Shaping the future of Open Science — parallel session during the MCAA Virtual Conference
During the first MCAA virtual conference, which took place on the 6th and 7th of November 2020, and focussed on Research and Democracy, one of the parallel session of Friday covered the topic of Open Science, and the challenges that it includes from the perspective of an Early Stage Researcher.
This parallel session was moderated by Maja Mise (Marie Curie Alumni Association Open Science Task Force Leader) and saw the presence of other three panelists: Alexander Hasgall (Head of the EUA Council for Doctoral Education), Giulia Malaguarnera (President of Eurodoc), and Toma Susi (Assistant Professor at the University of Vienna and formerly responsible for open science policy as the Vice-chair of the Young Academy of Europe).
Maya opened the session by explaining the meaning of Open Science (which is ‘the practice of science in such a way that others can collaborate and contribute, where research data, lab notes and other research processes are freely available, under terms that enable reuse, redistribution and reproduction of the research and its underlying data and methods’) and the importance that it has today: not only for scholars, but it is also a topic of interest for policymakers, publishers, and research funders. The final goal of open science is “to foster new collaboration, to connect researchers, and to open the science to the public, which has become even more important now during the pandemic,” Maya stated.
What has been achieved in terms of Open Science? Is it enough?
Giulia replied that thanks to the Covid-19 there has been an acceleration in Open science, however, this should not happen because of an emergency, it should become a common practice. Her major concern at the moment is that it is hard to understand what is the real meaning of Open Science, in fact, she underlined that when someone talks about an Open access journal this might be more clear compared to the definition of open science.
At the same question, Toma replied that in the last couple of years the biggest change has been made thanks to Plan S, an initiative for open-access science publishing which was launched in 2018 by “cOAlition S”, a consortium of national research agencies and funders from twelve European countries. He added that this is the direction that we should take: we should not only try to publish in open access journals, but we should try to also publish our data, making them available to everyone.
Alexander agreed with the previous comments and added that in order to be more oriented in the direction of Open science, it will be necessary to improve the infrastructures and to change the actual research assessment system, which is mostly focussed on evaluating the researchers based on the journals in which they publish.
Finding academic position, but in general, from a career perspective point of view, publishing in open access journals can be limiting, how can we solve this problem?
Toma, with all the panelists supporting his side, replied that of course, it is not up to young researchers to sacrifice their career and force them to publish exclusively in open access, but he underlined that nowadays there are many good journals with open access sections in which your paper could be published and could even receive more citations, due to the fact that open access journals can, of course, increase the visibility of the paper. The problem thus needs to be solved by the institution, as mentioned before; it is the whole system that needs to change.
How are universities responding to Open Science and Open Access?
The panelists underlined that it’s not important to tell people where they should publish, but it is important to create some principles, such as: training Early Stage Researchers, support them, create infrastructures that would increase the use of Open Science, and to publish in Open access journals. Summarising, we need to change the actual culture of “publish or perish,” into a culture which supports career development and find new ways to assess the quality of the research.
How can we move our actual rewarding system based on journals impact factors into a system more oriented in rewarding Open science journals?
The first quote comes from Toma:
“It’s silly to look at the name of the journal and evaluate scientists based on this, we should value the research, and not where the work is published.”
He underlined how important it is to move away from the concept of impact factors. It is necessary to find other ways to reward the research world, and he added that researchers and scientists are the research world, and thus they can change, they have the power to do it.
Alexander agrees with Toma and underlined the necessity of developing a new way to assess the research quality and make open science a normal part of research, not something unusual.
How universities can support researchers in open science in terms of infrastructures and training?
There are three major points that came out of the discussion, which can be defined as the three objectives that universities have to fix:
1. Creation of better data system management to collect all the information from a research project and make them available for everyone;
2. There is the need to look to what are the right skills that an Early Stage Researchers should learn and that could be useful in term of Open science (e.g. use of specific platform, learn what Open access and Open science, ext.…);
3. Develop ecosystems in which ESRs could get information from various researchers and co-workers with different backgrounds (from ITs, to research groups). There is the necessity to improve the support that we can give to the ESRs.
European open science cloud and Open Research Europe
The European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) aims to ‘offer 1,7 million European researchers and 70 million professionals in science, technology, the humanities and social sciences a virtual environment with open and seamless services for storage, management, analysis and re-use of research data, across borders and scientific disciplines by federating existing scientific data infrastructures, currently dispersed across disciplines and the EU Member States.’ The panelists agreed that this is a great opportunity to improve the infrastructures that are necessary to develop Open science, there is the need to create a system that will allow exchanging whole data sets, allowing other researchers to use them in different ways, with the final aim of increasing the level of networking between scientists.
On the other hand, Open Research Europe is a publishing platform commissioned and paid by the European Commission, which ‘will enable researchers to have full access to peer-reviewed publishing service for both Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe beneficiaries at no cost to them, during and after the end of their grants. The platform is already active and aims to have a rapid publication system and publication outputs that would support research integrity, reproducibility, transparency and will enable open science practices.’ Also, in this case, the panelists agreed that this initiative can be very helpful in order to exchange information between projects and will thus increase the level of networking at the European level.
The session ended with a brief Q & A session, in which the panelists replied to various questions and comments of the audience.
The final comment and likely the take-home message of the session was:
“Open science it’s a way to make research better and more accessible to everyone.”
Ruben Riosa is an animal nutritionist currently working as a PhD student at the University of Bonn/University of Glasgow, where he is part of the MSCA ITN project MANNA. His project focuses on dairy cow’s nutrition and physiology. In the MANNA network, he is also the Scientific copywriter. He is deeply interested in science communication.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rubenriosa/
Website: https://rubenriosa.com/
