An early career researcher’s view on modern and open scholarship… and careers
Laurent Gatto
Licence
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Background
Research is the by product of researchers getting promoted. – David Barron
My talk
- Focused on Early Career Researchers (ECRs)
- Proponents of modern and digital scholarship, hungry for transparency and openness
- Incentivisation and career paths featuring the incorporation of good data/software management and open science/research practices.
Content: an opinionated view about
- Modern, open, digital scholarship
- The Open Research Pilot Project
- Role of stakeholders in research
- Data and software research outputs
Modern, open, digital scholarship
- Open data: FAIR principles - Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Re-usable
- Open source software
- Open methodologies: material and methods
- Open access: pre-prints, immediate OA, no hybrid publication model
- Open research process: should not be controlled by commercial or political entites, guided by phony metrics; let’s not repeat the errors of the past!
- Peer review: open, pre-publication (see slides)
- Open Eduction
Modern, open, digital scholarship
But also
- Inclusive
- Respectful, for example of under represented minorities (see Open science and open science)
- Transparent: research outputs, dissemination channels, and research processes
Open or not
- useful for others (researchers, public, …) – a good thing; altruism
- useful for me (open leads of reproducibility, trust, visibility) – selfish
- the future of research and scholarship
- career decisions
Career choices: open or not
- Closed: scooping, perceived quality, risk averse, mis-understanding.
- Open: demonstrate your strenghts, stand out, show that you can tackle current challenges (big data, automation, reproducibility).
There is a gradient if how much one wants (or can afford) to be an open scientist. Every contribution counts. See Open science and open science.
With the Office of Scholarly Communication (University of Cambridge) and the Wellcome Trust.
- the support research groups need in order to make all aspects of their research open,
- why they want to do this,
- how it benefits them,
- how it improves the research process,
- what barriers there might be that prevent the sharing of their research.
In my opinion, barriers to Open Research are not technological, but rather at political, institutional, community level.
A critical point that is missing is the academic promotion of open research and open researcher, as a way to promote a more rigorous and sound research process and tackle the reproducibility crisis. What should the incentives be? How to make sure that the next generation of academics genuinely value openness and transparency as a foundation of rigorous research? – Laurent Gatto (link)
Do we want more OS? Who wants more OS?
An intricate inter-relation between academics, publishers and funders that drives (or does not) change?
- Traditional publishers are part of the problem, not the solutions (see catastrophic JISC/Elseveir deal).
- (Many of) the senior academics (i.e. those in a position of power) have vested interests, are mis-informed on open science, and have no incentive to change (see JCS committee in Cambridge).
Do we want more OS? Who wants more OS?
- Institutions: please, do support your ERCs in their efforts to promote Open Science, include them in decision making, listen to them - DORA, pre-prints, OSC.
- Funders, do you want to support Open Science? Do it! Funders are ideally positioned to drive change, support OS and ECR. But, in my opinion, too shy.
Data and software
| Static |
Dynamic |
| Meta-data |
Documentation |
| Large |
Small |
| QC |
Testing |
| DPM |
SMP |
| DB/Repo |
Version control |
References
Thank you for your attention
