Case studies on Open Science in the context of ERC projects - Set 4

This document presents the fourth of five sets of case studies that have been produced in the framework of the ‘Study on open access to publications and research data management and sharing within ERC projects’. This study has been procured by the ERC Executive Agency under contract number ERCEA/A1/2016/06. 

The following three case studies are included in this set:

• Twelve Labours of Image Processing (Twelve Labours)

A commitment of one research group at ENS Paris-Saclay to document their research process systematically and publish research outputs that are easily reproducible gave way to a new open access journal, ‘Image Processing On Line’. It is the first journal in the field openly hosting methods, codes and providing a possibility to conduct experiments and process images online. Created by Professor Jean-Michel Morel and his team during the Twelve Labours project, the journal is gaining its place in the computer vision and image processing fields. So far, it has not only proved to be useful in assuring further funding for the research group but has also been used widely by academics from various disciplines as well as other practitioners, from both public and private sectors.

• Predicting Environment-Specific Biotransformation of Chemical Contaminants (PROduCTS)

Although chemical contaminants can pose significant risks to the natural world, microbes can reduce such risk through biotransformation. The PROduCTS project, led by Professor Kathrin Fenner at the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology (Eawag), is investigating, measuring and aiming to predict the outcomes of the biotransformation process through which microbes break down contaminants into different, typically less harmful chemical structures. Her team has established enviPath, a free online tool, available openly to everyone, to document the sparsely scattered valuable data about chemical contaminants, their transformation pathways, kinetics and end products. This is the first open database for such data in the field of analytical and environmental chemistry, and it is proving to be a valuable resource for the scientific community, public authorities as well as industry.

• Layered Functional Materials – Beyond ‘Graphene’ (BEGMAT)

Michael Bojdys is an Associate Professor and Group Leader of the Functional Nanomaterials laboratory at Berlin’s Humboldt University. As PI of the BEGMAT project, in the highly competitive nanomaterials field, he has led his group in a gradual shift towards data management and sharing; at first internally and now increasingly publicly. Spurred by the ERC’s support for open science and his experiences as a postdoc working in the UK, his lab benefits from project efficiency and quality control by taking a formalised approach to research data management.  Institutional infrastructure has been a key enabler and, in turn, the lab’s RDM processes make it easier to share data to aid the reproducibility of published articles, extending existing practices of sharing supplementary material.