Luxembourg's first National Open Science conference

It was only 30 years ago that the first public research centres were founded in Luxembourg, but today research and innovation have settled as core priorities to contribute towards the country’s economic diversification and future prosperity. On Thursday 26^th of October 2017, as part of the Open Access Week (23-29 October 2017), researchers from all research institutions within Luxembourg were invited to participate, discover, discuss the broad and valuable topic of Open Science. Being Luxembourg’s first conference on the subject we aimed to pique researchers’ interest through a simple question: “Do you speak Open Science? Discover why you should!”.

The event was organised jointly with the National PhD Welcome Day which gathered all first year PhD candidates within the country. Because early career researchers are a crucial part of the research process, the first part of the event was tailored towards them in which Gareth O’Neill, the president of the European Council of Doctoral Candidates and Junior Researchers (EuroDoc), introduced the importance of “Open Science for early career researchers”.

After some social networking activities, the session was opened to all and the first guest speaker Lennart Martens, a professor of Systems Biology and Open Science advocate from the University of Ghent (Belgium), displayed the many reasons why researchers should consider open science practices. The importance of making public and research data available was then presented by Conchita D’Ambrosio, a Professor of Economics at the University of Luxembourg, showing we can be “Open in order to … fight inequality”.

This half-day event gathered more than 150 participants from across all research fields, making a successful first step in the promotion of Open Science practices within Luxembourg!

 

Speak OPEN science:

Hidden science is not useful

Hidden science will not improve our world

Conchita D’Ambrosio, 26/10/17

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You will find below some photos of the event, alongside with some of the objects that we included in the Welcome pack (yes everyone was pleasantly surprised to find an OpenAIRE powerbank in their bag!). Alongside the Open Access Week and the event, the University of Luxembourg library suggested some further readings through a ‘Focus’ display on the theme of Open Science.

And do not forget to watch the recording of the event!

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The Open Science conference and the National PhD Welcome Day were organised under the lead of the University of Luxembourg and OpenAIRE, in partnership with the Luxembourg National Research Fund (FNR), the Luxembourg Institute of Health (LIH), the Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology (LIST), the Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research (LISER), the Max Planck Institute Luxembourg for International, European and Regulatory Procedural Law (MPI), the Luxembourgish young researcher association LuxDoc and EURAXESS Luxembourg, the national service centre assisting for the mobility of researchers.

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