As was already announced, I am speaking from Hannover in Germany here, and I work at the TIB, which many of you will already know, since Christian Hauschka already gave a talk here, and I will focus on another area of the activity of our team, the Open Science Lab within TIB.

Let me very quickly first wrap up what TIB is, just to make sure we are here on the same page. So, the TIB is in the German research system in some way complicated because we are a

library, and more than that, a research infrastructure service provider, and a research institution at the same time. So, we have a somewhat longer tradition. As you can see, we are founded in 1959, and

we are part of the Leibniz Association in Germany, and we are also University of Hannover University Library. And as you would expect from a research institution, we have a huge research department, research and development department, and we try every time to come up with new services and better services.

So for instance, you might have heard about TIB's AV portal, a YouTube for research in a way, and you probably also have heard from Christian Hauschka about Vivo, and you might

know that data site came up originally as an initiative from the University of California, TIB, and others. So, without further ado, let me dive into my topic here today, the Open Science Lab. What does it mean? What does it take to run an Open Science Lab?

So, we started as a group within the research and development department of TIB almost 10 years ago, and the general idea and the reason why we call it Open Science Lab is that we are interested in helping research but also cultural heritage

institutions, so libraries, galleries, museums, archives, and so on, to make use of the open web in order to share what they have, what they can provide to the public. And we like to explore novel methods, but always in terms of coming up with practical solutions, and we like to do this in partnerships.

So we have multiple grant funded projects, both on a national and international level. And so the idea is not to do research as an end on its own, or because it's an advancement of your academic career,

but to really be close to the actual solution and to work together with the communities for whom this is important. So those of you who listened to Christian's presentation he gave earlier, you will easily see the connection here,

right? So we work with research institutions, in Christian's case, to find solutions involving open research information things, right? So and we developed within the Open Science Lab, which by now has more

than 20 colleagues, certain clusters like the one of Christian Hauschke I already mentioned. Then additionally, Ina Blumel, who originally started Open Science Lab with me, together with me 10 years ago. She's a professor also at University of Applied Science in Hannover, and she's

running a cluster around open GLAM, as we say, so galleries, libraries, archives, museums. And then we have a third thing that I want to focus on today in this presentation, which is what we call peer to peer learning.

And peer to peer learning means that also in research, it's a huge benefit if we allow people who are on the same level, so to say, to learn from each other, to learn among equals.

And there are certain mechanisms, we know for that, that we cultivate and develop and that we applied multiple times. And I will tell you a little bit about this now. So one thing is we co-created and run with Ina Blumel mostly, the

fellowship on open knowledge, together or funded by Wikimedia, Germany, Stiftverband and Volkswagen Stiftung. This was a program that is similar to research data stewardship programs. You probably heard about them. So they became popular only a few years ago in the Netherlands.

We have some of them also now in Germany. And it's like an approach to allow people to step up in their own fields, mostly early career researchers, and tell other people

how they do apply open science approaches and sustainable research data approaches within their own research. And this is super interesting because you come into corners where maybe research data approaches are not as popular yet than in other fields.

And you have also a network effect. So you offer like meetings, mentorship for these stewards, or in our case, fellows. And this is really a very sustainable and clever way to learn about open science from our experience here. So this exact program closed

last year, but we are certain that we will contribute to similar programs in the future, because we are pretty sure that this is worthwhile. Let me give you another example. Also from peer to peer learning, and that is hackathons. Certainly you all in some way or the other

heard about hackathons. So just this week, we finished our by now last hackathon, which was creating new dimensions hackathon. And this is something we ran together with several of the German NFDI's. So in Germany,

there's a government funded structure called National Research Data Infrastructures, or in German, NFDI for short. And we agreed among some of those NFDI's that across their research areas,

we have something in common, and that is in this case, three dimensional data. So we asked research institutions, but also cultural heritage institutions to provide openly licensed data sets that are somehow 3D, like CT scans, like stereoscopic photos, and so on.

And then we invited hackers, creative people, programmers, researchers, mostly young people again, to come together for a weekend, and to come up with creative ideas and solutions to do something novel with this data.

And they were really invited and there were no like assumptions on what they should do, but instead they could do everything they like to. And this Monday at the Museum for Natural History in Berlin, famous museum, research museum in Germany,

we had the prizes and the final ceremony of that hackathon, and it was really impressive. You can hardly imagine the level of skill and ideas that has gone into the project. I really invite you to have a closer look at the project website.

So let me again make sure that we are on the same page here. So we have by now in Germany, official curricula who take into account things like research data, that's for sure.

But when you compare what happens at a hackathon, it is in no way comparable, because in terms of being up to date and what you can do with data, in terms of agile collaboration that is necessary to get your project awarded in the hackathon,

in terms of incentivization to have this nice experience of the competition and the open hackathon weekends, and in terms of involvement of real, wildly mixed data from the brown field of research and cultural heritage.

This is really unique, and we should really make use of it very, very consciously as a tool, as a platform for learning to take place, for allow people to learn about research data and what to do with it.

And this will certainly not be the least bigger hackathon run by the NFTIs in Germany, that's for sure. That was just a start. So for instance, we learned that we must be better at involving the original university programs. So we need at a very,

very early preparation stage of the hackathon, make sure that they learn about the hackathon, and that the student groups from universities who learn about this anyway in their official curriculum are also invited there, right, that we connect the worlds.

So and then one final example, which I would like to have a little bit deeper look here, are book sprints. This might not be so obvious, so you know that within the larger book market, textbooks or handbooks are huge.

And yet, at the same time, we do not hear much yet in terms of open access books in these fields. So, not speaking here about PhD thesis also, they are sometimes open access already. But textbooks and handbooks are not very often open yet, or as the UNESCO would

call it, open educational resources, OER, which is somehow slightly different from open access classical. So what we do in practical terms, and you can see this from the example photo on the

right hand side of the slide, we guided multiple experts group through the rapid production of high quality textbooks. And this method that we apply here, we call it book sprints. And the idea is to have ultimately the book living as a structured text on a Git repository, where everyone can see it and everyone can see how it evolves, how it maybe

get enhancements or translations as a living book, so to say, and where people are actually invited to take part of the book and to use them in their context. Everything is openly licensed.

Everything is processed like it would be an open source software sitting on a GitHub repository or so. And also what we apply here is the experience from Wikipedia. So we have this invited closed group of experts, but within that expert group, the contributors are equal and are invited to collaborate closely on everything.

So like there's a collective responsibility for the book as a whole, and they feel it, and it contributes to the agile development of the book. So we make sure that all of the book is homogeneous and everything is on the same high quality level.

And yeah, that's what we do. And here you have a quick deep dive into the method. You can maybe you can have at least a glance at this or have a closer look on that blog posting from Helena Brink and me from a few years ago.

So this is all about setting up a book project in a proper way so to scope really what should be covered, what are the audiences that you have in mind. And certainly you will have to have good funding for making sure that

the book receives good review, good design, additional multimedia pieces and so on. And then you have to be very careful about selecting the experts that you invite to collaborate on the book, then

you have the actual sprint event, which only takes three or five days or so, where you collaboratively write on the book. And then you have like the time after the book sprint where things go on, things can still be contributed, and so on. So, and one last thought about book sprints. So I think that the traditional book production process is

for our times and days, much too slow and transparent, it's mostly behind paywalls and it doesn't favor updates. Essentially, it's broken.

And on the other hand, you have experts communities that can use tools and methods that are already available, like the open source software and approaches I mentioned, the book sprint methods and other things. And it's worthwhile to consider when you do your next handbook or textbook, if you try this

approach, so with a completely shared responsibility and collective ownership, like in a proper open source software project. And as a byproduct, you get more than a book, you get capability building, how Helen Beatham and Lou McGill called

it. So you have like a contributor community that learns how they can take over responsibility and do something with digital tools. Yeah, that's mostly it. I tried to be quick and short, maybe we can have questions and answers afterwards. Otherwise,

get in contact anytime. You know how to reach TIB and yeah, happy to hear from you and your questions. Thanks.