Open Research Calendar

In a world affected by the COVID-19 crisis where online workshops, seminars, and conferences are increasingly hosted online and can be attended with the click of a button, keeping track of events is becoming more difficult. A community-powered shared calendar, the Open Research Calendar (https://openresearchcalendar.github.io), can enable interested users to keep track of open research events. This calendar can help researchers find workshops, conferences and seminars on open research without an effortful search, and minimise the need for scattered manual updates via community-powered automated communication. The Open Research Calendar can also provide event organisers with an easy solution to promote their event, reaching a larger audience through this central advertisement portal than they could using traditional channels of event promotion such as newsletters, blogs and websites. The Open Research Calendar addresses these issues through a community Google calendar, which can be synced into a person’s own personal calendar and is automatically updated as new events are added. Events can be added by anyone through entering the key information into a short Google form. This information generates an automated Tweet to notify followers of the calendar about the new event. Quality control is ensured by the community (through a reporting form) and the Open Research Calendar team. The hundreds of followers of the Open Research Calendar on Twitter (@openresearchcal) indicate that there is a real need for this tool. The current aims of the project are to increase awareness and encourage submission of events. The code and documentation for the calendar is open source and shared with a GNU 3.0 licence to ensure interoperability and reuse, so we invite groups to recreate the automation and communication features for their own communities. We welcome contributions to the technical development of the calendar via our public GitHub repository (https://github.com/openresearchcalendar/).