Author: 100438257

I had no thoughts open science until I saw the news about developing countries asking for IP waiver for Covid-19 vaccines. Almost at the same time, I came across this course and decided to register so that I can get to know more about the pros and cons of keeping science open.

This course gave me a lot of insights into the world of open science which I didn’t know about and did not appreciate before. Earlier, like the majority, I was behind high impact factor journals for publications. But after taking this course, I felt I need to rethink this approach as I feel that open science will have a wide range of audience and more access especially in developing countries. Open access gives academics in developing counties the opportunity to participate in the international research community—and that creates more potential for new ideas and innovation, which is a necessity especially during a situation like covid.

I believe open science can benefit researchers that work especially on technological development. For instance, I from Materials Science and Engineering, work on developing a new category of materials called ´High Entropy Alloys´, in search of better properties and increasing the temperature limits of existing materials. But many of the information on literature is proprietary which hinders my research. There is a technique called Additive Manufacturing, where we use metal powders to build a final product layer-by-layer. The optimised process parameters for this technique are not revealed in most of the literatures for high entropy alloys because of which we need to spend more time and money figuring it out ourselves even though we are all working for the same cause. If they were open, it would help me accelerate my research and of course I would credit the original authors for their work. So, when I have my results, I am planning to make it open so that other researchers can benefit from this while making sure I also get credited for my work.

The more I got into the course, I realized open science is a complex topic. Open science, as of now, is not free of limitations. For instance, freely releasing scientific data could harm the chance for obtaining a patent. There is also a chance that data might be misused by the public. The cost to publish in open access journals is too high at times without any added recognition (that you get from closed journals) that discourages researchers. So, I feel there should be a proper infrastructure developed to support open science which must also ensure the quality of data that goes open along with solving the above problems.

Moreoever, in one of the sessions, we learned about citizen science where non-academic public take part in research for example, by observing, processing or gathering data. This is the first time I am hearing this term and even though it is difficult to be practiced in my domain due to the prior technical knowledge it requires, I learnt how useful it can be in fostering open science. It actually is both an aim and enabler of open science. But I feel that citizens can introduce bias into the data if they lack prior training in research. Also, scientists usually lack close relationship with common citizens and can sometimes miscalculate their behavior. These effects should be considered by scientists before asking volunteers to aid in their research. In recent times, I have seen that the public trust in science is diminishing. A section of people hesitant about getting vaccinated against covid-19, and a group of people who still believe earth is flat and are not ready to listen to science are few examples. So, the citizen science initiative can address such challenges and regenerate societal trust in science, enable easier access to information about research process (an aim of open science) and stimulate innovation by knowledge transfer.

It is a positive thing that I got to know about open science early during my PhD so that I can try to implement it during the rest of my research period. I will also try to publish my results in open access journals whenever possible. In one of the sessions, we were briefed about EuroDoc which is a conference for early stage researchers and discusses open science policies. I intend to attend it online this year. Overall, this course has been insightful for me and I thank the teachers and hosts who took their time to share their knowledge with us. I also appreciate how UC3M is committed to helping us become an open scientist and I am looking forward to it.