Waarom onderzoekers (geen) fan zijn van Open Science

Why researchers are (not) a big fan

of Open Science Tom Coenye

Laboratory of Pharmaceutical Microbiology, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium

Tom.Coenye@UGent.be

I want to focus on two (three) aspects

•Open Data

•Open Access

•(Pre-print servers)

•Data can deposited in an appropriate repository •Public repository •Other: Own repository/website, institutional archive …

•Advantages of using public repositories over others •Continued access over time is guaranteed •An accession number, DOI … is assigned (~ traceability) •No cost for researcher •Streamlined submission process •« Quality label »

Open data

•Data can deposited in an appropriate public repository

•Subject-specific repositories – examples from the Life Sciences

•ArrayExpress or GEO – data on gene expression

•GenBank, EMBL, DDBJ – nucleic acid sequence data

•PDB – protein structures

• …

Open data is nothing new in Life Sciences

Open data is nothing new in Life Sciences

•I don’t know researchers that object to this

•Mandatory for all relevant journals

•Streamlined systems, no cost

•Your work can be « found » by peers looking for data, and not only by peers looking for papers

Open data is nothing new in Life Sciences

•Caveats:

•Still limited to specific types of data

•GIGO (Garbage In, Garbage Out)

•What needs to be reported • Data • Metadata

Open data is nothing new in Life Sciences… … at least not for certain types of data

What needs to be reported?

Open data is nothing new in Life Sciences… … at least not for certain types of data

Data & metadata

Minimum Information Standard (‘MIS’)

Guidelines

Accurate verification, analysis, interpretation

Foundation of databases, public repositories

Development of data analysis tools

MIS are developed by community of specialists and provide specifications what information about the experiments (metadata) needs to be reported together with data

I want to focus on two (three) aspects

•Open data

•Open access

•(Pre-print servers)

Open Access: why (not)?

“This study … shows that an open access citation advantage as high as 19% exists, even when articles are embargoed

during some or all of their prime citation years.”

Open Access: why (not)?

•American Society for Microbiology

•OA APC: $2250 •Page charges (no OA): $900 - $1200

•FEMS

•OA APC: $2800 •Otherwise: no charges

•PLOS One: $1495

•Scientific Reports: $1675

•npj Biofilms and Microbiomes: $3300

•Complete Gold OA would cost my research group €25-35000/year

Open Access: why (not)?

•Who benefits? •Scientific society? •Regular publisher? •« Mega-journals »? •Does it matter?

•With research and library budgets under constraint worldwide, should we pay attention to this?

•Gold vs. Green OA – I never go to institutional repositories to look for scientific papers

•+ The peer-review system is broken

•+ Delay between submission and formal publication is too long

•+ I want to make sure I go on record as the first to have described this

•- My competitors will run away with my idea

•- People won’t take it serious as it is not peer-reviewed

•- Not every journal will accept the manuscript after it’s been in the public domain on a preprint server