Honest reflections on running Open Neuroseeds

- Sara

Tom Gainor (CC-BY)

And, why I am still in love with Open Science!

Sara Villa, Senior Resident fellow - Open Neuroseeds coordinator

When I started my journey as a learner in OLS in 2021, I would have never guessed that I’d be working WITH the team implementing my own training cohort at King’s College London.
But I guess that’s the point of dreaming big…you can actually get high enough!!

Open Neuroseeds is my attempt to bring all that I love and learned about open science to my own academic research community, versioning the Open Seeds format to fit requirements (learning objectives, schedules, funding, etc). In this blog, I will share how I started the programme, lessons learned along the way, and most importantly, successful outcomes from it!

What looked like a crazy idea in the beginning, started to look like a very obvious step last year after having participated in several Open Seeds cohorts and having given several talks to promote open science within my department (Wolfson SPaRC, KCL) and others. Being awarded a Research Culture award from King’s College London was the final push that put everything in motion. And like that, we organised Open Neuroseeds from February to June 2025.

How it started: plans and fears

Starting Open NeuroSeeds was seemingly easy, I had some funding to run it and it would involve doing a version of a programme I knew and loved very well, Open Seeds.
However, funds were still a bit tight and came with a deadline, so I had to recruit rather quickly and with not many communications strategies in place.

In order to get more participants, I opened the expression of interest for the whole School of Neuroscience and we successfully involved 10 different participants. We have quite a diverse representation of research levels (from undergraduate students to PI level), but I didn’t manage to get people from professional services (one of my main goals). People selected were also very diverse in their open science knowledge. Some applications included very well thought projects to work on during the mentoring part of the programme, while some applicants didn’t join with a project. Since this was the first approach to open science to this type of academic setting, I’d decided to include everyone in this pilot cohort, to learn from all different perspectives.
This last decision was one of the first ‘hiccups’ I encountered: coordinating this programme also involved recruiting mentors and experts, mainly from the OLS community, who had been involved in other cohorts. Of course, their expectations were similar to their experiences in the past, and I underestimated the orientation needed to adjust materials to a new domain, and that participants would need extra guidance. An important lesson learned for the next iteration: regularly communicate with all participants to establish clear expectations!
Needless to say, everyone adapted quite quickly and the miscommunications were solved fast enough for people to get on with their mentors and their projects.

Screenshot of a zoom meeting with a grid of 8 people on the right, and sides projected on the left.

During the training weeks, we had 5 different experts to come and introduce Open Concepts, curated from previous Open Seeds lessons. The topics chosen were:

These experts were invited from OLS and The Turing Way community to share general concepts and working examples from their projects involving open science. As reflected in the feedback (shared below), our participants really appreciated their presentations and support during the programme.

One of my main goals was to deliver a more context-specific training in neuroscience. I can see an opportunity to curate domain-specific examples together with trainers. Although it was challenging to identify neuroscience-specific experts under tight deadlines, this could be implemented for the next iterations.

How it concluded

I can proudly say that this was an amazing experience working with the participants, and I was blown away on graduation day. The participants were very engaged, plans for their projects were bold, well thought, and some of them even already being implemented. You can check the presentations on our Zenodo community and check for yourself! Final graduates and projects list:

Screenshot of a zoom meeting with 8 people smiling while sharing their Open neuroseeds project. from left to right, up to down we can see Joe, Sara, Busra, Zahra, Yo, Rita, Alina and Arielle.

Some of the feedback was:

The calls were all amazing. The presentations were well thought through and probably useful for people coming in from multiple levels. I was familiar with some of the topics and was a bit worried it would be a “waste of time”. It was not. All of the talks worked both as introduction and as deep dives into the topics. Congratulations to all presenters!

My training experience was truly amazing. The structured approach and insightful courses guided me towards new collaborations and innovative interdisciplinary projects.

It was a really helpful experience in helping me to think beyond just a problem and how to look for opportunities to expand into other initiatives such as open science and creating platforms for such.

That was an unforgettable journey for me to focus on interdisciplinary studies, collaborating with people who are from different fields. I truly appreciate it, and hearty thanks to the Open Seeds Program.

I learned how critical accessibility and community is if you want research to make a real difference.

I am chuffed to say that participants were as happy as me, and that this pilot cohort has been a success!

One of the big surprises was the feedback received when asked which part was their favourite and 2 related things were pointed out: the favourite training session was the one delivered by Anne Lee Steele on Open Community Management, and the best moments for almost every participant were the discussions in the breakout rooms during the training calls.

Of course, I might be biased, but as a researcher, I interpret these findings (within what I know was a small cohort), as an emerging need for connection in research. Open NeuroSeeds provided the perfect stage for people to talk about their research and projects openly and in a supportive way. More specifically, the community management call and the positive feedback on the breakout rooms discussions highlighted everything that is possible when working collaboratively and within a community.

What’s next

I would love to repeat this experience within the Schools of Neuroscience but also other universities and departments and keep working on context-specific training. I think certainly one of the changes I would like to implement is including a community strategy to make emergent groups sustainable within their own departments/schools.

I think it would also be helpful to include a lesson on collaborative research/work to spearhead the connections made during the programme.

All in all, I think this was an amazing pilot, and we will be working very hard to bring it to as many academic settings as we can. So, get in touch and keep an eye on what’s coming!

This whole experience has only supported my views that we need more open science skills taught in academic settings. There are many reasons (high expectations, low support, competitive environment…), but academic settings have changed their ways of working without realising that maintaining a research community requires new ways of working too. Increased collaborative projects, together with more remote working, have changed the rules of the game. We need to focus on the people behind the science, and equip them with the best tools to make the best science they can. I strongly believe that open science can bridge the research goals and people, making teams more efficient and science more inclusive.
In the end… if we don’t dream big, why are we dreaming at all?