✔️ Collaborate easily and make your work open and transparent

Start the tutorial today and learn on your own time and speed!

This tutorial has a CC BY license, so you can freely reuse and adapt it for your own courses or workshops by giving attribution. 🌍

#OpenScience #OpenResearch #Tutorial #OSCTutorials

And with that, the LMU Open Science Center has completed its 4th fully hybrid Open Science Summer School! 🙌 Five days filled with learning, training, and putting open science and open research practices into action. Check out all the material (slides, lecture recordings, workshop materials) of the open science training track here: https://osf.io/x639j/files/osfstorage and of the instructor training track here: https://osf.io/tkwqs/files/osfstorage. Find all our self-paced tutorials on our GitHub organization: https://github.com/lmu-osc

📚 #OSSS25 highlights:
🔓 Seven public lectures covered a wide range of topics from making publications more accessible, to crafting clearer code and sharing materials to make research more replicable. These presentations combined theory with practical recommendations and live demonstrations.
💻 Interactive workshops gave participants guided experience with tools such as R, Git & GitHub, and Quarto. Sessions blended demos, group activities, and self-paced tutorials, helping researchers apply these tools directly to their own projects.
👩‍🏫 The newly introduced Train-the-Trainer programme equipped participants with didactics, teaching strategies, and practical skills to share open science knowledge with their peers. With these sessions, participants were both building skills and learning to become leaders of the open science movement.
🤝 Connection and collaboration were at the heart of the summer school. From hybrid networking sessions and small group discussions to sharing lunch together, participants built relationships with fellow researchers equally passionate about adopting open practices.

A heartfelt thanks to everyone who joined us and to the OSC team who shared their expertise and energy, including Reema Gupta, Pat Callahan, Dr. Sarah von Grebmer, Dr. Sara Lil Middleton, Florian Kohrt, Dr. @MalikaIhle@scicomm.xyz, Prof. Dr. Felix Schoenbrodt (@nicebread@scicomm.xyz), Elizabeth Waterfield (@bethwater@mastodon.social), and Tejaswini Sharma.

Best of luck to all participants in implementing what you’ve learned to make your research more open, transparent, and impactful! Keep in touch, and see you in 6 months for a group check-in ! 🌍✨

#OpenScience #OSSS25 #LMUOSC

First day of the Open Science Summer School complete ✅ Participants learned a lot today but there’s a still lot more in store, you can join in for the public lectures by registering here: https://www.pretix.osc.lmu.de/lmu-osc/OSSS25/

📌 Here’s a recap of Day 1:
👨‍🏫 Prof. Dr. Felix Schoenbrodt (@nicebread@scicomm.xyz) gave a talk on the challenges with replicability in current research and the benefits of adopting open research practices.
📝 Dr. @MalikaIhle@scicomm.xyz shared everything we need to know on preregistration and how it can make our research more credible and reliable.
🤝 Participants, both in-person and online, joined in small groups for the interactive networking session to share their experiences, interests, and journeys with Open Science.
💻 Dr. Sarah von Grebmer led the workshop introducing R where participants got the opportunity to learn and practice basic R functions, paving the way for future workshops later this week.

We are excited to see how the following days of this summer school will be, don’t miss it!

#OpenScience #OSSS25 #LMUOSC

💻 Make your research more reproducible by making your code more readable. Get recommendations, examples, and key strategies for writing clean code!
Attend the “Readable code” lecture by Vera Karlbauer and Jonas Hagenberg on Thursday 18 September, 09:00-09:45.
👉 Register here for free: https://www.pretix.osc.lmu.de/lmu-osc/OSSS25/

#OpenScience #OSSS25 #LMUOSC

💡Explore how practices from distributed, open-source software can make science more professional, open, and collaborative!
Attend the “Science as amateur software development” lecture by Prof. Dr. Richard McElreath (@rlmcelreath@nerdculture.de) on Wednesday 17 September, 9:00-10:00.
👉 Register here for free: https://www.pretix.osc.lmu.de/lmu-osc/OSSS25/

#OpenScience #OSSS25 #LMUOSC

🧾 Learn about making your own research more credible, reproducible, and reliable by engaging with preregistration and a selection of computing tools!
Attend the “Credible Research” lecture by Dr. @MalikaIhle@scicomm.xyz on Monday 15 September, 11:00-11:45.
👉 Register here for free: https://www.pretix.osc.lmu.de/lmu-osc/OSSS25/

#OpenScience #OSSS25 #LMUOSC

📢 This year, we’re hosting seven public lectures that anyone can attend completely free of charge between Sept 15 and 18. Join us to strengthen your skills in:
🔄 Computational reproducibility,
💻 Writing readable and reusable code,
🌍 Open access publishing,
✍️ Making your own work more likely to be replicable, and more!

Each lecture offers valuable insights for students, researchers, and anyone interested in embracing open science practices.

📅 Registration for online attendance is open.
🔗 https://www.pretix.osc.lmu.de/lmu-osc/OSSS25/

Let’s learn, share, and build a more open research culture together!

#OpenScience #OSSS25 #LMUOSC

🔁 Thinking of making the switch to open science? The Switch to Open Program (SwOP) is an ongoing program at the OSC to support research groups who want to switch to open science practices. Here’s how your research group can benefit from this program:

✨ Over 6 months, OSC Coordinator Dr. @MalikaIhle@scicomm.xyz guides research groups through a flipped-classroom format, while FAIR data expert Reema Gupta provides tailored consultations 📊.
📘Each group creates a custom Open Research Practice Guide for future projects and onboarding.

🧠 First to make the switch: the cBRAIN lab from the LMU Clinic and Polyclinic for Psychiatry led by Prof. Dr. med. Inga Koerte.
👏 Thanks to Alberto Villagran for supporting this pilot!
🔁 Currently switching: Prof. Dr. med. Nikolaus Plesnila’s Stroke Research Lab.

📖 Lab handbooks of groups who switch to open science will be openly shared under a CC-BY license so others can adapt them.
👀 Preview the cBRAIN open research practice guide: https://zenodo.org/records/16262261
📢 Interested? Labs from all fields of science can contact @MalikaIhle@scicomm.xyz to learn more!

#OpenScience #FAIRdata #LMUOSC

🎯 The OSC is proud to have consulted for 6 out of the 7 successfully funded Clusters of Excellence applications at LMU!
🤝 We are especially excited to continue working with the Munich Cluster for Systems Neurology (SyNergy) and the Excellence Cluster ORIGINS, both Funding Institutional Members of the OSC.
🎉 Congratulations to everyone involved in this monumental application effort. We look forward to supporting more research that’s not only excellent, but also open and transparent.

#OpenScience #ClustersOfExcellence #LMUOSC

🚨 Exciting new program from the OSC!
This September, we will launch our Train-the-Trainer program through the instructor training track at the Open Science Summer School. Here’s all the information about it 👇

Turning knowledge into action! 💡 Led by Dr. Sarah von Grebmer zu Wolfsthurn and supported by Dr. Sara Lil Middleton, this program aims to guide and equip participants in learning, practicing, and training students and other researchers in Open Science 🔬

🤝 A key strength of the program is our partnership with FORRT, the Framework for Open and Reproducible Research Training (@FORRT@mastodon.social). Together, we’re building a community of trainers who don’t just talk about open science but teach it!

#OpenScience #TrainTheTrainer #FORRT #OSSS25 #LMUOSC

📢 Call for application for members of LMU Munich and TU Munich

🎯 Become a certified instructor of @thecarpentries@fosstodon.org to teach your software, data, or library skills that facilitate open and reproducible research!

🔥 15 seats available

Find out more and apply by Nov 13: https://www.osc.uni-muenchen.de/news/carpentry_23/index.html