Open Science | campus.kn

Thursday, 12. June 2025

A new window into the secret lives of animals

© Universität Konstanz, Comparative Cognition and Sociality Lab

Biologists from Konstanz developed a unique outdoor camera system to measure 3D movements and postures of wild birds: 3D-SOCS. In the spirit of open science, all hardware plans and software pipelines are freely available.

Tuesday, 13. May 2025

Provisional certainty

© University of Konstanz

"That seems plausible". Although talk about "plausibility" is so common in everyday life, research has rarely focused on the concept as such – until now. A new open access book from researchers at the Konstanz Centre for Cultural Inquiry fills this gap.

Wednesday, 09. April 2025

Artificial intelligence in education

© BillionPhotos.com | stock.adobe.com

Artificial intelligence (AI) has become ubiquitous in the classroom. Teachers can find helpful information and 20 practical examples in the guide DiKoLANKI. Johannes Huwer and Lars-Jochen Thoms from the University of Konstanz co-authored and co-edited the Open Access book.

Wednesday, 19. March 2025

Nano research: AI routine helps with counting and measuring

© Universität Konstanz

A new AI routine, based on Meta's "Segment Anything Model", speeds up nanoparticle research. The researchers at the University of Konstanz who developed this routine have made it available open access.

Wednesday, 05. March 2025

Free law textbooks

© utah51 | stock.adobe.com

Free access to educational literature for students and trainee lawyers – this is the aim of the law project "OPEN REWI". Public prosecutor Simon Pschorr from Konstanz contributed to the open access textbook on criminal law "Strafrecht – Besonderer Teil".

Friday, 28. February 2025

Diversity and inclusion in the classroom

© Based on an illustration by Manfred Steger | https://pixabay.com

Are you a (future) teacher who would like to acquire additional skills in the areas of diversity and inclusion? If so, go ahead and look into the self-study module "Diversity & Inclusion in Education" – an open educational resource by the European university alliance EUniWell.

Wednesday, 12. February 2025

Mapping the quality of public transportation in Germany

© Fischer et al. Mobility Maps. University of Konstanz / Steinbeis CIDAV, 2024

Interactive maps developed by computer scientists at the University of Konstanz show the accessibility and quality of public transport for every house in Germany. They are freely available online and can be used for research or simply to check out the situation in your neighbourhood.

Wednesday, 08. January 2025

The diversity of South Asian languages

© Rohit Tandon | unsplash.com

The open access "Journal of South Asian Linguistics" has been dedicated to research on South Asian languages since 2008. Linguist Miriam Butt from Konstanz supports the magazine as a consultant.

Wednesday, 11. December 2024

More than transportation routes, power grids and waste water…

© benfuenfundachtzig | https://pixabay.com

Rethinking Infrastructure: How can we grasp the immaterial and cultural dimensions of infrastructure? A new open access book from researchers at the Konstanz Centre for Cultural Inquiry opens up new perspectives.

Wednesday, 13. November 2024

Spotlight on data collection methods

© Miha Creative | stock.adobe.com

The open access journal "Survey Research Methods" publishes peer-reviewed articles on data collection based on surveys. The idea is to make it easier for other researchers to initiate large projects by giving them free access to the articles.

Wednesday, 09. October 2024

Open doors for creativity in the FabLab Konstanz

© Daniel Schmidtke

A workshop with digital production equipment on the University of Konstanz campus that can be used by anyone once a week free of charge as part of forum.konstanz: the FabLab Konstanz. Equipment includes 3D printers, a laser cutter and a CNC milling machine.

Wednesday, 11. September 2024

Art, Play, Labour: the Music Profession in Germany…

© Barbara A Lane | https://pixabay.com

Do musicians make music purely out of passion? In his open access book, Konstanz historian Martin Rempe analyzes the social and cultural development of instrumental musicians in Germany and examines their lives as well as how their profession is changing.

Wednesday, 14. August 2024

A glimpse into the research of early career psychologists

© Markus Winkler | unsplash.com

In the open access journal "Psychological research of early career scientists", students and doctoral researchers can get a first taste of the publishing process. The journal publishes outstanding theses from the Department of Psychology.

Sunday, 21. July 2024

Learning science through exit games

© Schülerlabor Chemie, Universität Konstanz

Do you want to learn about natural sciences in a playful way and in a real laboratory atmosphere? The chemistry lab for school students ("Schülerlabor") provides educational exit games that allow just that. They are available for free to school students in grades four through thirteen.

Sunday, 23. June 2024

Ethnic politics in the digital sphere

© Pixabay, Alexandra Koch

How do organizations that represent ethnic groups communicate on the Internet? The open access dataset of a research team at the University of Konstanz opens up new possibilities for investigating the online communication behaviour of these organizations.

Wednesday, 29. May 2024

Understanding historical sources from the Mediterranean…

© Unsplash/Gabriella Clare Marino

The University of Konstanz's open access journal "Transmediterranean History" provides access to commented excerpts of primary sources covering transmediterranean topics.

Tuesday, 16. April 2024

Expand your open science skills

© Manfred Steger on pixabay.de

Would you like to learn more about open science or give courses on the subject? Team Open Science in the Communication, Information, Media Centre (KIM) at the University of Konstanz shares corresponding self-study units as open educational resources.

Friday, 22. March 2024

Social participation and walkability

© Christian Gertenbach (@kc_gertenbach), Unsplash.com

Does the "walkability" of a city quarter influence the social participation of its residents? In a recent study, a team of researchers led by Martina Kanning and Lukas Bollenbach looked into this question.

Wednesday, 28. February 2024

Bringing order to chaotic data

© Hansjörg Neth

Real-world data are often confusing and unstructured. In his open access textbook "Data Science for Psychologists", Hansjörg Neth shows how they can be structured and prepared for statistical analysis using the free programming language R.

Friday, 05. January 2024

Who said it? – Quotations as a research object

© “Haanala 76”; License: CC0 Public Domain

Quotations are a valuable and unadulterated source of information – for the press, but for research, too. With "Quotebank", computer scientist Andreas Spitz and his Swiss colleagues are making a data set of 235 million quotations freely available.

Thursday, 14. December 2023

Time and timelessness in Victorian poetry

© Foto von Bru-nO auf pixabay.com

In the 19th century, the way we think about and experience time changed fundamentally. This is the conclusion reached by Irmtraud Huber in her open access book examining the transformation of time and poetry in the Victorian era.

Wednesday, 15. November 2023

Provisional permanence

© Philipp Schäfer

The "long summer of migration" in 2015: In his open access book "Etablierte Provisorien" (long-lasting makeshift solutions), sociologist Philipp Schäfer uses the city of Leipzig as an example of how refugee inclusion was negotiated on the ground.

Tuesday, 24. October 2023

On the trail of a great mystery

© 2023 by Mike Costelloe is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

Using genetic analyses, primate researcher Gisela Kopp searched for the geographical origin of mummified baboons in Ancient Egypt in the context of an interdisciplinary research project. The study, including the review process and research data, is available free of charge.

Wednesday, 20. September 2023

Collapsing Structures and Public Mismanagement

In his open access book "Collapsing Structures and Public Mismanagement", Wolfgang Seibel analyzes the failure of administrative authorities to protect the physical safety of people and asks what we can learn from past events.

Wednesday, 09. August 2023

Physics in video: watch standing waves and jumping rings

© Universität Konstanz / Fachbereich Physik (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Over 200 experiments from physics – as videos to watch online or to download. Reuse permitted! The Department of Physics at the University of Konstanz makes videos of its lecture experiments available as open educational resources (OER).

Monday, 10. July 2023

3D-POP – using AI to study animal behaviour

Artificial intelligence (AI) can automatically analyze animal behaviour in videos. To make this possible the AI needs to be trained with reliable data. Konstanz researchers now provide an open training dataset on pigeon behaviour.

Tuesday, 06. June 2023

How coral reefs can survive climate change

© Planes & Allemand; https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-38896-6; Lizenz: CC BY 4.0

The Tara Pacific Expedition traversed the Pacific Ocean to study coral reefs. The full data set is publicly available from the largest genetic inventory conducted in any marine system to date.

Monday, 08. May 2023

EmbryoNet: automatic detection of developmental defects

© Daniel Čapek and Patrick Müller

EmbryoNet analyzes images and automatically classifies developmental defects in animals. It works faster and more accurately than human experts do. The Software, created by Patrick Müller from the University of Konstanz and his colleagues, is freely available and open source.

Thursday, 20. April 2023

Crisis as an opportunity for climate protection?

© Photo by Mika Baumeister on unsplash.com

Two crises have dominated the headlines over the past months: COVID-19 and the war in Ukraine. University of Konstanz researchers Sebastian Koos and Adrian Rinscheid investigated how the perception of these crises has impacted people's support of climate protection measures.

Wednesday, 01. March 2023

Simulating molecular dynamics without having to compromise

© Simon Hunkler, Teresa Buhl, Oleksandra Kukharenko und Christine Peter

Can the possible spatial arrangements of proteins be simulated without having to choose between the level of detail and simulation duration? Konstanz chemists recommend using Back-Mapping Based Sampling (BMBS) and freely share the corresponding scripts and sample data.

Monday, 27. February 2023

The effectiveness of sanctions

© Created with mapchart.net (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Do international sanctions work? And what effects do they have? In order to examine these and similar questions, Konstanz political scientists Gerald Schneider and Patrick M. Weber compiled an extensive data set, which is now freely available.

Wednesday, 01. February 2023

Social obligations rob baboons of their sleep at night

© Mike Costelloe for the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior (CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0)

What do baboons living in the wild actually do at night? This is the focus of an open access article published by Konstanz-based researchers Meg Crofoot, Carter Loftus, Roi Harel and Chase Núñez.

Monday, 30. January 2023

How does language change over time?

© The British Library: Extract from "Beowulf", Cotton MS Vitellius A XV manuscript

How a language's syntax evolves over time is the focus of contributions in the Journal of Historical Syntax (JHS). The University of Konstanz publishes this open access journal.

Monday, 23. January 2023

Public administration in the digital age

Necessary digital skills, acquired through an open access curriculum with free teaching material for public administration & management study programmes – co-initiated by Ines Mergel, professor of Public Administration and Digital Governance.

Wednesday, 18. January 2023

COVID-19 and social inequality

© Daniel Schmidtke

How do people in Germany respond to the social and political consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic? This topic was the focus of a large-scale survey conducted by the Cluster of Excellence "The Politics of Inequality" at the University of Konstanz. The research data is freely available.

Friday, 13. January 2023

ReLive: Data analysis on the desktop and in virtual reality

Evaluating data from mixed reality studies synchronously on the desktop and "on site" in virtual reality?

Tuesday, 10. January 2023

Branching space-times in theory and application

© Daniel Schmidtke

Are there space-time events with real alternative outcomes that, even with the best knowledge, cannot be clearly predicted? "Yes!" is the clear answer that Thomas Müller, Nuel Belnap and Tomasz Placek give in their open access book.

Thursday, 05. January 2023

Analyzing animal movements without programming skills

Movement data tell us much more about the lives of animals than their mere whereabouts. To make it possible to analyze them without programming skills, Andrea Kölzsch from the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior and her colleagues provide the open source platform MoveApps.

Tuesday, 03. January 2023

Competitive advantage for invasive juvenile sticklebacks

© Dietmar Straile

Do invasive juvenile sticklebacks and native juvenile whitefish compete for food in Lake Constance? Freely available data on this question was collected in the context of a comparative open access study by Žiga Ogorelec, Lars G. Rudstam and Dietmar Straile.