fundamentals of eDNA

The paper “How open science helps researhcers succeed” (McKiernan et al., 2016) provided thoguhtful insights on open science as it relates to publishing, funding, resource management and sharing, as well as career advancement. The studies they presented on publishing in Open Access (OA) articles that showed a higher percentage of citation rates did not surprise me, as i know i will personally gravitate towards papers i can easily access overones that i need to jump through hurdles to read. However, what did intrigue me was that of all the subfields studied, ecology and biology had the lowest difference in relative citation rate for OA vs. Non-OA papers. I think the authors nicely addressed the concept of Impact Factors (IF) and the pressure they place on scientists as well as the misconceptions regarding the IF of OA papers being innately lower than those that are not OA, as well as the options that are available to scientists interested in publishing in a non-OA journal yet still wanting to archive their work openly. When it comes to funding, I think it is great to see funding sources require certain data management plans - especially those that are OA - as I am definitely of the mindset that data management is often overlooked at the beginning and can easily become to unyieldy to start thinking of at the end. Resource sharing and management is a topic that has been of high priorty to me within the last few years, as especially as I start my PhD work. The article echos many of the discussions I have had on this topic, many of which focus on the idea that the reproducibility, transparency, documentation, and accountability that innately comes with making your work OA is reason enough to start good OA habits. I appreciated their acknowledgement of the scientific contributions that come with resource sharing, where the output may not be a citation, but the resources, datasets, and packages could be monumental to others and yourself. Finally, the discussions on how OA work could be beneficial to career advacement is promising to a young career scientist like myself, as it reiterates the concepts that being open, communicative, and transparent about your work is being recognized as important by research institutions when considering who to hire… which only encourages me to start with some great OA habits sooner rather than later!