In December 2025, a dozen undergraduate students from the University of Puget Sound piled into a teaching lab at the Allen Institute carrying posters that described their original research projects. It was the first time all semester that the students had entered a wet lab, and yet every single poster presented novel research findings. That’s because these students were part of an advanced neuroscience course that used exclusively open-neuroscience resources.
As the head of the education program at the Allen Institute, an organization dedicated to open science, I think the field needs more courses like theirs. I’ve seen firsthand how students benefit more from exploring a database’s raw data than from just seeing data in papers or textbooks. Courses that incorporate open neuroscience teach students how to confidently navigate large datasets and help them start developing appropriate data science and computational skills, which are only growing in importance. Open-science projects also teach students about rigorous and responsible research conduct.
Despite these advantages—and the fact that neuroscience has made great strides in embracing open-science practices and principles over the past two decades—surprisingly few college and graduate-level classes center around open science. During my own graduate training, I learned many other facets of the process of science that prepared me to think like a professional scientist, such as writing and responding to peer review, but I never took a course that taught me anything about how to conduct open science or use its resources.
If we want open science to become an integral part of the field, we need to make open science a core training principle.
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euroscience programs can implement open science into education in several ways. Educators can put together courses that rely entirely on open datasets, such as Siddharth Ramakrishnan’s course described above. Ramakrishnan, a neuroscientist at the University of Puget Sound, collaborated with scientists at the Allen Institute to design a course to give students hands-on experience with open-science resources. The effort was inspired by class field trips to the Allen Institute. The class starts with short tutorials on how to use and navigate selected datasets, including those on optical physiology and behavior, cell types and connectomics. After that, students are turned loose to pursue their own independent projects throughout the semester.The Allen Institute offers free resources for instructors who want to develop similar courses, such as workshops at the institute and at conferences, teaching resources developed by other educators, and more.
Educators can also encourage students to use open tools outside of course settings. Back in 2020, Julia Milner, a student at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, missed out on completing her undergraduate thesis project in a wet lab due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Her adviser, Sarah Latchney, had attended some early workshops on using Allen Institute open science for teaching. So Latchney sent Milner into the world of open-science resources. Milner cross-referenced Alzheimer’s data from the Seattle Alzheimer’s Disease Brain Cell Atlas, NIH RePORTER and publicly listed clinical trial data on ClinicalTrials.gov and found differences in how two genes are expressed in early versus late stages of Alzheimer’s disease. This is one of my favorite examples of how open science can empower independent student learning even under challenging circumstances and without wet lab resources.
Additionally, educators can use open software tools to teach computational methods for analyzing and visualizing large datasets. Ashley Juavinett has written extensively about her experience introducing open coding resources in neuroscience classes. Juavinett correctly points out that, despite a core need for coding skills in modern neuroscience research, few resources are available to teach non-computer science students how to code. Open science can partially relieve this gap by providing access to large datasets for students to practice their computational skills in meaningful research scenarios. We also collaborate with Juavinett and Theresa McKim on a summer workshop geared toward teaching coding to neuroscience students, and the workshop materials are—you guessed it—openly available.
Discussing open neuroscience in courses can also stimulate discussion and motivate students to interrogate the values and research ethics that underlie open resources. For example, the public nature of open science requires that issues related to ethics, privacy and data reuse are carefully worked out before material is released, given that we can’t pull those open releases back once they’re out. Presenting students with these topics provides material for discussion that feels real, not hypothetical. Further, open science enables students to closely examine data, protocols (including data protections), analysis methods and other project elements and to make research rigor and ethics observations firsthand. These topics are not always explicitly covered in science education and training, leaving trainees to fumble around unspoken norms. Open science provides both a philosophical basis and concrete foundations for such conversations.
Juavinett and I explore these topics in greater detail in a chapter of the forthcoming book “Oxford Handbook of Undergraduate Neuroscience Education.”
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pen science has many strengths as a teaching tool, but it can’t fix all the challenges that educators face in the classroom. As with any teaching tactic, open science still requires students to buy into the learning process. However, I argue that the authentic nature of the data and the opportunity for students to engage in meaningful projects can help tackle this perennial problem of education.Finally, it’s important to remember that although open science is valuable, it is not necessarily easy. We often hear from educators in our programs that they were excited about the potential to incorporate open science into their teaching, but they needed time, support and a community to get over the hurdle of getting started. In addition to the Allen Institute’s resources, training and community groups such as the Open Education Ecosystems Research Coordination Network and The Carpentries can help guide educators through the process of implementing open-science practices into their programs.
As open science is and remains part of our scientific practice, it should also be part of our teaching and training. It’s never too early—or too late—to start learning.
