Tag: #OpenAccess

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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.

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Open Science, Open Excellence

Open Science: a very broad topic that some fear while others love.

It took me 2 years of PhD program to understand why the research industry is flawed. I am not willing to perform a socioeconomic approach, but, as far as I understand, the monetization of knowledge even though has been useful in terms of copyright when generating value to companies/countries, I think that it must be redirected and somehow democratized if we, as a society, want to improve. In general, by game theory we can state that humans GROW if they SHARE, and in this case the sharing must be performed in terms of knowledge and resources.

My expectations of the course were very high. Before then, I barely knew about the concept. My humble approach was: “Open Science is the legal implementation of Sci-hub”. Nothing could be more untrue, Open Science is MUCH more, not only “the Robin Hood of knowledge”. In this course, I learnt about the specifications of Open Science and how the world is implementing all the official infrastructure, all the paths a researcher can take to become an Open Scientist. Open Science is a new paradigm (as the first session of the course was called), with new methods and different points of view when contributing with others. Quality vs. Quantity. The advertisement in social media in a competitive-productive way. In essence, meritocracy in strict sense.

One of my favorite sessions was the 5th one, Citizen Science and Public Engagement, because it woke up my childish spirit. When I was a child, I loved to experiment with machinery, watch animals, understand curious physical phenomena. I loved to try how different inputs resulted into different outputs, to understand the mechanism of things in simple day-to-day situations. This passion did not die but became a bit numb.

If citizen science become a thing, society will improve for sure, not only in terms of proficiency but also psychologically. Most kids do not like science because it is explained in third-person, it is boring and the reward is invested in the long-term future under the premise “you will get a good job and be financially independent”. On the other hand, most adults do not feel fulfilled because they could not pursue their dream, but, what if they could not pursue their dream because they did not know what the dream was about? Most people do not know what is their talent, what if one of the best potential-ornithologist is someone who liked birds but ended up working in something else because he/she could not learn about the migration of swallows? What if the private publishing was one of the reasons of not being able to develop a passion?

If citizen science is a project that can be materialized, I am sure the world will be happier, people will be able to study or do hobbies without restriction. And without restriction, endless contributions may appear.

In connection with that, I believe that citizen science performed a qualitative leap, specially during last year, since Covid pandemic struck. Then, a lot of Open Science was performed, I do not know if it was under this “specific” name, but at least it was conceptually performed. Knowledge was way more shared, researchers were taken more seriously, new free of charge research-kind applications were created, etc. And with reference to this last example, I would like to connect the ending of my blog with the question: How are your plans to become an “Open Scientists” during your PhD and beyond?

(Banner: I do not perform any kind of monetary-reward advertisement, I just think that the following application is an example of Open Science that must be shared and used in the research field)

A few months ago, a friend of mine asked me: “Hey! are you more an Obsidian or a Roam Research person?” For those who do not know them, they are applications that connect concepts, notes and knowledge, and gather them in a very useful way creating the so-called “Vault of Wisdom” (others call it “Second Brain”). The difference between them is that Obsidian is free-of-charge and it has the capability to publish the notes online. It was created during the lockdown (approximately) when a group of programmers wanted an Open Source knowledge manager app.

Then, my plans to become an Open Scientist begin with this application (Obsidian), in which I plan to publish everything I know, particularly everything involved in my PhD discoveries, including all the Open Science Café information that I obtained from this course.

However, even though this approach is extracurricular and non-oficial, academically I would like to participate in the Open Science world, for example, by publishing in the IEEE Access journal, which is an Open Access Journal of the IEEE society.

Also, I would like to incorporate in my day-to-day research life several applications like Github for uploading the code, Overleaf for writing purposes, as well as being more participative in several communities like Twitter or Stack Overflow, among others. In any case, I will save as a cheat sheet, one of my favorite slides of the course (from the first session):

Thanks to this summary of platforms, I will be able to integrate one application at a time so I will GROW by SHARING my knowledge at each stage of the research.

In the end, I think that the course was very useful, I liked the structure of each session and I would recommend it to anyone, even though those who are not researchers. Also, I would like to thank the speakers of the course and the Open Science Café sessions who where very helpful by providing their knowledge and resources, which have been very interesting.