Hello everyone. My name is Alejandro Baldominos and I’m a PhD student of Computer Science and Technology at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, and currently working in the Evolutionary Computation and Artificial Intelligence group (EVANNAI).

The point of this comment is not to summarize the contents of the Open Science seminar, but rather to provide some personal conclusions (hopefully a bit provoking) about the topic.

I say science must be open, and I’ll explain why I think it should not be otherwise (yet, I’ll accept we are sometimes forced to publish non-open science).

I guess most of us have already published papers in conference proceedings and journals. When you publish a paper in either format, you realize that in most cases something is horribly wrong:

• When your work is accepted for presentation in a conference, not only you have to give away your rights over the work to the conference organizers, but also to pay a sometimes extremely-high amount of money (over $600) to be able to present your work.
• When your work is accepted for publication in a journal issue, you are giving away your rights to the journal so that academia (researchers or institutions) have to pay to get access to your work. The price for downloading a paper may be ridiculously high, and in many cases you can only see a short abstract before taking the decision of purchasing it.

In my opinion, this approach is extremely ridiculous to all extents. I understand that organizing a conference or running a scientific journal have an associated cost, but the previous facts go far beyond covering these costs: that approach is a matter of science merchandization.

Now, the problem is that academic standards are still promoting this approach. We are told that we must publish as many papers are we can, in the journals with the highest impact factors. That’s all. In most cases, it does not even matter how sound and reliable our work is: publishing is the goal, rather than spreading our knowledge.

Open access is the first step towards a new model of science, because at the very least it allows all researchers to get access to published works. Unfortunately, most journals are taking too seriously the “gold” of gold open access, considering it as an excuse to ask for fees over $1,000 for publishing a paper under open access.

Personally, I’ve taken commitment to never purchasing a paper, and only reading those who are published under either green or gold open-access or which are accessible from the UC3M electronic resources. I may cite non accessible papers as far as their abstracts clearly state their results and conclusions and they are relevant for my work.

While open access is clearly a step towards a new approach of science, I agree on the fact that it still lacks an important property for science: ability to replicate experiments.

In Computer Science it is often the case that authors describe new algorithms without enough detail, do not disclose information about datasets they use or fail to describe their experimental setup. In most cases, this results in readers having to assume that what the authors describe is true, without being able to replicate the experiments. In this sense, Open Science proposes a new approach which clearly improves the previous paradigm, by describing datasets, software and other resources cited in the paper, so that the scientific community can replicate the experiments and conduct their own.

Recently I started to do my best towards Open Science by using publicly available datasets in my experiments, publishing my software in a source code repository and publishing the paper in a free open access journal: http://dx.doi.org/10.9781/ijimai.2015.333

Finally, I must say that while open access improves accessibility and spread of science and open science as a whole also eases replication by the scientific community, there is still margin of improvement in papers readability. In my opinion, new technologies could be used better to provide a more intuitive experience, for instance, with interactive charts and pluggable data sources.

#IAmAnOpenScientistBecause I don’t think I would be doing science otherwise.