How to make science open, how to make Open-Science.
All over the years I spent in college I have been involved in innovation and entrepreneurship movements. The main idea where every entrepreneur movement spins around relates to sharing your idea from the very beginning. It is necessary and essential in order to know its limitations, and whether you may success in its development.
It really shocked me when I started my researcher career inside UC3M, during my master’s thesis and my current post as a PhD student. I did not really understand the reasons why researching was so far away from this policy.
Science, in the way I understand it, refers to figuring out solutions in order to make the world a better place. It may sound childish and innocent, but I think this motivation should be the engine pushing every single step in the researching mechanism.
Science, in the way it actually works, refers to publishing more, choosing quantity over quality. When related with scholarships and grants for developing your PhD, only JRC publications are taken into account, and the more you got, the easier is to achieve that precious goal, no matter how many years and effort you have put into your project.
Ticket To Open Science has brought me closer to the reasons why I became a researcher at first, and a PhD student afterwards. My main goal is, and has always been, to bring engineering closer to social and medical issues and try to find out the way to solve them in low-price and feasible terms. I cannot see this happening through conventional research, where I cannot find the way to share my knowledge with those who could take it and turn it into something better; or make me realize where my weaknesses are in order to develop the best possible product for the final user. All through this seminar, I have understood that Open Science is the way to do it.
For those like me who were not familiar with this term, Open Science refers basically to a combination of procedures that make scientific knowledge openly available and reusable for everyone. Everything inside this project should be open, from your raw data and methodology to your results and discussions.
By sharing every step accomplished, a reproduction of your research is achievable. Hence, errors and updates can be made, and your project can be pushed to the next level, creating something bigger than what you could have done in your own, or simply surrounded by those members of your research group. Additionally, your ideas can serve as an inspiration and a guiding principle for future researchers all over the world.
Furthermore, society can be involved through citizen science, encouraging them to express their problems, test possible results, and learn about different studies that may help them in their daily issues. Researchers do benefit from citizen science as well, receiving opinions and even ideas and personal work from those interested.
As a researcher, I have learnt different repositories where to find papers in the Open, which has been really helpful for me. As long as I have been working with medical issues, where data has a high level of security and confidentiality, it has been specially difficult even to find basic information about joints and individual measures and characteristics. Through these repositories (such as “Dimensions”, etc), some information which I found difficult to find was, not only available, but also easier to gather and to organize.
I have also learnt the importance of publishing in the Open, not only the final papers and studies, but also my coding, raw data, methodology, etc. My first step as a PhD student in order to find my way into the Open Science has been to, along with my research team, send and try to publish our last study in an Open Journal (MDPI). Furthermore, I am starting to develop my Data Management Plan and trying to adapt it to Open Access. I may need to dig deeper in this concept as long as I will be working with medical information and confidentiality is of the upmost importance and difficulty.
I have included this slide because I find it really helpful for having a better understanding about what each researcher can do in order to push Open Science Up.
However, all that glitters is not gold, and Open Science has still some limitations and drawbacks. I find the rather high price needed to publish in Open Science one important limitation, as long as publishing will report a lower personal or institutional benefit in terms of status. Thus, institutions will rather publish in the close where (even though you have to pay too) higher benefits are received; such as JRC ranked publications which may serve you in order to receive financing. Furthermore, Open Science is not that widely spread, so people do not tend to search for specific papers in the Open Sources, and citations may decrease. From my point of view citations should not be that important and Open Science will undoubtedly increase citations in the near future but, being realistic, some measures, such us the h-factor, do represent our ranking as researchers and Open Science still needs a little push up. However, this type of drawbacks can be overcome as time goes by, and Open Science is pushed higher and higher.
So, long story short, I may say that, through this seminar, I have found in Open Science the perfect tool to turn my PhD experience into something society can hopefully benefit from while I grow up as an Open Researcher.