Open Access Science Reflection
This week’s reading on the paper by McKiernan et al. (2016) generated really interesting conversation in our group and left me with a lot to think about when trying to publish scientific work. Overall I think that one of the biggest things I took away from this reading were the hurdles you have to jump through as a scientist to make your work accessible to a greater audience (including the public, who fund our research). Publication costs alone are sky high, but for open access journals its even higher. I liked my group’s discussion about dismantling the journal/ publication system for scientific research but in the end we ended up going around in circles. I think that sharing data, processes and final findings is such a crucial part to doing science and learning from other researchers, I have a hard time understanding why its taken so long to get to this point in communication. I know that there are many times as both an undergrad and especially as a masters student that I’ve wished I could have more access to an authors methods and the problem solving that went into creating the paper I was reading, especially when I’m trying to learn from what they’re doing for my own research. Additionally, the benefits we’d all recieve from seeing the nitty gritty aspects of not only someone’s science, but the review process, would help us all learn how to improve in the future (and maybe avoid totally nasty reviewers).
To summmarize, I think that the benefits of publishing your work open access far exceed any problems that may be in the back of your mind. Making connections with other researchers, sharing information more widely with the public and your colleagues, having more critical and consise/ thought out reviews of your work, and having a deeper understanding into scientific processes are all such valuable attributes of open access science. In my future career, publishing open access will be something I strive for with all of my work.