Theme: Research Management

• Do you use data in your research, or do you provide research support to those who do?
• Would you like to learn basic programming skills to program your own models and applications?

There is more to programming than simply writing lines of code. This free workshop will provide you with a basic set of skills to make the coding process more effective, less error prone and more maintainable.

This workshop is intended for those looking to obtain a basic understanding of the approach to be taken when designing a program as well as actually writing small programs to solve specific problems. It is designed for those with no prior experience of programming.

It is organised by the Office of Scholarly Communication and The Betty and Gordon Moore Library, and delivered by Peter Smyth (Research Associate) and Chris Park (Data Scientist) from the UK Data Service.

Paola Quattroni from Cancer Research UK coming to run a workshop on 11th May.

This is a really good opportunity to influence the Cancer Research UK data policy and give feedback to your funder about the changes you would like to see. Paola will give a short talk and then the majority of the workshop will be given over to discussions and opportunities for researchers to feedback their experiences, problems and suggested solutions to enable more data sharing. As well as discussing data sharing Paola will also bring some data management plans so researchers can find out more about what they should and should not be putting in their grant applications.

You know about Symplectic Elements as a way to gather the outputs of our research community but have you ever wanted to know more about the connections between funding and publications?

Digital Science, the makers of Symplectic Elements, have recently launched a new product called Dimensions. Dimensions integrates with Elements to link grants, publications, citations, clinical trials and patents and enables us to take a completely different view of what our research community is doing.

Join Dr Juergen Wastl from the Research Information Office for a demonstration of how the institutional instance of Dimensions works, ask any questions and get some hands on experience with the system.

For a sneak preview, the publication instance of Dimensions is available to all here.

Are the researchers in your department confused about what they need to do about Open Access?

This support session will equip you to help them understand:

• what Open Access policies actually mean for researchers across the disciplines
• what they are required to do in order for their research to be eligible for REF 2021

Open Access can be a confusing topic for researchers and they will often turn to those within their department for answers. These interactive sessions will help those with these responsibilities to guide researchers through the process of making their research available.

Each session will begin with a short presentation introducing Open Access followed by a chance for attendees to ask questions on issues of local relevance.

Note that this session is targeted towards those supporting the sciences, technology, engineering and mathematics although those from other disciplines are also welcome to attend

Researchers and students can now not only make their code and data available for their academic papers, but also enable others to reproduce the results with a single-click.

Code Ocean is an easy-to-use executable repository and reproducibility platform that facilitates replication and reuse of research code. This demo will provide an overview of the Code Ocean platform and explore benefits such as:

• preservation code will work today, tomorrow, next week, next year

• advanced tech suite of tools which follow reproducibility best practices

• impact enable easy reuse of code to extend research

• collaboration code is easy to share and discover.

Lunch will be provided.

Some learned societies are increasingly dependent on publishing revenues, yet as open access becomes the new normal, researchers and librarians alike are questioning expensive subscription and publishing deals.

The Office of Scholarly Communication presents a panel debate for Open Access Week 2018 and Cambridge Festival of Ideas 2018. Join representatives from learned societies in the arts and sciences, including the Royal Society, the Royal Society of Chemistry and the Royal Historical Society, in conversation with their members within the University of Cambridge to ask ‘what is a learned society in the 21st century?’ How can the societies sustain their place in the academic landscape and answer the challenges created by open access requirements?

Everyone is welcome to attend this free event: visit our booking page.

Advertised on behalf of ReproducibiliTea, the Open Science Journal Club in the Department of Psychology

The Open Science Journal Club invites anyone interested in Open Research to join this lunchtime session, where Dav Clark will introduce Gigantum, a free open source tool designed to streamline reproducible and collaborative data science. Gigantum aims to bring together complex tools, workflows and community approaches that enable exciting research collaborations and also enable others to evaluate and build on your work.

The session will introduce the Gigantum Client, an MIT licensed web application that runs locally, simplifying and automating tools like Docker, Git, and launching environments like JupyterLab. Dav will also describe paid services hosted by Gigantum that enable single-click publication and collaboration from the Client. You will learn about versioning and collaboration features, how to easily move work between local resources and the cloud, as well as new approaches to creating and managing scientific datasets. There will also be the chance to go under the hood to show how sophisticated users (e.g., Research Software Engineers, Data Librarians, etc.) can create customized data science environments that are easy to distribute, and are accessible to users with diverse skill sets.

All welcome - if you aren't a member of the Department of Psychology, please meet at the Department Reception by 12.55 and Ben Farrar will show you to the Nick Macintosh Seminar Room (a second escort will check at 1pm for latecomers!).

This session will include a hands-on demo, so please bring your laptops. You may bring your lunch if you wish, and Dav is happy to join participants for lunch afterwards.

As scientists, your skills of critical thinking are well developed in hypothesis testing, observation and empirical experiment. This workshop will incorporate other modes of logic and reason into your scientific thinking. The focus of discussion will be social and ethical issues in biotechnology.

You will develop:

• Knowledge of critical thinking, with respect to logic and argument development
• Skills in application of critical thinking using case studies and debate involving bioethics

Developing your critical thinking and recognising how human elements impact on scientific enquiry will support you in making more appropriate decisions in the direction of your scientific projects.

PLEASE NOTE

This course compromises of two compulsory sessions. In the first session you will learn the skills and in the second you will apply them. There is also an optional follow-up session where you can meet with members of your group to discuss how you have applied the skills in your research.

Trainer:

Caroline Broad is a Philosophy graduate, with seven years experience working in the bio science industry and 15 years delivering skills development workshops.

The design and analysis of experiments is an essential first step before doing any research; this short seminar will help you develop a clear understanding of what you need to consider when planning experiments and will help to maximize your productivity. Please note that this course is aimed at ecologists but the principles can be applied to experimental design in many other areas.

Your lab notebook is one of the most important and precious objects you, as a scientist, will ever have. This course will explore how keeping an exemplary laboratory notebook is crucial to good scientific practice in lab research. The course will consist of a short talk, a chance to assess some examples of good and bad practice, with plenty of time for questions and discussion. You might like to bring along your own lab notebook for feedback. (Please note that issues relating to protection of Intellectual Property Rights will not be covered in this course).

How to succeed in your PhD! A one day course which prepares final year PhD students for finishing the writing up, surviving the viva and moving on into postdoc or other employment. All research students in the Graduate School of Life Sciences are expected to attend this highly-recommended course at some point in their final year.