On Wednesday 13th of May 2015, an Open Science seminar took place from 10:00 to 14:00. To be honest, I registered to attend the seminar in order to complete one of the required credit hours for the transversal credits of my doctoral studies at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M). However, the seminar covered a very important and interesting topic. Open science concept is indeed a necessary approach for the advancement of research in the future. The seminar can be briefly summarized as follows, at first the event started with the definition of the term Open Science (OS) in terms publishing researches and sharing codes in open access magazines and repositories. Then the speakers started pointing out the advantages of publishing in open access magazines, focusing on the benefits for the investors and for the researchers. In addition to examples on how the open source codes can be improved by other parties and shared for greater benefit. Finally, few arguments are discussed regarding the steps to be followed in order to be an open scientist.

The concept of being transparent with your work along-with sharing your results and your algorithms with other researchers is upright, because this increases the speed of research advancements. However, the issue of the credibility for the published papers in open access magazines is a matter of discussion. At the time being, most of the open access magazines do not have full time professional reviewers, they request the review of the submitted papers from other researchers who can spare time. This can lead to low quality of the accepted papers and many researchers will take advantage of the notion to publish more papers with low quality results. In addition to the copyrights violations and the possibility of having the research which is published in open source magazines to be republished again elsewhere. Plagiarism will also increase drastically without proper citation for open access codes. Accordingly, we tend to publish in recognized magazines that requires you to pay a lot of money for it. This is not only because it required by the research community, but also because it will ensure the quality of the published papers and protect the published material from plagiarism.

We live in a greedy world, at which money is more valuable than research. Instead of giving money and awards to the researchers for the good results they obtain; the researchers have to pay money to publish their work. The scientific community, with its current structure, cannot make the complete transfer to use the open science concept on a large scale. To achieve this, many steps are required from all the involved parties. Researchers should make the jump of faith and start publishing their work in open access magazines and academic institutes should encourage the open science research and provide the researchers the necessary information. Besides the open access magazines and journals should start promoting the concept more and recruit high class reviewers who can validate the submitted work credibility. They also should protect the published work from plagiarism and ensure the proper citation. This seminar is very useful as it spreads the awareness of the open science concepts among researchers and academic institutes. The more of similar events, the faster the results will be applied.

Last but not least, I would like to thank the organizers and the speakers for an informative seminar and an interesting topic. Hope that the concept is accepted by the scientific community in the near future and improve all its current disadvantage.

#IamAnOpenScientistBecause it is the best way to advance in research in the near future through being transparent.