As NASA moves towards more open science requirements (eg. Scientific Information policy and ROSES funding opportunities) scientists will need to acquire new skills to participate in open science effectively and to demonstrate those skills when applying for NASA funding opportunities. TOPS first priority is to develop the infrastructure to train 20K scientists. For the 2023 Year of Open Science, NASA is developing strategic partnerships with large scientific associations to ‘teach’ open science during the large annual meetings, special science team summer schools, and other events. To support these activities, NASA needs to enable the development of open science curriculum content. The vision for the TOPS learning resources is for CC-BY licensed Massive Online Open Course (MOOC), hosted on the openEDx platform, that can be used to train scientists and award NASA open science badges.
TOPS will initially focus on developing OpenCore, 5 modules following a scientific workflow. The objective with these modules is to create a more nuanced understanding of open science to enable participants to better understand the open science workflow from end to end. The focus of the curriculum will give the learners participating a basic understanding of open science, and its ethos, why it benefits them, and how to actively participate in open science communities.
Once scientists have these basic open science skills, they will need advanced data science and domain specific curriculum content to continue learning, ScienceCore. For some learners, it is these domain specific modules that may attract them to learning more about open science.