No-Budget Science
No-Budget Science started as a regular meeting organized from 2016 to 2019 in Center for Health Sciences of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. The event was about biomedical science projects that could be done without major costs and without wet lab experiments - hence the “no-budget” in the title, as well as the slogan “a notebook in hand and an idea in the head”.
One of the motivations for the event was to facilitate the meeting of people who were interested in working in such projects. Among the organizers, there was a concern that the increase in the number of publications over the years made urgent the task of synthesizing research data into useful information. As the event developed, it became clear to us the need for a discussion of the conditions needed for such projects to materialize: transparency, reproducibility and reforms in the publication system.
Despite the interest of the local academic community in the issues discussed, we felt that the return of the event in terms of actual research projects was not as we expected. This led us to search for a new format. In 2019, 2020 and 2021 we then organized three Hack Weeks - extended hackathons, with some room for training in addition to the development of projects. With this change, we got closer to our initial goal: to foster collaborations in no-budget research projects and independence in young researchers.
You can check out material produced by No-Budget Science events here
Meetings
In the 3 years of the original format, we met over beer to discuss issues and projects related to preprints, social networks, co-authorship, outreach, systematic reviews, teaching, innovation, football/soccer and the use of public data.
You can watch most events (most are in Portuguese) in our Facebook page.
Hack Weeks
Since 2019, we’ve been organizing hack weeks around themes in metascience - science to understand science and make it better.
The first edition was in Rio de Janeiro, in 2019, with activities located at the D’Or Institute and the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. We received suppor from graduate programs in the University and from Serrapilheira Institute. For one week, eighteen participants from across the country, from undergrads to postdocs, developed their project ideas. You can watch the talks (in Portuguese) on YouTube.
The second edition was done remotely, in 2020, again in partnership with the Serrapilheira Institute. This time, 25 participants joined us for the event. Most talks and presentations, as well as our pre-Hack Week roundtables are available in our YouTube channel. The event was covered by Revista FAPESP (Portuguese), where you can see more details about the project. Data and presentations from the projects are also available at Open Science Framework.
The third edition was also done remotely, in 2021, and consolidade the partnership with Serrapilheira. The pre-Hack Week talks are once more available online alongside the final presentation of the projects (here). Moreover, in 2021 a small call for proposals made a total of R$ 23.000 available to support a few groups in the continuation of their projects. Materials produced by the groups are available at OSF.
Our fourth edition returned to the presential format, and occurred in 2022 in the Praia Vermelha Campus from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, with funding from the Serrapilheira Institute. Talks are available online as well as final presentations (here) and OSF material here.
In 2023, we are organizing an online event, with remote and assyncronous work, with the focus of developing projects in the theme of the academic career. We once again are supported by the Serrapilheira Instutute for funding small project costs. Check out the event website for more information!
For the remote edition, we also developed a remote work guide for Brazilian scientists (Portuguese).
Team
Learn about our team of organizers (Portuguese).
Social Networks
No-Budget Science is on Facebook, YouTube and Instagram.