Welcome to the Open Innovation in Life Sciences (OILS) Association! Thanks for dropping by!

Open science (OS) accelerates research outcomes and reduces effort redundancy. OILS wants to build an open research ecosystem in Swiss life sciences. We work with early career researchers (ECRs) to help them understand what OS is and how they can use OS tools in their every day research routine. We are always looking for more members to join our open science community!

Open science is the practice of science where data, lab notes, publications, etc. are made publicly available to enable reuse, redistribution, and reproducibility of all parts of the research process. Such practices encourage collaborations and make science more efficient. The culture change for open science in the future starts with the future leaders of tomorrow! We focus our efforts of promotion and education on early career researchers. This includes PostDocs, Ph.D. students, as well as Masters students.

We at the OILS association help life scientists understand what open science is to them and, most importantly, how to practice open science as part of their research routines via public discussions, workshops, courses, and our annual Open Innovation in Life Sciences conference. Everything we do is motivated by early career life scientists and supported by leaders in open science.

Current Swiss-wide initiatives focus on a top-down approach to implement new policies, which moves more slowly due to the large number of stakeholders. The OILS Associaiton is a agile bottoms-up, grassroots approach that is complementary to top-down efforts because when new national policies are in place, we will be already operations to support the new top-down policies. Other efforts often include open science as a sub-item or collateral effect of larger initiatives, whereas OILS will focus solely on bringing open science opportunities to the Life Science ECR community in Zurich.

The management and operational structure of OILS has significant advantages over other trainee-led organizations. The current soft skill training programs at universities exist in the form of courses and lectures. What is missing from these soft-skill training courses and workshops is the opportunity to practice the theory. OILS fills a need for hands-on training by providing a setting in a company-like environment with levels of supervision checks and performance reports. ECRs will be actively learning project management, team cooperation, conference fundraising and business strategy, negotiating skills and much more. We also use current team collaboration and especially tools (e.g. Slack, GitHub, Zenodo, etc.).

Are you a Swiss life science researcher interested in helping to organize open science public discussions, workshops, courses, and/or our annual Open Innovation in Life Sciences conference. Contact us today to see how you can get involved!

We are also always looking for corporate partners, who want to engage with our talented members in creating synergistic partnerships with the life science research community.

Our activities are funded by the efforts by our fundraising team, who are always looking for sponsors and ready to recieve your donations! ;)

Check out our website for upcoming OILS and partner events.

EMAIL: open[at]lifescience.uzh.ch

https://www.openinnovationlifesciences.com/