A Change in Perspective
The Ticket to Open Science course led by Eva Méndez and Pablo Sánchez changed my perspective on science for the better: now I feel very motivated to continue doing research applying the principles we studied during the course.
When I signed up for the course I thought that Open Science only meant Open Access. I was all in for it, but I didn’t know why we needed 10 two-hour long sessions, plus several Open Science Cafés, to discuss it. I saw the course program and although some concepts seemed familiar to me, I didn’t know what to expect. But then, after each one of the sessions I got more and more intrigued and motivated: Open Science is what I was expecting science to be when I embarked on my PhD journey!
For me, the Open Science movement resonated with what I was used to in the contexts of Free/Libre and Open Source Software and Free/Libre Culture: creating and dedicating meaningful work to the commons, working in the open, sharing the creative processes and being receptive to feedback and collaboration, and allowing and encouraging remixes and reinterpretations. These values are important to me, but during my first two years in the PhD I let “the flow of how things are normally done here” to guide my way of working, and therefore I didn’t embrace them fully. Now that I know that there is another way of doing research, more in line with these values, I’ll attempt to steer towards it. Fortunately, I have the support of my advisors.
In practice, what would embracing Open Science mean for me at this point in my research project?
Right now, the main study and design process that we are conducting in collaboration with Hospital Universitario de Getafe is basically unknown to people other that the collaborators and close friends. And we have been working on it, from planning it to carrying it out, for almost two years! We are close to publishing about it, so this is about to change soon. But still, now I know that there is another possibility for working on this project or something similar in the future, in a way that people are aware of it and can provide their inputs as it unfolds!
For instance, I consider that the OSF (Open Science Framework) platform would be great for sharing our research plan in general, protocols for the workshops we run, custom-made materials such as documentation sheets and body maps, some of the data we collect (according to our Data Management Plan / DMP), and the changes that the study undergoes due its very designery nature. We wrote the study plan and protocol along with the DMP, and that took a big deal of work and iteration cycles. We learned a lot from creating those documents, but these lessons have not been shared. Now I see that it is important and could be valuable that we share them all!
Regarding sharing the outcomes of our research, so far publications and source code, I started to use Zenodo as a public online repository. Before, I thought that the only “academic” options for sharing these types of outcomes were either publishers websites (having to go through the process of peer-review) or projects’ or personal websites (which might be unreliable due to how the web works, e.g. domains that have to be renewed). Now I know that there are platforms such as Zenodo that allow for “academic” sharing, even providing Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) for the software, texts and data in general, and allowing to group them as part of specific research projects. Additionally, I’m now also interested in using repositories for “pre-prints”, although I have to explore them further.
In our participatory design work, we collaborate with members of “the public” in defining what to design and why. To some degree, we might be doing Citizen Science. However, after the course I felt enlightened regarding the possibilities that full citizen science engagement could entail: personalization and appropriation of the designs we (all) create, research focused on the most important needs, support of already-existing design initiatives, and so on. For this, I also realized the importance of a stronger dissemination practice: papers are very valuable but they are not enough to communicate what is it that one does as a scientist, and how it can help someone or be the basis for collaborations. Blog and social media posts like this one, tutorials and explainer videos, among others, seem attractive to me again.
Finally, I feel very grateful for the efforts to reform Research Assessment. I’m basically new to academia and therefore I don’t care too much about playing the game and publishing in journals with high “impact factors” to “secure” my “career” (however, now I know that I do care about NOT publishing in predatory journals). Still, it warms my heart and allows me to look forward into my professional future to know that Open Science is being embraced as the desired way of doing research, thanks to people that are advocating and pushing for the change. From my humble position as a PhD candidate, and without a lot of experience in the field, I would like to join that movement of advocacy.
Now, all of this is very exciting but it is also a lot. I’m very grateful and motivated, but I’ll be implementing these changes slowly in ongoing projects, as I advocate for not overworking. The good thing is that for new projects I now have a framework to embrace.
Go Open Science!
– Sejo (José M.) Vega-Cebrián