My new perspective on Open Science
I will be honest, before this seminar I had no idea what Open Science was. I knew the term Open Source software and had always loved the idea, but I hadn’t really thought about what Open was and where this idea would be used as well. In fact initially I simply thought that Open simply meant free. However, I have discovered that it is much more. Now I believe it is actually about community and collaboration.
Open Science is a solution to the current paradigm of research, which is mainly focused on making as many published papers as possible (Publish or Perish). We have reached the point where quantity often takes precedence over quality. In my opinion, in some cases they may consciously make it difficult to replicate experiments so that other scientists do not “steal” their publications, or even not share their data for fear that other scientists may refute their results. And in a way I understand that, because they have worked hard to get them, but from my point of view this is the complete opposite of what research should be about. Nevertheless, this is starting to change and more and more people are beginning to adopt it in their research work.
As I had commented before, I had a great ignorance of what Open Science was but I was lucky enough to meet it the first year of my PhD because it allows me to be able to use this knowledge from the beginning. I have learned a wide range of tools, to search for publications or datasets as well as to identify yourself as interesting as ORCID, the routes for publications, how to make my research open, how to make my data FAIR, what a DMP was, and more importantly, how to carry it out. I have also realised that Open Science is not only that everything is now free and easily accessible, but that you also need to do your bit. Preparing the data or carefully explaining your code so that other people can understand it is time-consuming, but you will really appreciate it when someone else has put that effort into helping and facilitating its use.
In conclusion, the great number and quality of speakers, and how they work to make science open, has allowed me to see how big this project really is and how necessary it is. Open Science improves the accuracy and speed of scientific progress and making all aspects of the scientific process transparent and accessible.