EGU Blogs

open science

Getting into open science

October 21, 2015

This was originally posted at: https://thewinnower.com/papers/2301-my-open-science-story

It never really occurred to me not to be open. From the moment I started my PhD, I made a promise to myself that everything I did would be open and transparent. By this, I don’t just mean access to published papers – I wanted the data, and the information that I was generating to be freely available, and understandable to everyone. Apparently, this makes you a ‘radical’, but to me the alternatives just didn’t appeal. I didn’t see the sense in paywalls, in not sharing, in doing things for any reason but the benefit of the commons.

I remember during my Masters, back in 2011, vowing that my first paper would be published in PLOS ONE – I couldn’t fathom the idea that research I’d spent so long on wouldn’t be freely available. It took 3 years, but I eventually made it happen. My next paper was in PeerJ – I wanted to show that publishing open access early on in your career doesn’t cost anything, and is the easiest approach that benefits the most people. That’s when I really started to get into open science. Hitting paywalls when trying to do your research, or not knowing where the data was to support the conclusions of papers – these are huge impediments to researchers at all levels, and frankly I didn’t understand why it was the norm.

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New open science competition through ARCS

September 5, 2015

The ARCS (Advancing Research Communication and Scholarship) have launched a new ‘open scholarship’ competition. The aim is simple: describe your ‘open science story’, and you could win $1000! In particular, the competition is aimed at finding success stories – how has practicing any form of open science helped you advance or enhance your career in some way?

All submissions will be published and archived with The Winnower, an open access platform, and assigned a DOI for free so it will become citeable.

To submit your open success story, simply click HERE. Use ARCS2015 as a keyword, so your submission is included in the project collection and considered for a prize. Articles must be submitted before October 5th to be considered for a prize.

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The rise of open research data

September 1, 2015

This was originally posted at: http://exchanges.wiley.com/blog/2015/08/26/the-rise-of-open-research-data/

As a junior researcher in the UK, it has given me great pleasure over the last few years to see the dramatic development of open access publishing. Most major research funders in the UK now require public access to published research articles in one form or another, and many other research intensive nations across the globe are following suit.

Along with this global increase in public access to papers, there has been a gear shift in demand for the availability of additional outputs of research, including code, videos, software, and raw data. One of the most recent steps in increasing access to these outputs has been the RECODE project for researchers in the EU, which seeks to develop an open data ecosystem through shifting research practices. With progress being made in the USA too, the wheels are truly in motion towards a global shift towards open access to all research outputs.

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The Open Research Glossary round 2

July 14, 2015

A few months ago, we published the crowd-sourced Open Research Glossary, details of which can be found here. We’ve taken this to the next level now, and published the updated and much prettier version of this resource on Figshare. This means it is now openly licensed for re-use, and can also be cited like any normal research article. We also popped it on Zenodo, because why not!

The original document can be edited here, and remains an open crowd-sourced initiative, which means anyone can add or change anything they want. We strongly encourage the academic community to contribute to and broadly share this resource, so that we can all be a little bit more informed about the vastly complex topic of ‘Open Scholarship’.

This latest change was thanks to the hard work of Joe McArthur of the Right to Research Coalition, who have been kind enough not only to assist with formatting and the generation of an xml version of this document (pending), but also hosting the resource on their website.

If anyone has any questions, comments, or suggestions, then I’d love to hear them! In the mean time, I hope you find this useful. Thanks again to everyone who has contributed to or shared this work.