A document by Mazen Afif. Click on the document to view its contents.

A document by Mazen Afif. Click on the document to view its contents.

Being South East (SE) Asian, Indonesian, one of the biggest obstacle is the feeling of inferiority. Academically, by any means we’re behind, mainly due to language barrier in writing and speaking in English.English-based papers written by Indonesian, have not yet been largely published in the so called reputable journals. Our rejection rate is rocketing", based on individual interview with many Indonesian scientists. But yet, I haven’t found any published data on this matter. That doesn’t mean we only produce low quality research. Many manuscripts are rejected even before being sent for peer review due to poor language. In the other hand, copy editing fee is way out of our project fund limit.But with the inclusive spirit of open science, seemingly the inferior feeling transforms into positive energy to publish in our mother language. Just recently, DOAJ released a fantastic figure that papers written in Indonesian language is the 6th worldwide and journal registration increases 111% in 2017 compare to last year. Most of the journals are fully managed and written in Indonesian language.

My son Zach, now 16, is an n=1. Something I never thought could happen until he was four and a half and we sat at the medical genetics office and received his undiagnosis. The symptoms he had, the differences that marked him from his peers, the health concerns my husband & I were tracking, they all added up. Yes, he had a genetic disorder. No, it didn’t look like it fit into anything already characterized. These words left us with no prognosis and no plan to move forward with his healthcare. His grab-bag menu of symptoms and health-care concerns that would wax and wane and turn into a variety of surprising crises would follow him for the next 12 years. All of them without the ability to make plan. This is the reality of undiagnosis and rare disease – little prognosis, and reeling from one specialist to the next, only reacting (hopefully in time) as problems arise.It’s not good enough. We grew a team around us, clinicians who do research and who were willing to partner with us, fellow patients who had similar concerns, people wise in the way of gathering information. We grew privileged in our connections. As much as I could, I delved into the world of research to find any clues that could inform the practice of Zach’s healthcare providers to try new and innovative therapies. Did I understand everything I read? No. Did I get better at it? Yes. Mostly, it sparked conversation with his providers. It provided new avenues of thought. It was a springboard.This is how things stand now. My life is a beach, a rocky beach.

2016 wasn’t the year of the expert – quite the opposite when you think about Brexit and Trump, and how people had enough of experts. 2017 is a bit like a big hangover, scientists still have a headache about what had happened and how to respond. So, what has gone wrong – and why does it matter to open science?I argue that we’re living in an unbalanced transitional period: The internet has helped to transform our communications systems, significant parts of the economy, and even politics. But science is still grappling with these changes, it cannot keep up with the new speed in politics, economics, and communications. It therefore struggles to maintain one of its key functions: Informing the public discourse by injecting robust evidence into matters which are relevant to public life. To achieve this, science must start to operate at web-scale – and I believe Open Science is the key to get there.  When fundamental elements of societies change, unstable periods of adaption can follow. The 1920s and 1930s are a strong example: After the first world war, the introduction of universal suffrage in many countries required the sudden integration of millions of new voters into the political process and culture. In this disruptive period, populism and even fascism flourished. In the rebalancing after 1945, science was given an important role: Western parliaments expanded their committee systems, increasingly inviting scientists and subject matter experts to give evidence – and thereby greatly impact evidence-driven politics.Today, we’re at a similar crossroads. The internet, through social media, now allows people to engage more intensely in the public discourse than ever before. It has also facilitated a far more diverse media landscape. Generally, this change has the potential to improve the quality of our democracies: More diverse, responsive, and quicker public discourses should be a good thing. But they have also given space to bogus claims, fake news, and populist politics in a range of areas, including climate change, health, economics, religion, biology, and many more. Most likely, these views will continue to exist – but the question is how we counter them.That should be role of science. Ironically, today’s research systems are more advanced than ever, with better methods, tools, and data to produce superior research outputs. Where we struggle is the speed, efficiency, and agility of how we produce scientific evidence. As the public discourse steams ahead, fuelled by web-scale communications and media systems, being slow has a price: It compromises the ability of scientists to inject evidence into public discussions at the best time. No doubt, our scientific insights are more robust than ever, credible media outlets will still report about them, and scientists are still invited to tell parliaments and governments on what to do. But until all this happens, tweets might already have taken the public discourse in a very different direction. Therefore, we need Open Science to upgrade science to operate at web-scale, so that it becomes more agile, efficient, and speedy. For this, we need to remove bottlenecks in how we produce, deliver, and preserve a diverse set of scientific outputs. Ultimately this will make their production more transparent, increase their availability, and improve their utilisation. Research cannot have impact when papers remain in peer-review for 6+ months, if publications are locked away behind paywalls, if data isn’t available due to unclear anonymization requirements, or if other research artefacts (such as software) aren’t shared because repositories are not interoperable. For science, the problem is that the status-quo consumes resources which it does not have – if it wants to retain its influence in an environment where discussions evolve quicker and require injections of evidence in more flexible ways. Open Science allows us to pool our existing resources, exploiting economies of scale (e.g. when sharing datasets) and the long-tail of highly specialised research. For this we need to think about solutions that help to make (inter-)national science systems more interoperable and that create connections between different research communities. The great advantage is that Open Science can build gradually on existing infrastructures and stakeholders. It can therefore reflect the fragmentation and diversity which is so important to the progress and rigour of the scientific community. But at the same time, it can help to remove the administrative burdens, duplications, and bulkiness that currently comes with working in science. Open Science is therefore an agenda to modernise and relieve science – and help scientists do what they want to do: Drive progress and do good for society. 

Both of us, Marina as an economist, Jens as an historian, are not used to stay in the comfort zone of our scientific disciplines; we like to look beyond horizons and take a look at the wide variety of humanities and sciences. We are not doing this just because we are curious, but simply because it‘s our scientific approach. Marina, as an economist, is specialized in juridical aspects of new energies, which means she has to be aware of what scientists in the engineering and juristical faculties think, discuss, and publish. Jens as an historian is specialized in history of digitization and history of archaeology; he has to know all discourses on the internet, the web and new media as well as on different archaeological issues he is working on. Working in an interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary and multidisciplinary way often provides the basis for new ideas and concepts. Doing scientific research and being adventurous in researching beyond the established frontiers of disciplines and science goes along with several structural problems. One is the institutional aspect. Each scientific discipline, especially in Germany, has its own institutes, societies and publication media. Another problem are the informal distinctions between the disciplines, their specific semantic terms, the specific understanding of general theories and their sublimely shared paradigms; furthermore their networks of communication and patronage as well as all the little things that have to do with tradition and especially with scientific power. As a scientist on the edge of disciplines, it often feels as being neither part of the one nor of the other discipline. As an historian of archaeology, most of Jens historiography fellows don‘t understand his interest in the archaeological field. The archaeologists on the other hand don‘t accept an historian as one of their own so easily. Not having an inside position of an academic discipline means not being connected to all the information sources that may be relevant and in many ways it also means a lack of access to the disciplinary discourse. This is why we are so hopefully expecting more openness because scholars like us will benefit. One might assume this as a specific situation of only a few scientists which aren‘t clearly affiliated with the discipline. Certainly, most fellow scientists can identify themselves with one discipline, but we think everyone will benefit from well-ordered openness. The traditional mode of operation in academia is about the trade of information and knowledge, not about sharing these goods for free with everyone who’s interested. This behavior is often criticized, because most of the academic results are produced by public funding. So privatizing these results for the personal advantage of single scientists is kind of an unfair act. But this is not the point we want to emphasize. Our perspective is about the exchange of information and knowledge in order to improve research. Not every scholar should work on the edge of his scientific discipline and the intersection with other ones. But we think every scientist should at least be concerned about what neighboring disciplines discuss on the relevant issues, on methods and theories. Why this proposal? Because we think this would improve the scientific practice and theory. All scientific disciplines are strongly influenced by general concepts, paradigms schools of thoughts. Being aware of this influence and critically reflect this situation is important but greatly underestimated. By seeing past your own discipline, the ivory tower effect, scientists often suffer from, is questioned by new ideas, different paradigms, methods and tools. Whilst being confronted with all these aspects, it is also important not to forget about the traditional way of doing research and to reflect critically on them. All these factors together will be a good starting point for a more self-reflected scholarship. In our opinion this will level up scientific epistemology as a whole. So let’s be open to think multidisciplinary!    

My favorite flower is a dandelion. Why? Because it pops up everywhere in the Spring. There are whole fields full of bright yellow dandelions. And guess what? They’re free. You can pick as many as you want. You can make them into bouquets, mix them with a few daisies. You can give them to friends, keep them for yourself. Later on, when they go to seed, you can blow on them and relish in the knowledge that you’re contributing to a whole new Spring full of extra dandelions. The joy moves on.

This Blog post is in gratitude to the visionary Jean Claude BradleyWhy do I do Open?I do Open because I care about science belonging to everyone. I'm and academic and I think the emphasis that Open is to benefit academics (more citations, greater visibility, etc.) misses the main point, which is that we are funded by the world to do science that the world directly benefits from. There have been three great open initiatives in the last century that I have followed:Free and Open Source. Stallman and TorvaldsThe World Wide Web. Berners-Lee and the immense contribution of the IETF The human genome project. Sulston and CollinsAll of these have massively influenced my approach to Open and act as the ideal for collaborative communal action. I have contributed Open Source over 20 years and have both benefitted and benefitted others. It's a gift economy that works well, that companies have signed up to and that funders support. If any of these three had been closed the world would have been immeasurably poorer, often leading to control by commercial organisations The benefits are many - the main ones are:building on the work of others and being built on. permanent archiving immediate discovery of resourcespermanent archival and high-quality searchingimmediate validation and correction of my work (Continuous Integration, etc.) Open Access todayI had hoped that "Open Access" as visioned in the BOAI would parallel Open Code and Open Bioscience. In practice, for me, current Open Access has not delivered its promise and is not likely to in the next decade - there is too much fragmentation, open-washing, timidity, and restrictive practices. 15 years after BOAI I cannot go to a single point -of-contact and ask to download all Open Access papers (which is what I wish to do). I can download some subsets - most notably EuropePMC - and my non-profit organization Contentmine.org does this every day. We've worked with Wikimedia (Wikidata) to create WikiFactmine which aims to index all publica science against Wikidata (a collection of nearly 40 million facts). 15% of Wikidata is now the WikifactMine list of Open Access papers. A partial success for Open Access, making the science effectively available to the whole world, not just academics. But vast swathes of chemistry, materials, engineering are effectively closed. So yes, WikiFactMine is a partial success for Open Access and is only Open Notebook ScienceF/OSS Software is developed in public view - warts and all. Why not science thought one visionary chemist, Jean Claude Bradley, whom I knew well and collaborated with. J-C's vision was that scientists should do all their work in public view and post their results as soon as they got them. His motto "No insider knowledge" requires that any reader should know as much about the experiment as as the scientists who did this. It is Open by design .J-C developed this with young chemists, often undergraduates, measuring solubilities and publishing them immediately. The Open approach has an immediate effect on quality. People are often happy to expose their work, but they are not happy to expose palpably sloppy science. I contend that Open Notebook Science mean Better Scienceand this is the primary benefit. I've been through this myself and I feel the pressure always to be better, more organized, more thorough - to show work I am proud of.This doesn't mean that you have to get it right first time. For 30 years F/OSS has accepted that buggy code is fine and that it will be gradually improved. Similarly for science - experiments often go wrong and need repeating, and we should glory in this, not pretend that it's private until it's "publishable". There are an increasing number of Open Notebook practitioners and I'll just highlight one - Mat Todd and colleagues in Sydney who run Open Source Malaria. : Guided by open source principles, everything is open and anyone can contribute.Here's today's experiment and note that the data is all on Github.My own OpenNotebookScience I've tried to practice what I preach. Here are two examples where everything appeared in public as soon as it was created.A machine-compiled microbial supertree from figure-mining thousands of papers [RIOJournal] (Mounce, Wills, PMR). Methodology. Daily notebooks on public Discuss and data on Github. Without ONS the work would probably have been lost when Ross moved. Results!

 I started my journey into the land of open access and Open Science 10 years ago. I was lost and scared first. Coming from a Humanities and Social scientific background, everything in the field of scholarly communication was new to me. The only thing I knew about scientific publishing is that I have to get a start on writing and publishing if I wish to succeed in Academia. However, thanks to a strange twist of fate, I found myself in a university library with the task of digging into open access: all of it, whatever it meant. Looking back on this past decade, I have to say, it has been, and continues to be, a fulfilling and challenging journey. Besides the interesting research into the publishing scene, the endless advocacy work, reading the exponentially rising literature on the topic, and writing reports and grant applications, the most rewarding aspect of this work is being part of an expanding network of fellow Open Science enthusiasts. After getting over the initial insecurities of meeting new people and talking about or even presenting my ideas and viewpoints, it has become a rewarding process of travelling to conferences, workshops, seminars, training camps (endless possibilities of events we come up to talk about Open Science) and meeting open-eyed, creative devotees of an accessible, transparent and open scholarly discourse.I must admit, at first, the destinations of the events and the travelling itself meant a stronger drive to participate. But, after making the initial and lasting relations, I was looking forward to meeting old and new circle of friends and colleagues. One of the main achievements of Open Science driven thinking and activities, in my opinion, is the development of a network of various stakeholders (scientists, librarians, administrators, publishers, decision makers, etc.), all contributing to the establishment of a barrier free, open scholarly communication system.Who would have thought that in the age of fast and easy online communication, a human network and personal relations will be the most dynamic factor (at least in my case) in open scientific work. Openness for me means the easy and limitless access to creative ideas, new solutions to problems, energetic discussions, best and worst practices through an ever expanding web of friends and colleagues thinking alike or even challenging my viewpoint. So, here is to Open Science, to great conversations, to old and new friends!Have a great and fruitful time at OpenCon 2017.    

Often when we think about Science qua Science, it’s an inspirational pursuit of knowledge and the foundation of human progress and prosperity. Looking around at the advances in technology and modern medicine, it is truly amazing that this system for exploration that has uncovered gravitational waves, decoded the human genome, and has made possible the life that we live through technology and medicine.  While maintaining this sense of importance and awe, scientists themselves have a unique perspective perhaps contrasting the positive aesthetic due to its day-to-day implementation. The research process is a slow one with failing experiments, replicated studies, and detailed protocols needing development or optimization. However disheartening, it’s an unavoidable part of how scientific discoveries are made. But science is not an isolated system, and researchers rely heavily on the past bodies of work to glean insight into how a new system functions, follow up on past findings, or mimic a particular protocol. Frequently reading or skimming tens to hundreds of articles while planning an experiment or writing a manuscript, the attributes of published scholarly literature is the cornerstone of doing science. Having the techniques and data analysis procedures explicit, along with the subsequent critique from the larger science community (especially peer reviewer comments), would optimize the process of science itself at a granular but compoundingly massive scale.Online journals have allowed for the acquisition of massive amounts of information and opened the space for extensive detail within a publication (however traditional) along with appending a supplemental information, typically found separate to the main article. Despite this, many details and specifics about the scientific procedure remain lacking. Instead, these sections typically contain peripheral experiments that don’t have enough wow-factor to make it in the main body. These are important but do not always highlight methodology or data analysis procedures.Methods sections themselves should describe the actions taken to investigate the system of interest. They need to address research design, experimental protocols, preparation of sample, instrumentation, and data analysis procedures. Along with this, the justification and rationale of why these protocols and analyses were specifically chosen should be included to round out and fill in the context and relate them to the whole study.The type of content should be as explicit as possible such that another researcher can follow instructions and, provided the method was fully transparent and both researchers did it correctly, to ensure that the same conclusions can be made. However, if the data from the two replicate experiments does not match, instead of assuming inherent flaws in the enterprise of science, it means the system of interest may be more complicated than anticipated. In this case, there’s an unknown part within the experiment that is not being controlled for –  luckily scientists are trained to be curious and determine what’s going on. But the credibility of these further studies rests initially upon the transparency of the methodology.Similarly, the subsequent overt and visible critique by the wider scientific community on the methods, data, and analysis within a published product would further bolster the credibility and optimization of the scientific process. When determining if a study is useful, convincing, and ultimately worthwhile, there is an element of critical thinking required on the reader’s part but the backing of the rest of the community would further support the decision. A metric that’s commonly used to determine the usefulness of a research study is the number of citations. The reuse of a particular citation is sort of an inherent form of peer review, as it suggests that the broader group finds it valuable. But this form of indirect validation does not address any  explicit critiques or impacts of the particular study that inform subsequent experimentation.Providing a space alongside the publication is a potential solution that allows for open, honest dialog with the submitted manuscript. In the current infrastructure, this looks something like open peer review where, along with the paper itself, viewers could also see the evaluations the experts had on first glance of the manuscript and determine if critiques were addressed. The addition of this, without any extra labor on the reviewer’s end, allows scientists to analyze the paper themselves to gain additional insight into the work, further influencing the future of their experimentation and of science itself. Exposing and adding transparency to the most fundamental processes of science - the methodology and the analytical critique - will serve key roles in bettering future research practices as a result. 

Engineering is a field that touches nearly every aspect of our lives. Almost anything human-made that you come into contact with on a day-to-day basis was worked on by an engineer during at least one phase of its development before coming to fruition. Whether it was in the initial design, the selection of materials, or the manufacturing method, engineering is deeply woven into the fabric of our lives as well as our economic, technological, and social development as a society. Despite the importance of engineering to society, there remains a large portion of our global population that are not able to participate as equal partners in the engineering practice. This includes participating both as consumers and contributors of engineering knowledge. Accessing engineering knowledgeDespite the recent surge of interest in open access (OA) publishing models, engineering work remains, for the most part, locked away in traditional academic journals \cite{fleischfresser2016}. A recent study found that only ~17% of published manuscripts in engineering can be accessed by the public for free \cite{s2017}. This results in a disadvantage for those who have limited ability to purchase access to these resources, which is particularly hard felt in regions of the world where engineering solutions are needed to solve some of our most pressing problems such as access to clean drinking water and reliable electricity.The need for access to engineering knowledge does not reside solely in the realm of academic publishing. Other areas where inequity in access exists include educational resources and engineering tools such as software and standards. Open educational resources (OERs) is another area that has gained momentum in recently especially as people examine the costs of higher education. The growth of OERs for engineering doesn't seem to have taken off as quickly as in other fields such as computer science or mathematics. Solutions are still needed here for the development of engineering OERs that would provide alternative options for both the engineering student at university and the individual trying to learn on their own. Production of engineering knowledgeThe practice of engineering can include diverse array of work products. The products can include code, multimedia, 3D models, sketches, physical objects, writing, and everything in between. As such, it can be very difficult to find a one-size-fits-all model to prescribe when promoting the addition of open practices to the engineer's workflow. In terms of the tools available to enable an engineer's work, many of the standard tools that an engineering student is trained on and that they will later utilize in the workplace are closed source, proprietary technologies. Common examples include solid modeling software such as Solidworks or PTC Creo and computational tools such as Matlab. Fortunately there is much ongoing work occurring in the development of open source alternatives to these packages such as FreeCAD, BRL-CAD, and GNU Octave. While the maturity of these projects varies and their adoption in the work place is minimal, they show promise for the future availability and usefulness of these tools. The real test is if more widespread adoption can be facilitated such that continued development of these tools could be incentivized. 

Open in order to create a new balance between the interests of innovators and the interests of the rest of humanity. This means to be ready to question the not so obvious relationship between (open) science and its (closed) applications. What is Open Science in a world of patents that limit access to the practical application of science? What is the meaning of Open Access if people are not free to use their knowledge the way they want? Without Open Science, the co-operation between scholars and the application of new knowledge may be slower and less effective. But Open Science without an "open" patent regime is bound to become meaningless - for being only partially open ultimately amounts to being closed. Open Science and Open Access need to advocate for "open" applications of science, in order to avoid being naive and/or a hypocrite defense of hidden interests. Without open applications of science, Open Science and Open Access resemble the 6th Circle of Dante's Inferno, where gluttons are condemned to ‘freely’ see delicious things that they cannot in fact enjoy.

Unlike business content or political content, which serves certain people's purpose and is appropriate in the context of specific location and time, scientific content is supposed to be universally applicable. Thus access to scientific content may differ from access to business or political contents.Opposite to the open access model is regulated access, in which case, the access platform owners put certain rules on accessible scientific content. As owners are often in some business, their rules reflect those businesses.One example is general interest. In politics, general opinion decide, in science, majority thinking may not be relevant. Who is interested in a particular research result is not an integral part of that result.Another example is importance. Many owners hold the belief that their platforms are important, so are the works recorded in their platform, but self claimed importance is not really important, the place where scientific results are accessible is not science by itself. A platform can be important only if it helps people accessing scientific results easier.A third example is urgency. As a prerequisite, scientific results must have lasting value. So it does not matter much when a result is accessible, whether some years earlier or later.Science, in its raw form, is only about what is universally true, while who, where and when are at most business aspects of a scientific result. In normal development of scientific research, the result was first obtained, then made accessible to others, so that it could go through independent checks, its universal applicability is established during repeated independent tests. Within the process, accessibility is only one step, no result becomes science immediately when it is made accessible by some platform. The primary scientific activity includes hard work to obtain the result prior to accessibility, and subsequent repeated independent checks that eventually decide the true value of the result. Only after those scientific activity can the proved validity give rise to business values, i.e. universally valid results are pertinent to everyone (general interest, important) so that people should know it earlier (urgency).As the universal validity of a result can only be established after accessibility followed by repeatable independent checks, talking about the business value of a result prior to the accessible time is premature and likely misleading. Unfortunately, these business aspects are regularly asked by platform owners in decision on accessibility, which often dilute, and sometimes even displace the scientific value of a result. While readers are often distracted from scientific value by those business value, accessibility of raw research is made artificially troublesome for authors.In addition, the original writing of a scientific result represents the genesis of that result, thus serves as the birth record of that result. Due to the long lasting value of a scientific result, its birth record, as manifested by the original writing, bears value that is absent from business augmented writings.The emphasis on business value is hard to avoid on a regulated platform as the platform is indeed a business. On the other hand, open access model, by definition, looks promising in bypassing premature requirement of business value. In fact, universality implies openness as both are free of business impact of a particular party. In an open model, accessibility becomes easy, so both readers and authors will focus more on the raw universal value of scientific results. In that sense, open access in science is close to free speech in politics, as it provides equal opportunity for each result.It would be interesting to see how open access contributes to the advancement of science. If luckily, someone will be able to afford such a trial.

I work for a science research discovery platform that allows users to group and share articles intuitively, then leverages machine learning to provide them with recommendations. At its core, our mission is to make science more accessible by improving the access experience: in other words, to help level the playing field when it comes to public engagement with science, a field which for decades (if not centuries) has been stubbornly tilted in favour of those with significant levels of both education and money. Our problem? Plenty of the articles we index require a fee to be read in full. How can we level anything when the scientific publishing industry insists on stacking up the field against us?Many of our users are PhDs and postdocs; not only highly educated in the subject they’re researching, they’re also almost certainly affiliated with an institution that provides free journal access. Whilst open access is no less important for this group, to ensure that the most fruitful collaborative work can take place, the users who are left behind from the start are those we term ‘citizen scientists’. These are members of the public who are less likely to be familiar with the vocabulary of the subject they have set out to research, who almost certainly do not have paid access to subscription journals, and who may be seeking out research for personal reasons, such as to find out more about a recent diagnosis for themselves or for a loved one, to help them decide on a field of future study, or simply for personal interest. They're stuck at the lowest end of the playing field. The problem with open access, the argument goes, is that it’s useless: citizens who do not hold advanced degrees need scientific training to understand the articles in the first place. Yet fostering an ‘open culture’ will build public scientific literacy from the ground up by encouraging people to inform themselves about science from primary sources. And - to co-opt the slogan that decorates a building not far from our offices in Shoreditch, London - more scientific literacy, more power. The effects of a cultural sea change like this could be dramatic. Nature called the impact of releasing papers to the public “astonishing”, apparently surprised that anybody not holed up in an ivory tower would have any interest in research that is ostensibly done for the good of the public. The shock that public engagement actually works isn’t new: consider the resurgence of citizen science, a flourishing movement borne of scientists’ realisation that patterns or anomalies in data might just as well be spotted by laypeople as by trained scientists, which has produced democratic and cultural movements to the surprise of many of its practitioners. Steven Bishop writes how citizen science not only permits but delights in the participation of those who do not fit inside the narrow categories of "affluent, literate and educated". Perhaps scientific publishing has something to learn from this radical ethos - and its radical success.Concretely, what could an open culture do for us? A lot, is the answer. Pupils at schools too underfunded to afford journal subscriptions could nevertheless be introduced to advanced science and scientific inquiry, helping to shape their powers of critical thought in a critical age - maybe even giving them the tools to begin contributing to science, and by doing so to start fighting the systemic inequality that continues to plague it. Would-be higher education students unable to afford university fees could take their education into their own hands by learning for themselves what was previously hidden behind a paywall too high to scale without institutional help. Any person able to read about science for themselves is far less likely to be duped by ‘fake news’, a tide that threatens, however distantly, to engulf rational inquiry.  The spread of open culture - a different kind of tide - would begin to beat at the barriers that have stood for centuries between academia and the public, barriers that have largely served only to increase resentment and distrust of science itself. Open scholarship raises the bar that sets our preconceptions about what science and its practitioners should look like, and invites us to join it. It hints at a world where researchers, far from being forced to chase economic stability or arbitrary impact factors, can pursue research for knowledge’s sake: research from which members of the public can directly, explicitly benefit. Open begins to level out the playing field.

Essay prompt: What concrete benefits can be realized by making scholarly research outputs openly available?NONE. ABSOLUTELY NONE. Making scholarly research outputs openly available - pffft, are you daft!?  Under the benevolence of our grand vizier, and for the good of humanity, research outputs have always been stashed out of sight. In a decompression chamber somewhere. Under lock and key. Cryonized for all eternity. Why mess with a winning formula?If you make it open, people might start reading that stuff, rather than sticking to the headline in the press release or the artwork on the cover, and where is that going to lead us? We don't have time to read anymore! No, that's true, we have the attention span of a goldfish, everyone says so - I read it on @IFLScience. Who needs the aggravation? I'll tell you what: some papers have titles that are so long that by the time I get to the end of it (the title, that is), I'm exhausted. As far as I'm concerned, if someone has to say 'carassius auratus' instead of 'goldfish' to feel important, they deserve to have their paper locked away under two locks and two keys! I can only do so many roundtrips to Wikipedia before I start getting thirsty.If you make it open, people might start questioning what they read too, and that's just rude. You don't go around poking and sniffing all the melons at the produce stand to see which ones are ripe, do you? You do? Well, that's an unhealthy habit, stop it.And I'm asking you: what are people going to do with all their money if they're not subscribing to expensive journals anymore? They're going to go on vacation to a lavish conference, like OpenCon, and stop doing science, that's what. You can't tell me that's good for science. What's that? They can spend that same amount of money to list their papers as openly available?That's wicked, man - but I like the way you're thinking!

Open access to scientific publications enables everyone, everywhere to access the accumulated knowledge of humankind and keep up-to-date with the latest scientific discoveries. Free and global access to knowledge can only benefit the common good. Informed citizens can rightfully access the outcome of science funded by their taxes. Scientists can quickly learn the results of their peers, using it to improve their own research and avoid redundant work. Breaking the (pay-)walls of science helps promote cooperation over competition. The traditional (subscription-based) business model of scientific journals is based on an outdated publication process that relies entirely on a few publishing companies to disseminate scientific results. However, we now live in a technological era where the average person can use a smartphone to instantly publish their thoughts (through images, tweets, blog posts) and reach a target audience of thousands in a matter of seconds.On the scientific realm, online collaboration platforms like Authorea allow researchers to write a manuscript and collaborate in real-time. Pre-print servers like arXiv and bioRxiv allow authors to immediately disseminate their results while waiting for peer-review. This protects them from being scooped during the (sometimes long-lasting) peer-review process and gives other scientists faster access to results that can improve their own work. Analytic platforms like Altmetric give authors an overview of the impact of their work by tracking down the number of views, downloads, tweets, access demographics and so on. However, open access should not only address the issue of article access. Reproducibility is one of the pillars of science. In this regard, all collected data upon which hypothesis are tested should be available for replication. This issue becomes more relevant as we move towards a world of Big Data, where terabytes and petabytes are becoming common words within the scientific community. Research results are often the outcome of processing raw data collected by large-scale experiments through intricate workflows that crunch the numbers until a polished output is attained. This means that a lot of the assumptions, formulas, and fine-tuned parameters are hidden inside thousands of lines of code, like needles in a haystack. It is fundamental that data and source code are published together with the respective articles under open source licenses. Many researchers are now turning to platforms like GitHub to publish their software and interactive tools like Jupyter notebooks to share their workflows in a reproducible manner. A lot of data repositories are also becoming increasingly available for authors to share their data (see for instance the EMBL-EBI data submission portal). It is important that not only authors but also reviewers and editors are aware of these resources and vouch for their utilization at the moment of publication. Amidst the torments of publication pressure (so-called publish or perish), the quest for high impact factors and fancy press releases (desired by authors and editors alike), one should not forget the importance of negative results. These are often forgotten vital pieces of information, which are just as worthy of open publication, as they can help to improve experimental protocols, avoid redundant experiments and, consequently, the waste of tax-payers money. Finally, one cannot forget that open access is not a magic solution to all problems. It is a business model that moves the costs of publication from readers (through institutional subscriptions) to authors. This puts an extra burden on the authors on top of their other research costs. Furthermore, scientific publishing is a for-profit business that heavily relies on the goodwill of peer-reviewers that voluntarily do the revision work for free. During peer-review, researchers take time away from their own projects to evaluate and help improve the work of others in their field. The same others with whom they will compete for academic positions and research grants. It is hard to imagine a more altruistic job than peer-review. Publons is a recent project that aims to give credit to reviewers through a social network of peer-review track records. This is a step in the right direction but hardly sufficient. One way to mitigate both problems (publication costs and reviewer recognition) is for publishers to start compensating the peer-review work with reduced publication fees. Furthermore, invoices should be more transparent and discriminate the individual costs of the publication process. This would help authors know how each journal adds value to their article along the publication pipeline (editorial work, graphic design, press releases, etc), and make an informed decision on which publisher will give them the best value for their money.

Open Access and why that is important to me My name is Fulco Scherjon, and I am a professional software developer. In my research I design and implement archaeological software. One of my main focal points and the reason I submit this paper is the development of simulation systems. Everybody models in order to understand the complex real world, and everybody once in a while runs at least a mental simulation on what could happen if.... But archaeologists have one major additional problem: their subject of research is long dead! The remains most often gone and their behavior, the subject of most research, only visible in traces and trash. Archaeologists out of necessity model everything. Simulation, the execution of a model through time, is a great aid in their thinking and helps to explore hypothesis and test ideas. One of the most interesting and frustrating aspects of research using models and simulation software is that there are very few replications of that research. In general science reproduction (making an exact copy) and replication (doing similar experiments) are essential elements of proper research and the way scientific knowledge is expanded. In the natural sciences students practice and reproduce experiments to gain insight into the nature of things, before they can design their own experimental setups. Computational simulations in the social sciences on the other hand are rarely reproduced, let alone replicated. Reproduction is rerunning the same simulation, replication is the re-implementation of that simulation by another researcher, preferably using another developing environment. Reasons for this lack of replication of research include limited or no interest by publishers into replication results, the major investments needed to implement a copy of previous research and often without any foreseeable future use of the newly implemented system (no followup research), and limited accessibility of the original research. This last hurdle is not necessary and the reason why I write about this. Research and personal experience show that a proper replication is hardly possible without the original research materials. These include source code, documentation by the developers, version control files, input data, and original raw output data. This is minimally needed to allow proper replication of simulation results and reproduction of simulation runs. This does not only allow peer researchers to assess the quality of your research, but also allows them to build upon that research and create more scientific output. Open Access to simulations is needed if the methodology is going to be taken seriously and before it can become part of main stream science.Open in order to reproduce, open in order to further science!

My friend said something that resonates with me now, and has done since we met a few years back: "In our initiation as scientists, we do it with passion and with conviction. We do it to contribute to a better world. We believe that the sciences are far from corruption and politics" \citep{i}. In fact, science has to grapple with those issues every single day. This story can be summarised in the title of this post, but revamps towards the end. In Nov 2012, I joined an international PhD program. I had travelled for 38 hours non-stop and despite a time zone difference of 14 hours, I was summoned to my first PhD meeting 12 hours after arrival. That day, I signed a confidentiality agreement, which stated that any process and results from my PhD will become the Intellectual Property (IP) of my University. I had no problem with it; I was a scholarship recipient and that was standard procedure, or so they said. Only in the first month of my PhD, I was informed that my group had received industry funding and, due to this, all our research data was restricted by rigorous confidentiality. Around the fourth month of my PhD, my supervisor suggested that I should focus my work on some of this confidential data. He said the datasets were of excellent quality and that we would learn a lot from it. He did mention that there might be some restrictions on publications, but assured me that I would have other options to publish. What I did not know, was that there was a key relationship between my research and the industry grant objectives. Almost at the end of my second year, my research group splintered when both of my supervisors moved to another University.At that stage, I wanted to seize the opportunity to work with a different local supervisor. Things got grey, I had a stern warning from my supervisor. Because of the confidentiality agreement by which I was bound, I had no ownership of my research data. Hence, I could not continue with my thesis if I decided to change my supervisor. I was left in limbo. After the struggle, I decided that my work needed to be finished. After all, I was not going to let those two years of work go down the drain.  I continued my PhD research, then finished my thesis. However, my thesis has an embargo period of three years (from October 2016), despite my many attempts to make even some small parts of it public. Luckily, that is not the end of this story. I do not want this to happen to others, especially when it goes against our principles. Since then, I have become an advocate of open science. I can say that at the time, I did not understand what it meant to have confidential restrictions. Restrictions including, not being able to talk openly to anyone about my research for fear of breaching the legal agreement. I was prevented from attending, or even applying to present at conferences because the data I was researching was not openly accessible. Not only that, but in order to have some publications, I had to work on other datasets outside of my PhD topic.  Science needs to be open in order to better understand confidential restrictions and act upon that. We need open data to be able to talk openly about our research. Open access enables movement, freedom, learning and development. Open access should cut through biased economic interests, lack of ethics and unclear statements. I do open science to grow and help others grow. I believe that unshared knowledge is dead knowledge. Today (Oct 24th, 2017) is a key day for writing this text as Stephen Hawking has granted open access to his 51-year-old thesis \cite{universes}. My thesis will be open access from day one after the embargo, for anyone who wants to read it. Only two external reviewers were able to access it under a confidential agreement, that review is worth sharing: "The results presented are novel, broad and significant, and are of strong value. Future research in this area will no doubt use them on which to build further knowledge. The methodology developed will also be of interest to the bioinformatics community" \cite{bioscience}.