Course plan and materials for the Open Science Course at the Physics Department, Utrecht University
In Open Science for Physicists (OS4P), students evaluate the best practices, concepts and conditions used by physicists in their professional activities and workflow, working either inside or outside academia .
This course is first developed by Sanli Faez (@sanlifaez) and Erik van Sebille (erikvansebille) in 2023, with the help of Hendrik Snijder (@hendelhendel), at the Physics department of Utrecht University.
Tanja Hinderer, Sjoerd Terpstra, Hosein Nemati, and Marc Schneiter have contributed to the second edition taught in the academic year 2024/25.
The OS4P course is about real-life skills and experiences of researchers in a rapidly evolving academic landscape. With the advancement of open science, students do not only need to update our idea of "how science works", but also need to know which tools are available and which skills will be necessary. Therefore, this course is a combination of lectures and hands-on exercises to get a good feeling of these new developments. Some of the open science practices are still not widely embraced by some people in the scientific community. These frictions could influence the post-graduate career of our students. To appreciate and form an opinion on these practices, these dilemmas are presented to the students through discussions and hands-on assignments, which are purposedly made imperfect just like the real world. In this course, we often ask why a certain choice is made or commonly practiced. Such questions are not always the most comfortable or easy to answer. We do out best to create a brave environment where such uncomfortable issues can be discussed openly and critically. We hope that all students engage in these discussions with curiosity and an open mind. As the course emphasizes learning from engagement, which is difficult to quantify, grading is done as pass/fail.
These topics are covered during the OS4P lectures:
For details of the topics and lectures covered in each week, please look at the Syllabus Specific instructions for the academic year 2023-24 are listed in the essential info
By following this course students make an attempt to
The exercises for this course are team-based. See the list of assignments for an overview.
Teams will be reshuffled for each exercise so that pass/fail is individually determined by collecting a basket of satisfactory project results. Exercises are partially assessed by peers and partially by course instructors.
Learning outcomes: At various occasions during the course, students are assessed for the ability to
Open Science for Physicists will run in period 1, and is scheduled on every Thursday afternoon from 13:15-17:00, between September 12th and November 1st.
The course materials will be made available on the course repository and are regularly updated during the course. Important announcements will also be posted on the UU Blackboard system.