Reflection on Research Communication
I was excited by the perspective embodied in the McKiernan et al.(2016) paper that science and research should aim to become more open-access. As a first-year MS student, I’ve never published any research, but I have frequently been frustrated by the lack of accessibility to research articles. I think that removing financial barriers to research access is an important step in making science more equitable. Similarly, I think that institutions should help offset the cost of publishing in open-access journals in order to encourage more researchers to publish in such journals.
While I think that research and data should be open-access and accessible to the public whenever possible, I also think that there may be some instances where data cannot be shared. When working with wildlife, for example, it may be necessary to keep sensitive location information private in order to protect the study species. But this is not a problem unique to open-access publishing, as research published in other journals could also contain sensitive location data.