Open Science: the Collective Advancement of Science
Since I began to take an interest in science, I always liked the idea of sharing the advances that could be achieved through effort and research. At first, it was just an idea, but when I discovered that it had a name and it was Open Science, it became much clearer to me that I wanted to be a part of it. When I saw that the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid was addressing this field and allowed me to increase my knowledge in this area, I saw it as an opportunity to start understanding how to properly use the tools. That’s where everything covered in this fantastic course “Ticket to Open Science” comes in. Open Science is a great revolution in democratizing and socializing science, allowing everyone to participate in the advances being made, not limiting their understanding or their ability to use it to just a handful of people. Access to open science has personally allowed me to access knowledge in certain fields or topics that, at first, I might not have thought would interest me. One of the ideas I particularly like about open science is the lack of competition. Working in research centers can lead us to focus solely on producing redundant results or those with little novelty just to force a publication. Open Science tries to avoid that. The aim is to democratize this knowledge, promoting progress over publication, which in my opinion makes science advance much faster in certain directions of knowledge. In this course, this idea has been made clear, seeking the balance that every researcher must have. Do we seek to publish? Of course, publications give you visibility within your field of specialization, but do we want to promote progress? Absolutely. And that’s where the Open Access tools seen throughout the course come into play. The existence of these tools promotes these advances as they allow for a more global sharing of all the achieved progress. In my personal opinion, it is this duality between a scientific publication and an openness of data, code, or obtained metrics that fosters a double scientific advancement, both in the technical direction and in the direction of opening up to society.
What we have seen during the course?
During the Ticket to Open Science course, we covered a large number of topics related to open science and how to use it in research. The first sessions introduced us to Open Science in a global way, giving us a general overview of what we were going to discuss. We were also given tools to use open science and tips on how to apply it within our research field. We learned about the principles of FAIR data and how to create our own DMP plans, which allowed us to establish what type of data we would handle and how we would manage it during our research. We were also introduced to the internal tools available at UC3M, such as UNiOs and the library support. This was very important as it made us aware that UC3M encourages us to work in open science by providing us with its own tools for it.
The following sessions focused more on the legislative and ethical aspects of open access, emphasizing the need to always maintain ethics in our publications and the open access information we generate. In the last sessions, we were introduced to Citizen Science and public engagement, which was one of the most illustrative parts of the course, highlighting the idea of opening science to everyone so that people from anywhere in the world can participate in the advances. The final session was specifically centered on open science techniques for the engineering field, where we could clarify much more specific doubts about our research and the data we generate in our area of study.
In addition to the lectures, the course included a series of Open Cafes, where experts from different parts of the world, both nationally and internationally, presented us with more concrete cases from all the previously explained fields. These sessions were highly illustrative as they allowed us to see how the open science community is global, and how from different parts of the world there is a focus on developing these tools.
And now what?
Once the course is finished, all that remains is to put everything we’ve learned into practice. But how can I do this? Firstly, all the developments I have been working on during my PhD have been uploaded to an open access platform like GitHub. All the uploaded code is associated with a paper, which we always try to ensure is open access. This allows all the advances made to be viewed both in paper format (which references GitHub) and directly on GitHub (which references the paper). In addition to this, I have started using the tools provided by UC3M and the library, which allows us to upload all the work done to the university’s public repositories so that the university community and anyone else can access these works.
As a final reflection, I would like to add that the existence of these courses promotes the progress of science. These courses can open the minds of different audiences, from university students to professors, encouraging science to raise its voice and demonstrate that together we can achieve much more solid and lasting advances.