Thank you “Ticket to Open Science”!
I believe that my career as a researcher really began in the last year of my degree (3 years ago), working on my bachelor’s degree Thesis. The strong point of this project was to combine and apply knowledge from my field of expertise (electronic engineering) to concepts that were not so directly related and totally unknown to me at that time (such as hydrogels and their complex chemical concepts). At that time, I wanted to know everything that was known to date about these elements that resembled soft sweets and their electrical behaviour.
That’s when my first question as a researcher arose: how can I achieve such knowledge if many of the articles I find on the internet have restricted access? As some of my colleagues have commented in their respective posts, I understood publications as a means of disseminating knowledge in order to be reused and expanded by others. Therefore, I did not understand the reason for such restricted access.
Also, among other questions, I asked myself, is there a search platform(s) that can compile articles published in different journals and make them easily searchable and accessible? I was aware of several article search tools, but I was interested in the idea of a tool in which all publications would be open access.
Today, in my first year as a pre-doctoral candidate, the Ticket to Open Science course has answered many of my questions and, at the same time, has created new concerns for me as a researcher. From all the course sessions, the main idea for me is, above all, some of the practices to promote and participate in the great project that is the Open Science concept: provide open access to research outputs (including either publications or pre-prints, data, algorithms…), ensure reproducibility, open the processes of research output evaluation (open peer-review) and overall involving all relevant knowledge actors, including citizens. Undoubtedly, the session related to this last point of citizen science was one of the most inspiring and interesting, as it also actively encouraged participation among the course participants. For future editions of the course, I would like to highly recommend that, as far as possible and within the tight schedule, more collaborative activities like the one that took place in this session could be organised.
I was also able to learn about many new tools, which I think are very well summarised in the attached image, provided during the course. I am convinced that, as this is my first year as a PhD candidate, as my experience as a researcher progresses, I will find even more usefulness in these tools that will surely push my work to the next level.
Finally, I would like to comment that recently and at the same time as the course was taking place, I have been able to successfully publish my first article (DOI: https://doi.org/10.3390/s21134414) in the journal Sensors from MDPI, which is Gold Open Access. Thanks to this course I have a better understanding of what this concept entails. However, I must say that when we were talking in some of the course sessions about APCs, I honestly did not expect them to be that high (around 2 grand)! I believe that these costs should be lowered as much as possible to definitely boost and give real meaning to the concept of Open Science.
