Open Society And Open Science: Challenges And What We Can Do

Introduction

For all PhD students, “Open Science” courses are very necessary and helpful. From my own experience, this course benefit me at least in the following three points:

Resources – This course has introduced abundant open science resources to the students. For example, It tells students how to use the DORA, OPENIRE, and CORE and etc., which are very useful for students’ research practices.

Principles – This course has taught students what is “open science”, and explained the main principles of “open science”, in particular, It gives some specific strategic suggestions from the perspective of doctoral students’ scientific research and practice, when preparing to publish and store their academic results. It has also taught us how to use open science tools to make more people to be engaged in our research, and get more open data to be utilized in our study.

Thinking – This course has aroused my deeper critical thinking about “science”, “academic” and “society”. In the past, I was very interested in the philosophical concept of “open society”. After taking this course, I think that “open science” is one of the most important characteristics of “open society” in the development of academic research. In this blog post, I will discuss open society and open science briefly.

Open Society

The concept of “open society” was put forward by the French philosopher Bergson(1932). He defined it as a dynamic system inclined to moral universalism. And then during WWII, The famous British Austrian scholar Karl Popper further developed this term of “open society” in his masterpiece “The open society and its enemies“(1945). He saw it as “part of a historical continuum reaching from the organic, tribal, or closed society, through the open society (marked by a critical attitude to tradition) to the abstract or depersonalized society lacking all face-to-face interaction transactions”.

In Popper’s analysis framework, there are two streams about the term “Open society”. One is from the view of political science: in the open society, individual freedom and human rights are the cornerstones, the government should allow and accept criticism from the people, the political mechanism should be transparent and flexible, as opposed to authoritarianism. The other stream is from the perspective of epistemology: Popper believes that there is no so-called “ultimate truth”, critical rationalism is the philosophical basis of scientific skepticism, everything must be kept open.

Open Science

“Open Science” can be traced back to the Enlightenment period in the 17th century, but the exact phrase for “Open Science” was created by Steve Mann in 1998, when he registered the domain names openscience.com and openscience.org. For the term “open science”, different scholars and institutions have given various definitions. Although expressed in different ways, the concepts of “openness, cooperation, and sharing” are fully permeated. According to UNESCO(2021), open science builds on 5 key pillars: open access to scientific knowledge, open science infrastructures, open science communication, open engagement of societal actors and open dialogue with other knowledge systems. Currently, open science is leveraged and utilized wildly in academic research, which includes government management, business, education, publishing and other fields.

Significance of Open Science in An Open Society

Is today’s society an open society? There is no clear answer to this question. However, it is clear that with the development of information technology and the media industry, especially the rise of the Internet since the 1980s, our society has become more and more like an “open society”. The limitations of information dissemination and storage have been broken in both space and time. In the present time, within the internet everyone can freely express their own opinions and create personal content, such as videos, under the scope of the rules. Popper’s “open society” seems to be gradually becoming a reality on the Internet Era.

However, for academia, it is still very conservative. Especially in the academic publishing industry. According to a statistics conducted by the European Universities Association (EUA), the overall expenditure by 26 European countries for academic journals was €597 million (£515 million) in 2017, but 75% of that – some €451 million – was spent on subscriptions to journals published by the “big five” : Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley, Taylor & Francis and the American Chemical Society (ACS). Together they accounted for 56% of articles published (Mehta.A, 2019). With the monopoly advantages in the academic publishing industry, the “big five” have formed a de facto oligarchy. For commercial interests, the “big five” have built a high wall for publishing activities and access to products, which is not in line with the concept of open science.

From where I stand, as a part of the panorama of open society, open science is an irresistible trend. The development of new technologies represented by Internet technology will ultimately affect the academic publishing ecology, which is fully illustrated by the current facts. In February 2018, the European Open Science Cloud Initiative (EOSCI) proposed a framework for open science; on July 4, 2018, the French National Academy of Sciences released the National Open Science Program; on July 17, 2018, the National Academy of Sciences of USA released the plan of ” Open science by design”.

Two of The Most Biggest Challenge For Open Science

Why does the academic publishing industry present a closed feature? In my opinion, there are mainly the following two reasons:

Firstly, the current academic evaluation system is flawed. To get better recognized, most academic scholars have to submit and publish their research papers on high impact factor (IF) score journals, which are basically monopolized by the “big five” academic publishers. While, can we say those academic workouts, such as research book chapters or conference papers, have no value? Obviously the answer is no. Numerous scholars are the fundamental and decisive force in promoting the development of open science. Only when the open science work results of these researchers are fully recognized and directly linked to their performance evaluation, more and more scholars will have the motivation to participate in the open science initiative, and the open science movement can become more and more energetic, and finally succeed in practices.

Secondly, the profit model of academic publishing is too closed. According to the well-known laws of economics: “monopolistic enterprises can obtain excess profits through their monopoly position”, those “big five” companies, for their business interests, they are raising the subscription service fees of their published products year by year, which has led to protests from many universities, research institutions and scholars. Especially for scholars, they may have to pay high fees for publishing papers and when they want to get access to the published papers, they have to pay for it again. Some funding agencies like the European Research Council (ERC) also protested it, because when people want to get access to the results of the funded research, they may be involved in the issue of secondary payments. Academic publishing companies argue that their services price hikes were due to the increasing costs of publishing and printing, but this explanation does not convince most of the people. 

In order to solve the problem above, the governments or the public sector can increase investment and promote the open scientific infrastructure, which will strengthen competition in the academic publishing industry and guide the business model of academic publishing to a benign transformation. The government can also issue relevant policies or laws to reduce the fees for certain services in the academic publishing field, or the government can subsidize academic publishing companies instead of those companies directly charging scientific research relevant entities, or the government can build up academic publishing institutions for non-profit purposes. Because in general, breaking down the barriers to knowledge and science dissemination will promote economic growth and improve the overall level of welfare eventually.

What can we do?

As an early stage researcher, more specifically, a PhD student, we will go through the whole process of academic research and academic publishing. In my opinion, for becoming an “open scientists” during our PhD study and beyond, we can draw efforts from the following 4 points:

Above all, we should strengthen our belief in the concept of “open” in today’s society. In life, we should be open and embrace new technology, new information. And in academic research, we should be confident in the open science trends and internalize it into our inner values.

Besides, we should make good use of open scientific resources and tools. When we conduct the proposed research, we should make full use of the skills learned in this course and apply them to our research work. For example, when we are looking for literature or data relevant to our research, we can refer to the open platform like Dora and etc. And when we need to collect large scale data, we can encourage more people to get engaged in our research. These practical skills will be helpful to our own research.

And as for our research work outputs, we could try to publish and upload our papers, data and relevant materials in open science platforms. If we are not clear where these platforms are, we could ask the university library for help, they provide a variety of comprehensive services. And we will also submit the doctoral dissertation here at the end, which is an open science platform in some sense. And even though we plan to submit and publish our papers in “big five” journals, we can still use the pre-print version to relevant open science platforms. Only when more and more scholars continue to enrich the content of open platforms, can these platforms truly promote the dissemination of knowledge, inspire academic debates, and promote the development of academic science.

Last but not least, we should actively spread the idea of open science. Just as the value of money is to make it flow, so is the idea of open science. We pass on the knowledge of open science to more people, and more and more people will participate in the open science initiative. And if it’s possible, we can join a professional open science working group and use practical actions to promote the development of open science.

References:

1. Henri Bergson ([1932] 1937). Les Deux Sources de la morale et de la religion, ch. I, pp. 1–103 and ch. IV, pp. 287–343. Félix Alcan.
2. Popper, K. R. (1945). The open society and its enemies. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
3. “openscience.com historical whois information – who.is”. who.is.
4. Azoulay, A. (2021). UNESCO embraces open science to shape society’s future. Nature, 593(7859), 341-341.
5. ANGELI MEHTA (2019). 75% of European spending on scientific journals goes to ‘big five’ publishers, Chemistry World, Available online:https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/75-of-european-spending-on-scientific-journals-goes-to-big-five-publishers/4010616.article(accessed on 1^st July 2021).
6. European Commission. The European Open Science Cloud Initiative (EOSCI) 2018. Available online:https://ec.europa.eu/info/research-and-innovation/strategy/strategy-2020-2024/our-digital-future/open-science/european-open-science-cloud-eosc_en. (accessed on 1^st July 2021).
7. European Open Science Cloud. France National Open Science Plan (2018).  Available online:https://www.enseignementsup-recherche.gouv.fr/cid132531/plan-national-pour-la-science-ouverte-discours-de-frederique-vidal.html. (accessed on 1^st July 2021).
8. Mike Henry (2018), National Academies Envisions ‘Open Science by Design, American Institute of Physicals (AIP), Available online: https://www.aip.org/fyi/2018/national-academies-envisions-%E2%80%98open-science-design%E2%80%99. (accessed on 1st July 2021).

Before this course in Open Science I was unaware of most of its goals and even had some misconceptions about others. Now, after seeing what adopting Open Science can offer, I believe that this is a better way of doing research that the scientific community and the society as a whole needs. If science is all about trial and error until we get results, why not do the same with the research methodology itself?

A big problem in the current paradigm of research is the assessment of scientific production, which is heavily affected by each reasearcher’s amount of publications, citations and the journal they are published in. While this metric may be important, it fails to accurately determine the imapct of a researcher’s work. It can be argued that this encourages publishing many papers in detriment of their quality in order to not fall behind. This could happen to scientists in any stage of their carrers, but specially can affect young and not yet established researchers which need to fiercly compete with their peers. Some situations may generate fear and anxiety of being rejected by the community not based on the quality of the research but by other unfair reasons.
Even worse, some very important investigations may even never be undertaken because they are too hard, their results a priori uncertain or may take a lot of time. Another downside is that scientists may become ‘too busy’ to grow interest in other areas in contrast with the relevance of interdisciplinary research, which grows as does our knowledge. Because of this we might be missing out on wonderful science or even discouraging young bright minds to get into a research carrer.

The nature of science is coorperative, and that enriches it: the more widespread an idea is, the more new ideas it can generate. However it seems that the current research paradigm has deviated from that idea to become strongly competitive. It seems counterintuitive that this is happening in the era of Internet, which should make cooperation easier. It would be in the scientific spirit if all data, method, procedures – in short, science – were openly shared for anyone to see and use. This idea raises some alarms because in the traditional paradigm, opening up your research likely implies being able to publish less original papers or risking not getting the due credit. This indeed is a valid concern if the assessment metrics are the traditional ones, but the picture radically changes if the community starts valuing other criteria more.

In the same spirit as the previous criticism, it is evident that journals should change their policies regarding publication. The current business model usually includes a pay wall at some point or embargoes which work against openness. There are several ways a journal can treat the issue of open access, called open access routes. All journals need money to run but the difference lies in who and how much pays. For example, in diamond OA, users do not pay and the journal is funded by institutions or other stakeholders. In gold OA, authors usually pay a fee to publish. The goal would be to remove all payments from individual researchers or readers.
There also exists the issue of licensing: ideally all rights and credit belong to the author and journals do not own the research at any point. However, traditionally there are embargoes or other licensing practices that empower the journal over the researcher.
Plan S is an initiative aiming to address these issues. Its principles state, among others, that authors should keep the copyright of their works, that fees for publishing should be limited and payed by funders or insitutions. Some open access alternatives may even not be considered by researchers because in some areas it is almost mandatory to publish in a certain distinguished journal in order to be read or have any impact.
Beyond the problem of publishing, an open scientist should make sure that their research is FAIR, this is, findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable. This criteria is aimed towards making data as open as possible in a way that is useful for other researchers. Of course, there are many legal technicalities involved, such as sensitive information, but they can be handled via licensing, for instance.

In my opinion, for the reasons I mentioned above, Open Science is an alternative to the traditional paradigm that the scientific community desperately needs and that everyone would benefit from such a system. However, I think that the major challenge we face (and its weak spot) is the transition from the well established ‘Closed Science’ to Open Science. For instance, journals with high impact factor naturally draw a lot of publications, making it more difficult for other (maybe open access) journals to gain prestige. Another example could be that researchers focus their efforts to maximize the current assessment metrics (and not prioritizing better metrics) hence perpetuating the system.

For my professional career in mathematical physics, open science would be very beneficial for us scientists, and I think me and our group don’t have to change much our modus operandi. As for data, since we don’t work with physical experimental measurements and our works are always on a theoretical basis, we rerely work with extra information that we don’t already write in papers, and it is customary in our field to publish preprints in arXiv.org simultaneously to submitting them to an indexed journal. We also use ORCID for identification.
I have been lucky enough to do my PhD with a community of people that embrace open science principles and have passed them down to me. Before this course I could not spell out why they were good or beneficial and I even was unaware of some of the traditional practices that are considered ‘not open’, but thanks to it now I can fully identify and appreciate what and how they do science and I plan to stick to these principles during my PhD and throughout my career. There are still of course some points that I would like to be addressed, for example to increase the percentage of publication in open access journals. Although as a community we are not where I would like to be in terms of openness, we are advancing at a good pace. Personally I think it is reassuring for the future that a different, modern way of doing science is possible and I am eager to be a part of it.

Alexandra Jesus Oliveira Lopes

student number: 100 390 726

As a new paradigm of academic research, Open Science represents not only a great opportunity to connect the academia itself, but it also encompasses the aspirational goal of bringing science to our everyday life.

It can be said that one of the drawbacks for practicing open science is the legal issues inherent to intellectual property preservation when sharing outcomes from an academic research. Furthermore, apart from potential copyright barriers, most of researchers are still constrained with the rate standards which they tend to achieve through the publication in not open access journals.  

While this can be a challenge, it is also true that open science scientists have been developing mechanisms to contour these struggles and, simultaneously, improving science methodologies within the academia. 

For instance, as a law graduate that has been mostly concerned with Human rights issues, I think the open science caffes opened my mind to the possibility of societal engagement. 

It is indeed important to take in consideration the advantages of involving stakeholders and, in my opinion, this the perfect link between this course and my field of studies.

The participation of civil society actors as a research methodology is something I’ve been trying to emphasize in my doctoral work. If science exists to boost our daily life it is important to establish a balance between theory and practice.

During my previous studies, I had the opportunity to investigate about the insufficiencies behind the scientific modern paradigm. In this regard, the absent connection with the surrounding reality, especially when it comes to legal systems, led me to the conclusion that the majority of fundamental rights legal framework is not in line with the real needs of communities.

The Law exists but it is not operational because scientists are distant from the reality they wish to transform. The premise is, hence, adopting open science paradigm as a collaborative way of making research.

It is important to bear in mind the importance of engaging with the society to solve real daily life problems. Open science is much more about the whole research cycle. It is not restricted only to the paper sharing. It implies redefining our way of doing research and, by doing that, it represents a very efficient tool to deconstruct one of the most solid dogmas of modern scientific paradigm, which is the separation between the scientist (subject) and its object of study.

Descriptivism would therefore be the logical consequence of the scientific modern paradigm that implies, as a basic principle, a reality given beforehand, which in these cases are the gross facts of nature. 

The problem is that if knowledge cannot have any prescriptive function and, consequently, if the subject can’t interfere with the scientific process, all the academic research falls upon a dimension of pure abstraction. At most, we can get to know those facts from several different points of view and, even in these cases, the division of knowledge in disciplinary categories would prevent a holistic approach towards reality. 

Given this in consideration, I would highlight as the main input of open science concept the possibility of applying the tools acquired in this course in the interviews, I intend to conduct during my doctoral research process.

As a result of this scientific methodology, I believe I would be able to improve the collaboration between different disciplinary perspectives. For instance, I will aspire to achieve a connection between the use of art, as a typical reasoning free of prejudices, and contra-hegemonic initiatives to decolonize Portuguese society and, in particular, its patriarchal premises over black women within the metropolitan area of Lisbon. 

Apart from the transdisciplinary approach (interpreted, in my opinion, as a practical dimension of complexity paradigm through open science methodology), which I believe is one of the strongest outputs of open science, I am really enthusiastic with the idea of developing a data management plan and, in the sequence of the interviews I wish to prepare, I think I became equally more aware of the importance of data protection ethical committees.Specially in those case where there is not proper anonymity, it is vital to take in consideration the guidelines given by this course and its helpful tips on how to use the structures within the university (UC3M) that help researchers to analyse and interpret data.

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.

thank you #OpenScience

Open science has seemed like a pleasant experience to me because I truly believe that the collective effort should be at the service of society that is interested in research. I was unaware of many of the resources and tools that have been disseminated in the course. Enrolling and participating in it has undoubtedly been a great choice and an interesting culmination for this last section of my doctorate. Thanks #OpenScience #uc3m #ticket2OsUC3M

This blog post will not focus on what we learned during the open science, but my two cents regarding open science in general. Although I have reached the final stage of the Ph.D., taking this course was beneficial, and I wish I took it earlier during the first year or so, but that did not stop me from learning a thing or two from the distinguished members that are pushing open science forward in Europe.

Open science holds as a unique movement into making cutting-edge scientific papers available to the general public. Open science is transparent and accessible knowledge shared through specific tools. To name a few, OpenAire searches for forthcoming scientific publications and datasets through Zenodo to publish or explore datasets from different scientific disciplines.

With these tools, It encompasses publishing available research, campaigning for open access, encouraging scientists to practice open-notebook science, and generally making it easier to post and communicate scientific knowledge. As Rupert Sheldrake quotes, “Science at its best is an open-minded method inquiry, not a belief system.”

Thus, the main challenge is not open access or open data, but open mindsets that change your perspective into really contributing to our ever-evolving modern society even at the expense of personal benefits. If we stop and think about it, the aspect of collaborating with multiple early or senior researchers is desirable. That collaboration might lead to more meaningful scientific publications in general, just like a game where each player has their own set of unique skills.

Each can contribute to a piece of that puzzle with total transparency. The key here is transparency through encouraging the reproduction of scientific publications. However, nothing is perfect, and it is good to mention from a student perspective what is leaking in UC3M to push open science forward.

Usually, when we enroll in UC3M, we get a welcoming folder with a pen and a notebook to write on, but how about we also get a piece of paper or a notebook mentioning open science in general and its tools. Of course, we have the open science seminar, but this can come as a complimentary, especially for those embarking on a research master’s.

Honestly, I did not have any idea about Open science during my master’s, and luckily I was exposed to it during my four-year Ph.D. journey. I am proud to say that most of my scientific publications during the Ph.D. are open, from codes used over Github to datasets collected published in Zenodo through the Creative Common (CC) license. This will be the case as well for my Ph.D. thesis. Finally, I hope we all continue contributing to more open science channels and moving our society forward.

     Open Science represents a new approach to the scientific process based on collaborative work and new ways of disseminating knowledge using digital technologies and new collaborative tools. The idea captures a systemic change in the way science and research have been conducted over the past fifty years. The main objectives from open science must be cleared for any researcher learning with plan S principles and research strategy. Furthermore, Data Management Plan DMP under horizon Europe considerations and what is citizen science definition and how it will be satisfied with various disciplines. Meanwhile, how the shift from the standard practice of publishing research results in scientific publications to sharing all available knowledge earlier in the research process.  

     The technological developments in different fields of scientific research put the researcher with new challenges about how they will be more diffusion and impact with their thoughts, ideas, critical thinking, data, planning and participate. Open science characteristics focused not only publishing but also for research outcome, collaborative, cross disciplinary and easy society access with compared to closed science. UNISCO 2021 divided open science in to open (sources, access, infrastructure, educational resources, data, lab, funding, notebook, innovation, evaluation, hardware and citizen science) components. Researchers should use these components in order to be open and shareable by using different tools for example: RIO for proposal, Zenodo for data, Zotero for reference libraries, OSF for pre-registration, green and gold open access for publishing.

     Plan S is part of a broader open science movement that aims to accelerate the transition to making research results available through open access. Therefore, the followed strategy to be open must began from proposal and use the institutional repository for research paper, in addition to share research output and data (FAIR+OPEN) with research facilities like multidisciplinary and thematic repositories. Also, care your visibility by registry on ORCID and explore new tools for open science for example: GitHub for collaborating with keep your research integrity. While the EU ethics review process is primarily concerned with ethical issues, the project must demonstrate compliance with the general data protection regulation (GDPR). However, the fact that your research is legally permissible does not necessarily mean that it is considered ethical.

     From the beginning of research, collect, produce, and use data. Research data management (RDM) is part of the research process. It includes all activities associated with collecting, describing, storing, processing, analyzing, archiving, and accessing data. Good data management is useful for researcher and for others. It makes the data easy to find and makes it accessible and reusable by others. At the end of the project, it makes it easier to archive and share records. The DMP should be updated at least concurrently with the periodic evaluation/assessment of the project. If no further periodic reviews are foreseen in the grant agreement, then such an update must take place no later than the last review. In addition, the consortium may set a review schedule in the DMP itself.      

     Citizen science is a general name for a wide range of actions and practices. It is possible to understand it by considering the characteristics of those actions and practice with core concepts, disciplinary aspects, leadership and participation, financial aspects, and data and knowledge. Moreover, is the term used to describe a variety of activities in which people from all walks of life participate in a scientific project in a meaningful way. These are found in a variety of scientific disciplines from the natural sciences to the social sciences to the humanities and within each discipline the interpretation of citizen science may vary slightly. Citizen Science is a pillar of the European Commission’s Open Science Policy Platform (OSPP).

     Meaningful principles describe the citizen science according involve citizens to generate knowledge or understanding with a genuine science outcome. On the other hand, both professional scientists and the citizen science benefit from tacking part when the last participate in multiple stages of the research process, receive feedback and considered a research approach with limitations and biases that should be considered. Data and metadata are made publicly available and where possible published in an open access format, with acknowledged in research results and publication too. The programmers are evaluated for their scientific output, data quality, participants experiences and wider socialist or policy impact. The realization of these common ambitions requires a modernization of the system of recognition and reward. This modernization should aim to improve quality in each of many key areas in education, research, impact, leadership and universities centers.

      As result from above, in open science we can diversification and vitalization of career paths and finding a balance between the individual and the collective by focusing on quality. Therefore, during my PhD journey, I try to regulate the research on open science criteria from starting thought for the idea passing through all steps of plan. Activate metadata in order to publish research data on comfortable form to be more reliable for all public. But that will be according to sensitivity or personality performance. Using passport for open science as a practical guide for PhD student in order to build my strategy. Finally, I think is better idea for me know to start for construct research DMP under horizon Europe in line with FAIR. In addition to thinking serially about the possibilities or limitation of using citizen science during that. Furthermore, put in mind what are the rewards came from open science applicate at the end of research, and even for long time after that for all stockholders.

Open Science is a really important topic because science should be available and accessible by everyone. In addition, science is often funded by public organisms that in the current model have to pay multiple times for the science works: researchers, access to the publications of that researches and sometimes also to publish that works. This situation has no sense and should be urgently improved.

The Open Science movement recalls the ‘Public Money, Public Code’ initiative, that pretends that projects funded by public organisms must be open source to benefit the whole society. It’s not exactly the same because in this case the money is not paid multiple times but without this requirement the code cannot be reused and even in future projects the money could be wasted to updates or improvements over a project funded with public money.

But Open Science is not only about avoiding wasting money paying for the same thing multiple times: the science should be available for the whole society and this only can be achieved via Open Science. The most obvious thing is the freely available resources to citizens, who usually don’t pay to read a scientific paper and also they not should. Nevertheless, Open Science goes beyond: involving the whole society since the beginning of the scientific studies permits to improve the scientific results not only getting more data but also receiving more ideas and different points of view that improve the scientific results.

And Open Science is not only about involving citizens, but about collaboration. If the scientific studies are open since the beginning a lot of waste of efforts is saved when several teams work in the same thing. In addition, the scientific process is improved getting feedback of other researchers and finding together reusable ideas and data. And also in this way it is more easier to find errors in the early states of the studies, saving a lot of efforts in incorrect work and improving therefore the efficiency of studies, that not only saves money but also speed up the scientific work and therefore the scientific advances are achieved earlier.

Another essential topic is that Open Science is not an utopia but an achievable thing. Without being the same thing, free and open source (FOSS) movement has demonstrated that open collaboration can achieve amazing results. And it’s important to not forget that the FOSS movement was harder that Open Science, since scientific are not paid for selling their work but to produce scientific results meanwhile the only direct incomes of many open source projects are donations (some companies have proved that profit can be generated from open source projects, but an important percentage of FOSS projects are not driven nor funded by companies).

An important learning of this course is that Open Science is much more than freely available publications, results and data. The Open Science approach is a methodology applied from the beginning to the end of the research and benefits are gotten in all the stages.

Other great findings are the resources learned in this course, like the OpenAIRE, Sherpa Romeo, Sherpa Juliet, Open Research Button or predatoryjournals.com website. These resources permit to find open versions of publications and to categorise publishers and funders, which is obviously very useful to achieve Open Science. Other essential resources are data and code repositories, where Zenodo is the most remarkable one.

Another paramount topic is the Data Management Plan, not only because it is required in many public funded projects but because it allows to think about the data since the beginning of the research and so finding all the possible caveats as soon as possible. It also permits to do a follow-up of the data during the whole research, that is obviously essential.

Knowing the different types of Open Access publications is also needed to publish and get funds, and this course has explained the differences between Gold Open Access, Green Open Access and the other levels in a clear manner.

In spite of they can be shadowed by other more amazing things, the importance of open identifiers is also enormous. This course has taught the relevance of getting a ORCID identifier for the authors and assigning DOI to all publications in order they can be linked and be more easily searchable. Though the identifiers are the most important metadata, there are other useful information like keywords and institutions that should be also assigned to easy search and links.

Last but not least, the Open Science Cafés have produced very interesting and nurturing discussions about Open Science and also they have made possible to learn about Open Science topics directly taught by prestigious people in this field.

To sum up, Open Science is a fantastic approach to get more fair and collaborative science saving in duplicated costs and involving more people in the science process. To become an open scientist (something that I had already in mind in spite to not to know all the things learnt in this course) I will publish my research data in public repositories and publications as open access. In addition, I will recommend the research group of my PhD mentors to involve in the Full Open Science initiative.