Weekly Schedule
In this course, students are presented with challenges and discuss various tools developed to address them. Meeting session activities include 1:1 meetings with faculty and peers, a group opening discussion of the week’s challenge, oral presentations, and a collective critical evaluation of the week’s tool. Individual requirements include oral presentations, weekly written response papers, and a final project.
Week 1
- Challenge: What are we trying to do here?
- Discussion: Reforming science.
Week 2
- Challenge: Data are wasted, lost, and under-used.
- Tool: Data management plans, meta-data standards, data repositories.
Week 3
- Challenge: Experiments cannot be repeated by other labs.
- Tool: FAIR protocols; methodology reporting standards.
Week 4
- Challenge: Effect sizes are inflated by experimenter degrees of freedom.
- Tool: Pre-registration of analysis pipeline.
Week 5
- Challenge: Mistakes go uncaught and uncorrected.
- Tool: Dynamic executable papers; FAIR open-source processing pipelines.
Week 6
- Challenge: Time and effort are wasted by arbitrary gatekeeping.
- Tool: Preprints and post-publication review.
Week 7
- Challenge: Results are only accessible to very rich institutions.
- Tool: Open access and alternative publishing agreements.
Week 8
- Challenge: Scientific papers are obsolete.
- Tool: Video papers, blogs.
Week 9
- Challenge: Researchers are incentivized to be first, not right.
- Tool: Badges, transparency audits, openness metrics.
Week 10
- Challenge: It’s often unclear who should have credit, access, and ownership.
- Tools: Collaboration agreements, licensing.
Week 11
- Challenge: Minoritized scientists are excluded and undervalued.
- Tool: Citation audits for papers and syllabi.
Week 12
- Challenge: Basic science does not generalize to the real world.
- Discussion: What are we trying to achieve, again?
