CONP – Nikola Stikov and Rachel Harding on Open Science

In this podcast, Nikola Stikov and Rachel Harding, co-chairs of the CONP Communications Committee, speak about open science and what it means for neuroresearch in Canada.

Language: English
Length: 29 mins

Time Description
Nikola and Rachel introduce the CONP and the rationale for doing a podcast: a chance for Canadian scientists to voice their opinion on open science.
Rachel introduces Openlabnotebooks.org, a unique way of bringing transparency to science: 'If we share science more quickly we can get things done more quickly.'
Rachel: All the data in the lab notebooks is open, but it is still copyrighted under a creative commons license. If anyone does use the data in the open lab notebooks, they have to cite the source.
Rachel: More than 20 researchers worldwide are using open lab notebooks. The idea came from Aled Edwards at SGC, who is always pushing the definition of open science and looking for ways to share data in innovative ways.
Nikola describes 'slow science', an approach that was encouraged by his PhD advisor, John Pauly at Stanford: 'I published my first paper two years after I got my PhD'.
Nikola: Not every work deserves a 10-page PDF. We need to publish data, code, and improve the way scientists communicate.
Nikola: Science communications used to be more intimate and immediate. Something got lost along the way, and things went off the rail.
Nikola: The unwritten rule of 'three papers per PhD' can be circumvented. Instead of salami-slicing work into 3 PDFs: (1) create a data article, (2) publish the code, and then (3) wrap it up with a text summary.
Rachel: Specific disease funding agencies and charities are on board with the open science movement. They don't care whether you have high profile publications, all that matters is getting the science done as quickly as you can.
Nikola: Publishers are behind on the technology. Advocacy and better infrastructure is needed to support data-driven science.
Rachel: Preprints are encouraging people to share more openly.
Nikola: Transparency in the peer review process is essential. People love reading comments on YouTube and Facebook, time for scientists to follow suit and make their reviews public (signed or anonymous).
Rachel: Open science is an inclusive environment, not just for the scientific elites. We need to recognize and correct the inequities in the system.
Nikola: We need more examples of open science to show the way. Jonas Salk did not patent the polio vaccine, and he is known for saying 'You cannot patent the sun'.
Rachel: Most people do not become scientists because they want to publish in Nature, but because they want to discover things and make a change.
CONP wants to make scientists take on an advocacy role and fight fake news that spread easily via social media.