GLAM/Newsletter/September 2014/Contents/Austria report

This Month in GLAM – Volume IV, Issue IX, September 2014

Austria report

Open Science aboard the MS Wissenschaft in Vienna

MS Wissenschaft in Austria

The MS Wissenschaft is a riverboat with a science exhibition on board (see also Germany report). In 2014, three of the 38 stations it served were in Austria - Linz, Krems and Vienna. This way, the exhibits on Wikipedia and on Open Data (jointly produced by the Open Knowledge Foundation Germany and Wikimedia Germany) also reached an Austrian audience of several thousand visitors.

On September 15 in Vienna, a public evening event on Open Research - a topic rarely featuring in public discourse about research - took place aboard the ship. It was jointly organized - in partnership with the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) - by the Wikimedia chapters in Austria, Germany and Switzerland and the Open Knowledge Chapters in Austria and Germany. It featured a panel discussion around openness in scholarly research, structured around the themes of Open Science, Open Data and Citizen Science. The event was attended by an audience of about 70, many of which actively participated in the discussions, to the extent that the final duration took well over an hour more than originally foreseen, without causing people to leave.

Brief reports on the event are available from FWF and from Wikimedia Germany. The entire panel discussion - as well as the short talks on the three themes have been videotaped and are available on the YouTube channel of the Open Knowledge Foundation Austria (transfer to Wikimedia Commons is underway).