Further information

This page explains a few additional concepts that didn't fit in the course, and links to more useful resources.

A more in-depth course

This course is designed to be a short introduction to doing open science, and what you have seen here is just the surface of a deep topic.

For a more comprehensive treatment of open science, we suggest the aptly named Open Science MOOC. In the spirit of open science, this entire contents of this course is published in a GitHub repository where everyone can contribute.

The basics of publishing your open science outputs

Where to publish

This course already mentioned Zenodo, OSF, Wikimedia Commons, and Research, Ideas and Outcomes as good places to publish all outputs from your work.

Another catch-all platform for long-term archiving is the Internet Archive. It is a 20+ years old non-profit organisation that aims to digitally preserve all aspects of human knowledge. You can upload practically anything that could be saved in a file to the Internet Archive for safekeeping, and you receive a permanent link to share with others. Look at their upload guide for more details.

FAIR principles

Here are some further readings which give you more details with practical examples regarding FAIR principles:

• Publishing FAIR data in citizen science projects, hosted on EU-Citizen.Science
• Step-by-step guide to publishing FAIR data by Harvard University
• Original paper proposing FAIR data by Wilkinson et al. (2016)

File formats for long-term archiving

Avoid proprietary file formats, or formats that require proprietary software to open and edit. There are established good practices for doing this: 

• The United States Library of Congress has a detailed guide on the Sustainability of Digital Formats and an extensive list of Recommended Formats.
• The European Union OpenAIRE project has a set of recommended readings and guidelines.
• Stanford University in the United States also has a guide with case studies of possible problems if you do not use open file formats suitable for archiving!

Open science outputs: software and hardware

Publishing software

For more information on good practices for publishing software code, you can look at:

• Guides by the Software Sustainability Institute
  
• Coding Club
• The Turing Way guides to reproducible data science

Reuse, remix, and legal considerations

What else is there besides copyright?

Copyright is the legal concept that applies in most situations in open science. However, there are other legal concepts that might come into play, such as:

• Patents - A monopoly preventing others from access to your invention, such as a piece of scientific hardware.
  
• Trademarks - Distinctive and recognisable designs that identify something, such as a brand.
  

Generally speaking, for the purposes of doing open science, it is a good idea to not patent your work and apply for trademarks.

For more valuable information, Dr Teresa Scassa of the Wilson Center has written extensively on how copyright and other legal concepts relate to citizen science, which you can read by clicking here.

Other notable terms

There are two other terms you may have heard that deserve more explanation:

• Intellectual property - This is often used as a "catch all" term and ends up being ambiguous in its meaning. This is because the rules concerning copyright, patents, trademarks, and other legal instruments are all different. Therefore, you should try to be specific about which one you are talking about, and avoid the term "intellectual property."
  
• Public domain - When the copyright on a creative work expires, such as the case for the Happy Birthday song, the work enters what's called the "public domain". In other words, anything in the public domain has no copyright and can be used by anyone, for any purpose, and in any way without permission or attribution (in most legal jurisdictions). Remember, however, that copyright is automatically applied to anything as soon as it is created, so normally there is no way for you to release anything directly into the public domain. One exception, which works in some jurisdictions, is to use the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) public domain dedication. This is a nuanced topic, so please read the instructions on what this means before you use CC0.