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In the last years I have had the chance to learn a lot in a context of stimulating education at a French university. I now start do to research and my next step is to do a PhD.
Great work has already been done in research and I know my participation to knowledge will be small at first. Yet, regarding technical and organisational considerations, in a short term I can help propagate practices that help:
Declaration of conflicts of interest: I may be the first person benefiting by this process, as it will help me bootstrap my research activity.
Expected outcomes: in an attempt to give back to the community more than I receive, I commit myself to documenting this process so that other research aspirant employ it.
Note: I don’t think I will revolutionize the way research is carried with this project. But within a short term, I expect to have a good basis for reproducible, highly documented process and data, as well as a cooperation-friendly process (think of it: if Iwork on my own during the tree years of a PhD and only when I leave start thinking about making it understandable to the next PhD, these criteria will not be achieved).
Start with an idea, written in plain words.
Agregate literature and start a knowledge database (semantic graph that connect concepts).
Contact researchers to collect collective intelligence. Present the project, ask for review of the knowledge base, list a set of open questions.
Aim is to collect validate the quick review of available knowledge and collect heuristics aquired through experience. Concretely, a project developped without experience leads to steps non feasible in the given time and technical means, or even non-feasible with current precision oh instruments and mathematical models.
This prospection step is rewarded with an attribution of contributions to their authors, with the grant of an access to the knowledge database as it will be enriched.
Develop a workflow (digital pipe of tools) from sources, through analytics tools to results database and publication. A monitoring dashboard, with real-time and previsions will be used to visualise the advancement of the project.
Modularity and feedback (indications to the user as well as regulation of the workflow), modularity and interoperability are important criteraia.
Note: at this point, the research project will start to be realised. All what has been aquired precedently will be incrementally enhanced. The individuals who contributed may benefit from these improvements. Other individuals wishing to bootstrap a research project may benefict from the feedback of the former steps. What follows is a more regular research project.
Add a great quantity of high quality hypotheses/interpretations/theoretical notes/testing. <- Do the job of THINKING, proposition, testing
Pursue regular discussion with the scientific community, through questions and updates.
State when milestones are reached. Communicate to the world about it (without any consideration of birth place.) Communication is about telling, listening to the feedback and explain again in a customized way.
Attribute to everyone who participated to this process, in publication and in communication (something like: any time possible, suggest one with a question to discuss with someone).
Advise aspiring researchers willing to bootstrap a research project. Be clear about the proposed help (in my case: answering to questions related to this process, in case the dynamics grows, launch an autonomous community around this method).
In a process of “eating my own dog’s food”, I wrote a short version of the research project I would like to carry, with some literarure.
Soon I will post a link to the discussion going on with scientist (for the moment, this is not advanced: issues management and private/public discussions are not straightforward to handle).
I am currently looking for a lab for a PhD. I expect discussion and compromise on the narrowing of my project.
Pleas have a look at my projects in order to understand how I want to implement the workflow and documentation management (under construction).
I invite you to discuss the process in itself (let’s go meta) on this Loomio (please note that I will agregate the possible comments from facebook in order to keep record of all interesting contributions).
Finally, I wrote this process motivated by my own questions, reflections and state towards my research project. Yet, I have been greatly informed and inspired by my participation to the team HackYourPhD (facebook group of HackYourPhD). If the discussion goes in this direction this project may become a HackYourPhD project.
Choosing open practices in research and advocate open science might make some fear not to find a position. Yet, formalising constraints and consequences of this choice may reveal an encouraging situation. After all, open practices lead to opon knowledge, reproducibility and easy cooperation.
So, at least, here is at least some information of what it means to choose open practices for me.
Jibé @jibe_jeybee About me
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