Credit, a troubled elephant in the room of Open Research
Does being more ‘Open’ in your research practices help with your career? On the face of it the correct answer should be an emphatic, ‘Yes!’. However maybe the real answer is more complicated. An investigation around benefits and challenges for Early Career Researchers (ECRs) (Allen and Mehler, 2019) highlighted the problem with the adoption of new open practices in academia; a much higher standard of rigour, it takes longer and there is currently no incentives. There are benefits also; research integrity, new tools to help, and building future skills. The elephant in the room of open practice is credit, credit for putting the time in to do things properly, and this downside is not entirely counterbalanced by the distant eagle of potential future benefit soaring above.
Thus, for an ECR who has a name to make for themselves the fact that the extra work is not recognised could be a showstopper. The fact itself that this work is seen as ‘extra’ could be disputed; depending on your point of view this is not extra work but necessary work. An ECR may not get traditional academic recognition but it can open doors to present and speak on a topic which is gaining more and more interest, this itself could raise the profile of the ECR.
The problem arises that many Principal Investigators (PIs), supervisors, research group leads, evaluation return managers, and all the other people who have authority in this area don’t really have a focus on Open but on the traditional measures and output rate of academic discovery. ECRs thus find themselves chasing two rabbits at once: getting results on the timescales of their research group and using open practices as they know this is the future and how research should be done.
This is an unrecognised, exhausting and time consuming situation that ECRs can find themselves in. Getting little credit, taking longer to get to results and leading to potential conflict with supervisors who may be left wondering why the ECR is more focused on what they see as process rather than doing research!
It is not all doom and gloom however, research groups do exist, such as the one run by Dr Stephen Eglen of the University of Cambridge where new PhD students are inaugurated into open development practices — basically they work out in the open in GitHub repositories producing software and analysis that can be re-run by their supervisor. Being open is then not an afterthought but baked into the process of investigation and research. This is a great way to normalise open practice and reduce the time burden as candidates build up their skills in this area as well as being a prerequisite for gaining credit.
Taking a snapshot of research now might not yield the answer that open practices are worth it; i.e. time spent on these practices on average does not yield the same kind of career credit that just focusing on research results do. However research practices do not stand still and methods of recognition and rewards are always playing catchup with those on the leading edge. One cannot also overlook the unanticipated benefits; such as the production of concrete examples of open practice that can then aid in open advocacy. Not being the best in your PI’s mind might be somewhat offset by becoming a key point of reference for those in your group, department or domain organisations on open practices.
The niggly fact of credit and when one can get credit for open practices never goes away; generally unless doing charity work people want some form of payment or credit for their effort. The good news is that in some areas of research open practices are being recognised. Take the rise of Research Artefacts (e.g. at the International Conference on Software Engineering), these are software, scripts and data that can be tested to see if the results of submitted papers can be reproduced and if so the associated papers gain an extra ‘Artefact’ badge showing that such information is available for them. Another example is the Giga Science Journal that highly encourages authors to submit the associated DOI for a Code Ocean compute capsule to allow the results to be reproduced in an open way.
Concrete moves towards giving credit for open practices is what makes credit a ‘troubled’ elephant, as time goes on the elephant is being shown the door as this major pain point for ECRs and other researchers are being minimised by changing research group practice, better domain reception and better recognition by domain workshops and publications. However hurdles remain, from the attitudes of PIs driven by practices in their domain as well as the needs of research evaluation (e.g. REF) to the promotion criteria in academic jobs there is still much to be done to make open practices expected practices and trade some of the speed of research for improved integrity of research. New knowledge procured by research is only really of value if it is trustworthy. The elephant of no credit must leave the room of research but there is still some persuading needed before it decides it’s no longer welcome.
References
Allen, C. and Mehler, D. M. A. (2019) ‘Open science challenges, benefits and tips in early career and beyond’, PLOS Biology, 17(5), p. e3000246. doi: 10.1371/journal.pbio.3000246.
