Comments on Open Science Lecture

I see the OpenScience movement as the academic equivalent of the OpenSource movement in software development, where coders share their work to build something bigger and better amongst all the participants, newcomers and, lately, event multinational companies.

The interesting thing about OpenScience is to share methods, conclusions, measurements/datasets with the rest of the academic community so experiments can be replicated and improved by others. This issue is not trivial as according to Kostas Glinos, the head of the Open Science office at the European Commission, it could cost up to €300 billion/year the effect required to reproduce papers with not enough information, not sharing software or by correcting mistakes that the researcher may have introduced unintentionally. Even with the COVID crisis, most of the research data that was shared was not fully interoperable and reusable to help resolving the vaccine development in an effective way. So I agree that a change in the way we do research needs to be changed to reward team work or collaboration.

Current journal publishers are taking advantage of the need to publish papers as part of the PhD process to exploit the researchers, in my modest opinion. These publishers require you to provide the result of your work for free and then, if you are “lucky” then you can present it in a congress. This implies that you have to pay for the travel and the hotel expenses but, in most of the cases, you also have to register to the congress and pay the full tariff to present your work for free. In addition, not happy with that, they take ownership of your paper and sell it to the rest of the community and the author, in most of the cases, does not receive anything. If you are on the paper reviser side, you also need to dedicate your time to reading and making comments on paper for free, sometimes on very special dates as on Christmas holiday, as it happened to me very recently. That’s why sites like https://www.reasearchgate.com or https://www.arxiv.org are worth to collaborate with, as the create an open environment where your work can be shared for free with no third party taking benefits of your work.

On the other hand, these publishers also have an important contribution related to filtering the papers in terms of quality, style, length etc. Nowadays, millions of papers are submitted every year to the thousands of journals and publications available worldwide. The amount of information is so huge that it is nearly impossible to read everything. On the other hand, not all the published papers are relevant and, as PhD candidate, you can waste a lot of time reading papers with low innovation, small advantages or they are just a remake of previously seen papers. Sometimes I feed like Einstein where he was amazed by the amount of irrelevant information that was available at the beginning of the 20th century that he decided to start his thesis form scratch and firs principles. I am not that clever, not have such determination, but I prefer having a lag of 1 to years in the papers that I read to ensure that, as time goes by, they demonstrated that they were relevant to the advance of science. By doing that, I save a lot of time. I do not want to image what would be the situation if these publishers that we were mentioning before were not doing any kind of filtering in the information.

From the academic world point of view, current evaluation system is not optimum as we PhD students need to publish our research papers on high Impact Factor (IF) journals, as well as our tutors and thesis directors. Which leaves your research curriculum in the hands of the big academic publishers and their fees.

The idea sounds good but we need also to think about the Intellectual Property (IP) issues and when it is the right time to share our work with the rest of the community is also an important point to consider. Although sharing information is the way forward, as it happens in the software industry with the open source code, there must be also an effective way to protect authors against legitimate usage of the information when the license conditions are not respected. Because, in practice, it is very difficult to control if the user of the information is compliant with such license conditions. It is clear now to me that patents are not part of Open Science, but, on the other side, I think it is a good idea that all the data that are paid by public founds are available for other researchers.

At an international level, there is also significant effort to promote OpenScience. Some of the initiatives that we have reviewed during this seminar are:

• ECSA (European Citizen Science Association) that promotes Citizen Science where everybody is encouraged to participate on scientific research and also contributing to research progress by connecting normal citizens with researchers.
• Plan S from Science Europe where objective is to ll scientific publications resulting from publicly funded projects are published in Open Access as soon as …. 2021!!!!.
• last, but not least, the European Commission, as mentioned above, that is developing a server where scientific publications, research data can be shared amongst the research community using the so called European Open Science Cloud.

In my particular case, I am going to open a github account where I will share with the community the partial results of my thesis investigation whenever I use public datasets or data, so everybody can take advantage of such work and improve it, which at the end of the end that’s the final target of Open Science philosophy. I have also created my ORCID account (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3755-1661) with regards the paper that I have just submitted for publication to one of these big publishers (required as one of my thesis targets for final evaluation), I will also submit my paper to https://www.reasearchgate.com or https://www.arxiv.org as soon as the quarantine period will be over. And, finally, during this seminar I have also discovered new tools such as https://zenodo.org/ and https://www.openaire.eu/ to look for data or datasets to support my thesis. I have not been successful to find data to support my thesis, which is dealing with defects on castings and weldings X-ray images, but I will be trying.

Thanks to the organizers of this seminar to let us know these platforms of additional open source data and research !!!!.