Open Science Ambassadors

Program 2025

Sunday, 14.09.25

  • Welcome Dinner

    –

    self-payment

Monday, 15.09.25

Tuesday, 16.09.25

Welcome Remarks

The PhDnet Working Group Open Science is co-organizer of the event. Their representative Toluwanimi Afolayan will welcome the participants and introduce their group and activities. She will also say a few words about the Open Science Ambassadors program, its development and current status.

Intro to Open Science

The “Open Science in Practice” (OSiP) Team of the Max Planck Digital Library is co-organizer of the event. The Project Manager for Open Science, Larissa Leiminger, will give a short introduction to the principles and practices of Open Science. Additionally, she will introduce the tools and services the Max Planck Digital Library offers to support Open Science in the Max Planck Society (MPG).

Bernd Pulverer – Open Peer Review

Bernd Pulverer obtained his PhD from the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research, London, and carried out postdoctoral research in Toronto, Seattle, and Innsbruck. He has held senior editorial roles at Nature, Nature Cell Biology, The EMBO Journal, and currently serves as Head of Scientific Publications at EMBO and Editor-in-Chief of EMBO Reports. Bernd co-founded the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) and served on its Steering Committee, as well as on the advisory board of bioRxiv and is currently part of the advisory boards of Review Commons and ASM publications. He is also a founding director of the journal Life Science Alliance.

Stefan Skupien – Open Science Ambassadors at the Berlin University Alliance

Stefan Skupien studied Political Science, Sociology and Philosophy. Between positions in higher education management, he researched international collaboration between African and European researchers. Since 2020, he has been the Open Science Coordinator at the Berlin University Alliance, working to promote and embed Open Science practices at all levels of research and across different research cultures. Transforming an Open Science mission statement into sustainable alliance policy and leading an ambassador programme are two of his current projects.

Open Science Ambassadors Talks

During this session all participants have the opportunity to share their Open Science projects, experiences, ideas and challenges. Spontaneous contributions are also possible and welcome.

Overview of planed contributions:

Spontaneous contributions:

Richard McElreath – Open Science at the MPG

Richard McElreath is a director at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and the author of the popular Bayesian statistics textbook Statistical Rethinking. A key aspect of his research involves integrating theory with data analysis and study design, and he devotes a significant portion of his time to supporting his colleagues in this area. He recently published a blog post on challenges for Open Science and science reform and will introduce a discussion on the status of Open Science in the Max Planck Society.

Interactive Session

This interactive session provides space for an open discussion among all participants on the future of Open Science especially in the MPG. It is prepared and moderated by Larissa Leiminger. The following four main themes will be addressed in groups:

  • Open Science in the Light of Geopolitical Polarization
  • MPG Governance on Open Science
  • Needed Infrastructure Support for Open Science
  • The Role of an Open Science Ambassador

Results of the four whiteboards: https://hdl.handle.net/21.11116/0000-0011-E7EA-1

Evening Activity

It has become a small tradition that we finish the first day with an evening activity. The activity is a surprise and will only be revealed at the event.

This year’s surprise activity was “The Pentomino Reproducibility Game”. It is an interactive puzzle game for 1 game instructor and up to 4 players that illustrates the principles of scientific reproducibility through collaborative play. All materials of the game are printable and can be used to create casual and fun ways to start a conversation on Open Science and reproducibility.

Find all game materials including set-up instructions here: https://hdl.handle.net/21.11116/0000-0011-C732-4

Aaron Peikert – Collaborative Manuscripts via GitHub

Dr. Aaron Peikert is a Principal Investigator at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, where he leads the research project “Formal Methods in Lifespan Psychology.” His work bridges statistical methodology, software engineering, and reproducible science, with a particular focus on making computational workflows accessible to researchers across disciplines.

Collaboration is at the heart of good science. As research teams grow in size, diversity, and speed, the need for structured, transparent, and efficient collaboration increases—especially in the face of rising demands for scientific rigor and reproducibility. This half-day workshop teaches participants how to apply techniques from agile software development to the collaborative writing of scientific documents. Using GitHub as the central platform, we guide participants through a hands-on workflow for writing, reviewing, and managing academic texts together. Researchers familiar with Git/GitHub will learn how to extend their skills beyond code to the entire research process. Those new to GitHub will gain a practical introduction to this powerful tool and discover how version control, issues, and pull requests can streamline research from collaborative writing to project management. By the end of the session, you will be able to:

  • Manage a GitHub repository for a manuscript
  • Use issues and pull-requests to coordinate writing and feedback
  • Leverage branch-and-merge workflows to track revisions and enforce transparency

These skills will be acquired in a realistic context where all participants work together on an actual research project. Some prior experience with Git, however small, is advantageous. Participants require a stable internet connection and a GitHub account.

Slides: https://aaronpeikert.github.io/repro-collab/presentation#1
Self-paced workshop: https://aaronpeikert.github.io/repro-collab/self-paced/

Mimi Arandjelovic – Community Science

Dr. Mimi Arandjelovic is a biologist based out of the department of Primate Behavior and Evolution at the MPI-EVA, Leipzig and known for her work in great ape conservation and genetics. She is co-director of the Pan African Programme: The Cultured Chimpanzee (PanAf) and lead scientist of the community science platform Chimp&See. Her research utilizes non-invasive methods, like camera traps and fecal DNA analysis, to study great ape behavior and population structure across Africa. Through these initiatives, she has helped gather extensive data on ape populations and involves the public in scientific discovery with a focus on supporting ape-range scientists and conservationists.

For over a decade, the Chimp&See community science project has enabled a global community of online volunteers to become direct contributors to African wildlife conservation and research. Through our website, over 40,000 people have helped us annotate a collection of over 600,000 one-minute camera trap videos filmed across tropical Africa. On this platform, volunteers have identified hundreds of wildlife species, characterized over 1,000 individual chimpanzees, documented fascinating behaviors, observed cross-species dynamics, and much more. These annotated datasets have formed the basis for nine published open-access manuscripts and several Africa-based training workshops, and they are publicly available for broad use in training and testing machine learning algorithms. Over the last decade, we have also supported several new initiatives that developed directly from the insights of our community scientists and have successfully transitioned most daily activities to a dedicated team of volunteer moderators. This sustained effort demonstrates how with support, a dedicated global community can generate open, long-term data to support wildlife research and conservation.