5  Open Materials

Publishing Open Materials is a bit different from publishing Open Data. On the one hand it’s easier, because you will generally not risk publishing personal data as is the case for data. On the other hand it’s harder, because although anonymized data generally exists in the public domain, materials you create are often creative works, and so by default, copyright applies. Finally, if you use closed infrastructure (for example, software that is not open source, like Qualtrics, NVivo, Atlas.ti, or SPSS), it is not always straightforward to make your materials open. You can publish your files, but the may require the prospective interested scientist to first pay for the same software, and that excludes quite a large proportion of scientists (i.e. all but the richest few).

Fortunately, all these topics are also relevant for other aspects of open science. You may have read about them already - and otherwise, see Chapter 8 and Chapter 2.

In any case you will need to choose a repository to deposit your materials. The Open Science Framework is generally a good choice. It can integrate with a number of third-party services to make the process as effortless as possible. You can create an account for free at https://osf.io.

5.1 Conferences

For conferences, organizers (or anybody, really) can request an OSF Meetings page. A number of examples are linked to from https://hpss.one. This allows people to upload slides and posters very easily: just by sending an e-mail.

A pro tip: e-mail your slides to the OSF meetings page a few days before the conference. They don’t have to be done yet: you will still be able to change them later (the only thing you won’t be able to change is the filename). OSF will create a new OSF repository for you with your slides.

Make sure that when you send the e-mail, you use one of the e-mail addresses associated to your OSF account. This way, you will be able to edit the repository that OSF creates later. The repository will still be linked to the OSF Meetings page. You can then replace the file with your slides or poster with updated versions (as long as the filename stays the same), and even add more files, or edit the repo’s wiki to link to other interesting resources for your audience.

This new repo will be directly accessible from the OSF Meetings page of the conference, and like all OSF repositories, it will have its own short URL. You can then use this URL to create a QR code, and include the URL and/or QR code on your slides or poster. This way, you can easily let people download your slides or poster (is using slides, make sure to include the URL and/or QR code on both the first and last slide, and explicitly tell people that it will be on the last slide - that way, people know that if they missed it, they can just wait until the end.