Towards Open Science within Health Care Technology and Management Education

Lack of research reproducibility, restricted access to scientific knowledge to citizens, fake news (on social media) and limited citizens’ involvement during scientific knowledge generation are phenomena which negatively affect the relationship between Science and society. Unfortunately, students, who will be the next scientists, practitioners and citizens, are not educated to address these scientific and societal challenges. Teaching Open Science (OS) principles to students may equip them to deal with these challenges during their future career. OS refers to any endeavour aiming to make one’s research more open, inclusive, accessible, reproducible and replicable. Therefore, OS is expected to address these challenges by promoting: open and reproducible research, publicly available scientific knowledge, public engagement of (scientific) experts within society and greater citizens’ involvement in Science. OS consequently promises to transform the relationship between Science and society. This teaching innovation will introduce Health Care Technology and Management students with the theoretical underpinning of OS and will let students practise OS during a group project. The teaching activities will comprise a series of interactive lectures and practical assignments. Key topics of this teaching innovation are an introduction to OS and FAIR principles, pre-registration, performing open reproducible research, open peer-review and practise public outreach. The teaching materials and activities will be co-created with students who already participated in this course to ensure the OS content matches students’ knowledge, interests and needs. Dissemination efforts will be undertaken during the entire duration of the project to increase awareness concerning the importance of teaching OS within educational curricula.