Small cup, big effect
The ZBW Coffee Lectures bring Open Science into teaching
In 2024, the ZBW launched the Coffee Lectures on Open Science Education. These short, practical online seminars are aimed at researchers and students from the economic sciences who want to learn more about the principles of open science and how to teach it in higher education. The focus will be on topics such as open data, legal aspects of publication and strategies for science communication. The aim is to show that knowledge and skills of an accessible, transparent and comprehensible scientific approach can be taught in teaching formats.
The Coffee Lectures on Open Science Education started on 15 October 2024 with Lars Vilhuber, Director of the Labor Dynamics Institute at Cornell University and Data Editor of the American Economic Association (AEA). In his work for the AEA, Lars Vilhuber has been working for years with a training concept for student assistants who, after a short familiarisation period, assist the Data Editor in checking the reproducibility of journal submissions. Lars Vilhuber has now reported on the expansion of this training and assistance programme to include interns from some cooperating universities. Interns acquire knowledge in data management, empirical analysis processes and writing replication reports. They work on real-life research projects in a practical setting and on an equal footing with authors from leading international journals. Following the Coffee Lecture on Open Science Education, the participants discussed the practical implementation of replication courses, the integration of open science principles into existing curricula and the challenges of promoting transparency and reproducibility in economic research.
On 25 January 2025, we continued with the topic “BERD Academy: Open Education for Research with (unstructured) Business, Economics and Related Data“. In this coffee lecture, Markus Herklotz, lecturer at BERD, presented the work of the BERD Academy, a training programme within the framework of the National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI) that specialises in unstructured data in the economic and social sciences. Herklotz emphasised the growing importance of big data and artificial intelligence in research – and the associated challenges for researchers whose training has so far primarily focused on structured data (e.g. surveys).
The BERD Academy offers a wide range of flexible educational formats that specifically address the needs of researchers and data providers. The focus was on the question of how open education programmes can facilitate access to new methods and thus better exploit the potential of innovative data sources. The event emphasised that open education not only imparts skills, but can also act as a catalyst for open science as a whole.
A recording of the lecture is available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_llm5K4U_zA
The third Coffee Lecture on 29 February 2025 focused on anchoring open science principles in university teaching. In his keynote speech “Teaching what we Practice: Open Science in Higher Education“, Dr Meikel Soliman from Leuphana University Lüneburg spoke about how open teaching methods can be used to convey a realistic and sustainable understanding of science. His central thesis: if open science is practised in research, it should also be firmly anchored in teaching. Soliman presented concrete measures on how openness can be communicated in scientific work – for example through pre-registration, sharing materials and data or promoting replication studies. He emphasised that students are usually open to these practices anyway, which creates a fertile learning environment and lays the foundation for a new scientific culture. The Coffee Lecture made it clear that Open Science is not only a research paradigm, but also a didactic paradigm that optimally prepares students for their future role in science.
A recording of the lecture is available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izudRuIK4gI
*This text was written on 17 April 2025.
This text was translated on 12 May 2025 using DeeplPro.