An early career researcher’s view on modern and open scholarship

Laurent Gatto                      Computational Proteomics Unit
https://lgatto.github.io           University of Cambridge
lg390@cam.ac.uk                    @lgatt0

Slides: http://bit.ly/20170925OpenScienceEPFL
Blog post: https://lgatto.github.io/EPFL-open-science/
GitHub repo: http://github.com/lgatto/2017_09_25_OpenScience_EPFL

Licence

These slides are available under a creative common CC-BY license. You are free to share (copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format) and adapt (remix, transform, and build upon the material) for any purpose, even commercially.

CC-BY

Introduction

Early Career researchers (ECR) - we
Open is a gateway to better research
Open Research/Science

Who?

Laurent Gatto - https://lgatto.github.io/
ECR, non-established research staff, PI
reproducible research, computational research, data, research software
Open scholar

What is open research
Open vs close?
Why isn’t it open?
Go open!
What can we do?
What can institutions do?
Inclusivity!
Conclusions

What is open research?

Any research output should be

free to access (read)
free to use/re-use/mine
free to disseminate (publish)

And

inclusive

Open vs. closed?

Mertonian norms of Science (1942)

universalism, communalism, disinterestedness, organised scepticism

Are these imperatives in line with current practice?

Open is a gateway to more trustworthy research

Open research is research that enables reproducible and repeatable research.
Open research is transparent and honest research.
Open research is research that we can build upon.

Open is better, and we should always aim for the better, not the worse.

But then…

Why would anyone not want to do open research?

Why isn’t it open?

If research is the by-product of researchers getting promoted (David Barron), then shouldn’t we, early career researchers (ECRs), focus on promotion and being docile academic citizens rather than aiming for the more noble cause of pursuing research to understand the world that surrounds us, and disseminate our findings using modern channels?

Barriers are not technological, but rather socio-cultural and political.

Systemic control and inertia
Vested interests by people in charge
Abuse of power dynamics
(Perceived) fear of being scooped
(Perceived) fear of not being credited
(Perceived) fear of errors and public humiliation, risk for reputation
(Perceived) fear of information overload
(Perceived) fear of becoming less competitive in a over-competitive market!
…

Go OPEN!

Open science/research is particularly important for ECRs. Open research practices are here, and won’t go away. It is clear that they will increase in the near future. If you, as an ECR, want to be a competitive researcher in the coming years (and you’ll need to be), you’ll need to be well versed in open research practices.

Funders’ requirements

CC-BY open access publication (golden or green) with limited embargo period. In the UK, Wellcome Trust and all RCUK funders.
Requirement for a data management plan (see here for one of mine)
Open data mandatory for H2020 grants and many national applications.
The Wellcome Trust recently expanded it’s data management plan to any research outputs (software, antibodies, cell lines, …) (July 2017).

Acceptance of open practice: pre-prints

Wellcome Trust (Jan 2017) and the Medical Research Council (MRC) (April 2017) accept pre-prints in grant applications.
NIH encourages submission of pre-prints and cite them (March 2017).

Open science evaluation criteria (1)

The EU’s Evaluation of Research Careers fully acknowledging Open Science Practice defines an Open Science Career Assessment Matrix (OS-CAM):

Open Science Career Assessment Matrix (OS-CAM)

Open science evaluation criteria (2)

Reproducibility and open science are starting to matter in tenure and promotion July 14th, 2017, Brian Nosek

In any case, my experience with promotion review requests this summer suggests that change is occurring, particularly in assigning scholarly value to open science contributions and behavior, and it’s great to see.

More citations

Tennant JP, Waldner F, Jacques DC et al. The academic, economic and societal impacts of Open Access: an evidence-based review
Erin C McKiernan et al. Point of View: How open science helps researchers succeed
Piwowar HA, Vision TJ. (2013) Data reuse and the open data citation advantage

Reproducible research

We still need more

But, let’s face it, in practice, it is currently still relatively easy to brush over many of these requirements. In addition, the incentives are still inconsequential compared to the (perceived) risks. Maybe we need more threads when not being open.

Build openness at the core your research

Many aspects of open research, and arguable the most important ones, can’t be implemented as an afterthought.
Open Research Pilot Project with the Wellcome Trust and OSC in Cambridge
SpatialMap: sharing data - GitHub repository - Grant proposal blog

Promoting open research through peer review

Accept sound/valid research and provide constructive comments

and hence

Focus firstly on the validity of the research by inspecting the data, software and method. If the methods and/or data fail, the rest is meaningless.

Peer review tips

Availability and meta-data
Do numbers match?
What data, what format
License
Findable and Accessible and Interoperable and Reusable FAIR principles

My ideal review system

Submit your data to a repository, where it get’s checked (by specialists, data scientists, data curators) for quality, annotation, meta-data.
Submit your research with a link to the peer reviewed data. First review the intro and methods, then only the results (to avoid positive results bibs).

Be reproducible!

Avoid disaster, easier to write papers, helps reviewing, continuity in your work, reputations

Promoting open research/science

What can institutions and senior academics do?

The BulliedIntoBadScience campaign, an initiative by ECRs for ECRs who aim for a fairer, more open and ethical research and publication environment.

Sign the Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA)
Positively value the commitment of open research and publishing practices
Endorse immediate open publishing and 100% OA, and pre-prints
Endorse, support and promote the open publication of data and other scientific outputs such as software.
Educate researchers about publishing practices
Be transparent about costs of publishing
Make all postdocs and ECRs full voting members of their institutions

Whether you are an ECR or a senior academic, sign our letter or support us and our campaign at http://BulliedIntoBadScience.org/!

Inclusivity: open science and open science

The primary value proposition of #openscience is that diverse contributions allow better critique, refinement, and application 3/n
— CⓐmeronNeylon (@CameronNeylon) August 10, 2017

It was a damned hard community to break into. Any step I took to be more open, I felt attacked for not doing enough/doing it right.
— Christie Bahlai (@cbahlai) June 4, 2017

Conclusions

Open research is better research.
There’s more than one open.
You want to do more. Yes please!

Acknowledgements: I have been influenced by many throughout my ongoing journey towards better (open) research. I would like to thank some of those that have inspired me, either directly or indirectly, along the way. In no particular order, I would like to thank Corina Logan, Stephen Eglen, Marta Teperek, Danny Kingsley, members of the OpenConCam group, Steve Russel, Yvonne Nobis, Bjoern Brembs, Micheal Eisen, Peter Murray-Rust, Rupert Gatti, Tim Gowers, the Bioconductor project, the Software Sustainability Institute, Greg Wilson and the Software/Data Carpentry. And probably many more.