My PhD journey in a Gantt chart incl. Open Science practices
Plan and monitor your PhD with a Gantt chart and include all of your activities in implementing Open Science practices to ensure efficiency and societal impact of your research work and efforts.
Start with planning your Holidays and annual leave - as this gets usually neglected and difficult to catch up on as your thesis progresses. The row for unforeseen absences from work will be empty to start with, but you will likely fill some cells as you progress, and Life happens. Having this section in the chart allows you to adjust your timeline accordingly. In your weekly calendar, also highlight public holidays of the country you work and live in and perhaps also your home country’s holidays, in case you want to plan for leave during that time to visit family and friends.
The ‘Thesis’ components range from proposal writing, preregistration, data management, thesis writing, and finally to defense. For a more detailed breakdown, add the explicit projects and experiments/studies with their respective workflow steps. In doing so, you will have a more realistic image of the time you have available to juggle two or more experiments and projects at a time during your thesis.
In the ‘Events’ section, you can list and map conferences you would like to attend, research and field visits, bar camps, retreats, and other work-related happenings.
Under ‘Publications’ goes everything you can make available to the public and/or other researchers under open publishing practices - Open Access, openly licensed, and as restricted as necessary or feasible. Manuscripts can be published both as so-called ‘preprint articles’ and if need be submitted to a journal. Choose the journal based on the scope of your work matching the journal’s scope of research fields and topics and if it has reasonably priced publishing fees (aka APC = article processing charges) if any. Preregistrations, research manuscripts (preprints), datasets, posters, presentations, images a.o. can all be published on field-/region-specific or generalist cross-disciplinary open repositories. Methods and protocols can equally be shared in public repositories or at https://www.protocols.io/.
Finally, also add any coursework you participate in within the scope of your Ph.D.
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0)
