Reflection Blog 2/5/2021
Blog post 2
This week’s lectures focused on communicating science through online platforms such as GitHub, the benefits/downfalls of using open source journals, and places to store data which are open source. Much of this material was new to me; I’ve used R before and have an account with OSF, but have not used these tools for communication before. Andy did an amazing job being patient and teaching us how to connect R with GitHub and I can see this being useful not only for this class, but for other coding, graphing, and communication projects. In terms of open source data and journals, before this paper and our discussion this week I didn’t know that you had to pay to be published in an open access journal. It has always been interesting to me that scientists don’t make money directly from journals, but the price to subscribe to journals or even to rent certain manuscripts is high. While I understand a lot of work goes into the publication of a journal, scientists, especially students and young professionals, don’t make a lot of money, so paying for access to journals and/or paying to publish is out of reach. Furthermore, the general public deserves to be able to access scientific journals to keep themselves informed and hiding the information behind a paywall is a barrier to learning. Financially, there isn’t currently a best solution for everyone, scientific literature is mostly available to those associated with an institution or those with money. However, with the availability of free information online such as biased news sources and blogs, open access journals are more important now than ever to combat misinformation. I am looking forward to being part of the solution.