A way to improve science
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.
