Grant Complete: Moving Our Open Science Lessons from Creation to Community

We have officially wrapped up the “Lessons for Librarians in Open Science Principles and Methods” project. As of December 2025, our final performance report is with the IMLS, marking the end of our formal grant period.

Over the last two years, we focused on building capacity and content. The results are now live on this site: 15 public lesson repositories created by 27 authors across 14 teams. We covered everything from Cloud Workflows to Authoring Open Science, achieving 100% of the goals set out in our original proposal.

Where We Stand

Some of these materials are already finding their permanent homes:

• Adopted: Data Management (and Sharing) Plans for Librarians 101 is now an official Library Carpentry lesson.
• Reviewing: The Open Qualitative Research lesson is in the adoption pipeline, following successful pilots at IASSIST 2025.
• Alpha: Eight other lessons are fully scoped and drafted but need broader testing to mature.

The Shift to Community Piloting

In the Carpentries lifecycle, a lesson matures from Alpha to Beta through piloting. Until now, most pilots were led by the authors or our project team. To create stable, resilient resources, we need to stress-test them in new environments with instructors who didn’t write the material.

The Library Carpentry Curriculum Advisory Committee (LC-CAC) will be stewarding these lessons going forward, but they need data to refine them.

How to Get Involved

If you are looking for new material for your library or workshop series, we need you to take these lessons for a test drive.

1. Pick a Topic: Browse the Lessons page. Find something that fits a gap in your local training.
2. Run a Pilot: It doesn’t have to be a high-stakes event. A brown-bag lunch or a small internal workshop is perfect.
   • Note: Treat this as a user test. If things break or explanations fall flat, that is a success—it gives us the data we need to fix it.
   • Review the Carpentries’ guide on Preparing to Teach for advice on planning your session.
3. Report Back:
   • Use Observers: Have a colleague watch the room to see where learners get confused.
   • Minute Cards: Collect anonymous feedback on sticky notes.
   • Open Issues: Tell us what happened on the lesson’s GitHub repository.
4. Log Your Interest: If you think you might teach a lesson, open an issue using our Pilot Interest template. This helps us track usage and connect you with the original authors for support.

We are incredibly grateful to the authors, reviewers, and staff who brought this curriculum to life. The grant paperwork is done, but the real work—using these tools to teach Open Science—starts now.