Open-access data reflection
Before and after our discussion, I am a strong proponent of open data. Isn’t research conducted to discover and share new information? McKiernan et al. (2016) did an excellent job outlining the pros and cons of open data, as well as how scientists can contribute to the mission of open-access publication. I think the solution of writing in publication costs associated with open-access journals is a good one. One could argue that that grant money could be spent on research itself; however, the benefit of higher visibility seems worth it to me. Publishing in open-access journals facilitates and amplifies the spread of knowledge among scientists. Even large institutions may not have access to all journals and it is cost-prohibitive for scientists to buy individual pdfs from journals. I’ve seen the prices of day-long pdf rentals around $40. There shouldn’t be a cover charge to learning in my opinion. It’s easy to take institutional access for granted! Paid subscription journals also limit access to this information by non-scientists who are likely not part of an institution with a journal subscription. Newspaper scientific articles often oversimplify and dramatize results and add unfounded speculation to the conclusions. These articles, or even news programs, are often the primary source of scientific information for non-scientists. Perhaps open access to journal articles would mitigate some of the spread of misinformation in our culture?
I was initially a bit skeptical of sharing raw data because others could use it to publish your study before you, though my advisor, Pete Countway, summarized it well: most people are too busy to steal someone else’s project. With some new perspectives offered by our class discussion and this week’s reading, I think widespread availability of raw datasets will benefit researchers. A colleague could look at my dataset and analyze it in ways I did not think of, or with methods I do not have this skillset to use myself, or even answer completely different questions about the system of study using my data. Additionally, publicly accessible raw data can increase the rigor of review, quality of replication, and trustworthiness of results, as mistakes, omissions, or falsification may be discovered by a reader and brought to the author’s and the editors’ attention.
One concern that some people brought up was quality of research. Do open-access journals maintain the same rigor of selection and review as prestige journals? The strong bias towards citation of open-access journals, as illustrated by McKiernan et al. Figure 1 (2016), may indicate either that this is not the case. The authors also discuss in depth the misperception of high-impact-factor, prestige journals as higher quality than open-access journals.
In a tangent from this week's reading, the Countway Lab was discussing patent rights and commercialization of research in the context of open-access data yesterday, mainly using the example of Taq polymerase. I see the obvious benefits to medical researchers to patent, for example, surgical techniques, diagnostic tests, and medicines, but in environmental research, is there much of a demand for the commercialization of extraction methods, primer sets, etc.? Is it worth the tens of thousands of dollars and time cost to patent these processes rather than keeping it accessible to other researchers in the public domain? This can also be asked of medical patents- are these discoveries for profit, the expansion of knowledge, or to help society as a whole? I suppose this is a matter of personal ethics. To me, it seems more beneficial to a researcher to share their methods so others can replicate and expand upon their experiments and findings.
This week, I have also been thinking of social media as an open-access data tool. For example, science Twitter puts scientists and their research in conversation with peers and the community at large. It’s a quick way to share figures and graphs (preliminary or otherwise), journal articles, job postings, and feedback. Social media can also serve as a tool for collaboration by putting researchers with similar or complementary interests in contact with one another. Additionally, it provides a platform where anybody can ask authors questions about their work and receive a fairly quick response. The website is free to use by anyone with internet access (of course, at the cost of your personal data). I am not on social media, both professionally and personally, but see its value as a communications tool. I’m interested to see what other members of this class think about social media in science.