The Open Science training handbook: Written by 14 international experts during the FOSTER Book Sprint

Abstract

In February 2018, FOSTER Plus and TIB organized a book sprint in order to author an Open Science training handbook collaboratively. For one week, we brought together 14 experienced Open Science educators in Hanover to answer a number of questions: What works, what doesn’t? How can you make the most of limited resources? With their help, we are creating a handbook that equips future trainers with methods, instructions, exemplary training outlines and inspiration for their own trainings. The handbook provides advocates across the globe with practical know-how to deliver Open Science principles to researchers, support staff, and research administrators. It is a living resource that is online accessible under the terms of CC0 1.0 license. The Open Science community was and will be able to review, comment and add other contributions such as discipline-specific case studies or translations after the book sprint. This is how we ensure the relevance of the handbook for a broad audience. In our ultimate goal to establish a robust, highly reusable resource on a certain topic in a short matter of time, we utilize two of the most prominent concepts and methods from the area of collaborative book writing: Book sprints and living books. Although the opportunities of both became apparent in the last few years, they still bear challenges, especially when applied to a loosely coupled, international audience of authors. We scrutinize our experiences all along the process, from the book preparation, through facilitating the book sprint itself, up to the reuse and enhancement of the book with different groups in different scenarios. Hereby, we hope to encourage and equip Open Education practitioners all over the world to make use of new open methods in the realm of collaborative book writing, like book sprints and maintaining open books, for their respective projects.