Open Science: A Revolutionary concept
Original image from Program – UC3M TICKET TO OPEN SCIENCE (curatore.es)
“Open Science”, what a cool term… But again, what did it mean?
What is the first thing that comes to your mind when reading “Open Science”? It is a truly widespread term, written all over science and research blogs, diaries and journals. It actually sounds quite neat: “science” and “open”. A science that is “open” must be good, seems to mean “free” or “easily accessible” science, right? But what is the true significance and real scope of Open Science? In this blog post I’m deepening a bit into this term and solving some common doubts, so stick with me here if you want to find out more!
Why do researchers do science? My personal case
As a PhD student and researcher to-be, I do science because I am engaged with changing something on society, to make the world a more egalitarian, more empathetic, healthier place for all beings who live in it. And the final goal of my thesis is motivated by those values. But, being in the middle of the vortex of research —midway between publishing papers and coding—, I had not questioned myself whether the way I am doing research was also aligned with those principles, until I ran into UC3M Ticket for Open Science course. And throughout the course, something has clicked in my head and I am now clear about the way I want to do research. I want to do Open Science.
What is actually Open Science?
Open Science refers to the set of techniques and methods aimed to make science open to view and use, making it accessible for all society, free of charge. And opening science, means opening not only the outcomes of the research, but the whole process since the begining of the research cycle: opening the snippets of ideas, research questions, nanopublications, data, steps to follow, methodology used, experiments carried out and conclusions drawn. Having it all open all the time is a way to make people involved in the research process.
At this point you may be having a small panic attack thinking “wait, opening the whole research process? How can that be positive? That means other people could steal my ideas and step on my work, and I do not want that! Maybe Open Science is not as idyllic as I thought”.
Let’s stop here for a second. I think I speak for all researchers —specially early-stage ones— when I say that we live in fear of getting our research stepped on, and we —sometimes literally— run to publish our research to get ahead other research groups. Because nowadays research has become a competition for quantity instead of quality.
We are also afraid of making mistakes —which are intrinsecally unintentional, but— we are afraid of getting caught and being categorized as imposters. I have some good news here, we are all human, and we have to assume that everyone makes mistake, constantly! The key is to realize them and having the will to fix them.
If we remain in our “closed science” where no one gives us feedback except the reduced circle composed of our research group colleages, wouldn’t this increase the likelihood of not spotting mistakes? Wouldn’t it also make more difficult —due to limited accessible resources— to conduct high-quality, groundbreaking and multidisciplinary research?
Filling up our research with innovative ideas and insight from other research groups or individuals, considering different points of view, would result in a much more fruitful research, and that is what Open Science stands for.
Open Science advocates for collaborative science, where you can get feeback, suggestions and collaborations from the wide researchers community.
What institutions support and promote Open Science?
During the course we have made a tour through some of the institutions that are actually working towards the achievement of Open Science, let me briefly introduce you to some of them:
- The European Comission is investing for the development of an environment for hosting and processing research data to support EU science called European Open Science Cloud, an Open Portal to share research.
- Science Europe since 2018 is working an initative called Plan S for the open access to scientific publications Coalition S. Plan S is looking to ensure that, as of 2021, all scientific publications resulting from publicly funded projects are published in Open Acess.
- The European Citizen Science Association (ECSA) is a membership assocation that advocates for the growth of citizen science movement in Europe and beyond. Citizen Science is classically described as “public participation in scientific research” so that everyone can contribute to the research progress. ECSA’s mission is to connect citizens and science and to promote sustainable development through citizen science.
So, Open Science is a rather new initiative –it is less than a decade old!—for which many institutions are working really hard to support and promote it.
Why is then Open Science REVOLUTIONARY?
I’m referring to it as “revolutionary” because I truly believe that Open Science aims to change science research as we know it, right down to its foundations. Something revolutionary means that “has a major, sudden impact on society”, and I can’t think of anything more revolutionary than the advancement of science in an open, accesible, honest, free-to-use, collaborative way.
Open Science leads to :
- greater oppotunities for collaboration between research groups, promoting diverstity and inclusion in research
- higher citation due to the easily accesible content
- greater transparency in the research process and therefore more ease to introduce improvements in the research pipeline
- reproducibility in research facilitating scientific advancements
- economic growth due to funding not being used several times for the same purposes
Challenges still to be addressed…
One of the problems in our actual “closed science” paradigm is the evaluation criteria used to measure researchers productivity, and how the citation impact for every research discipline is remains the same. Right now, the number of publications is the only variable that enlarges author-level metrics —such as h-index— or journals impact factors. This means that publishing in open access is not as attractive for researchers as publishing in “serious” restricted access journals just because they own a high impact factor.
And this is also a challenge for Open Science still to be addressed, to create incentives for researchers to publish open access. Because rather than focusing on publishing tons papers, or having individualist science determined by metrics like JCR, Open Sciences advocates for researchers to remove “the publicacion” target from their mindset and changing it to researching with the purpose of contributing and enriching science, pursuing it to be more impactful.
Besides, the “Closed science” paradigm is deeply rooted in our society, and the coexistence between Closed and Open Science is difficult, because the existing of the first limits the progress of the second. That researchers’ CVs are evaluated for a faculty positions based primarily on the number of articles they have published in high impact journals, is a good example of it.
We must take great care when “opening the whole research process”, being very midful with the data we share. We must take into account the privacy and data protection laws before sharing potentially sensitive data. It is good to follow the guideline of “As open as possible, as closed as necessary” here.
Another of the challenges is that, most science is conducted in English because the most important journals are written in this language. But in Open Science we must recognize all research, which is not only conducted in English, we need to stop marginalizing it and make it truly count.
What can you do, as an individual researcher or group researcher, to promote Open Science?
Some final tips to getting on board of the Open Science boat:
- publishing the data in the open, following the FAIR practice -make data ‘findable’, ‘accessible’, ‘interoperable’, ‘reliable’ and reproducible- by building Data Management Plans
- sharing your code in open repositories
- adding altenative evaluation (altmetrics)
- comunicating and disseminating your research through social media
- using open licences in your research papers
- sharing your preprints
- taking a look into the citizen science research lines
Recent years do not give me hope but they give me purpose
This change has to come both from the institutions and from individuals from the entire research community. I am sure that, all of us who are still researching, started because we wanted to make progress to achieve a better world. That is the biggest challenge of them all, still far from the paradigm in which science is today. But we are fortunate, because at this moment, we have the tools and we have the will, so let’s make the switch to Open Science to achieve the world we started researching for.
