I always really enjoy getting asked to speak at generalist or discipline-specific conferences that are not per se about open science, but the organisers of which recognise that it is a great thing to discuss (and increasingly, a necessary thing). One such opportunity was at the [ID]² interdisciplinary life science student conference in Oxford last week. I thought I would share my approach and summary here and really hope to hear back from others who have presented on the topic and the kind of discussions that come up in your sessions. For those of us who spend a lot of time talking about open science with a broad range of people, it is really useful to reflect on what aspects different groups relate to and where the really interesting conversations lie.

Here is my slidedeck, it’s a short one (Friday afternoon session!) with a whip through the main aspects of what open means, what falls under the open science umbrella and then three short case studies of projects which represent many different aspects of open science. I chose Open Source Malaria, Open Ash DB and PLUTo, because I felt I knew enough to talk about them for a few minutes and they’re all relevant to the life science interests of the audience alongside their brilliance at using open approaches.

Key to the second half of the session was a discussion, based on the following questions:

1. Why do you do scientific research?
2. What are your biggest frustrations?
3. Do you see scope for greater openness to improve your research or science in general?
4. What are your reservations?

I emphasised I was particularly interested to find out how the answers to the third question related back to the particular goals, aspirations and barriers that had been identified in the first two questions.

Sticky notes and markers at the ready, the group of 15-20 students split into three and this is what we learned:

1. Why people were researching science fell into several clusters of answers – pragmatic answers like buying time and paying the rent, intellectual curiosity and the joy of finding things out, personal enjoyment (nice working environment, good coffee!) and wanting to change the world and make a difference.
2. Biggest frustrations unsurprisingly were slow rates of progress including experiments not working for no apparent reason (I think we can all empathise – for session leaders I would say a tip here is to move people onto the next question quickly before discussion becomes too much of a #phdchat/counselling session!). A lack of openness and slow exchange of information were explicitly mentioned particularly in terms of unpublished algorithms and inability to reproduce other people’s results. There was an interesting dichotomy of an information overload (too much literature/data deluge) contrasted against a complete lack of access to data in some cases. General inertia and conservatism in academia were brought up, some cited a lack of freedom and too much hierarchy whereas others suffered from a lack of direction. Complicated data formats and restrictive formats for submission (e.g. only a Microsoft Word document) caused some lively discussion in the groups. The final frustration listed was (of course) supervisors.
3. Scope for openness to benefit people’s research was a little under-represented with only four sticky notes once a slight colour confusion had been corrected, but as someone pointed out one of the notes was greater availability of raw data which covers a lot of ground and addresses several people’s frustrations. Publishing negative results was deemed to be a beneficial effect of greater openness. Given that many students in the group work on modeling biological processes, I was surprised that code availability was not brought up but it seems in some areas it isn’t a problem and in others the focus is on the theoretical model rather than the implementations, which neatly led to a side discussion about the level of priority that is given to good software engineering in academia and also the trade-off inherent in documenting research outputs for sharing and reuse versus using that time to create more outputs. All valuable discussions to have.
4. People were not short of reservations about openness, which was expected. Lack of reciprocation and people cheating the system were brought up as was gaining credit for your work, although other members of the group stated they thought openness would make this easier and get you more recognition and citations. That it’s difficult and time consuming to do openness, to share data and convince collaborators to do the same was a strong feeling and undeniably true. The standard reasons for not being entirely open were all present, as documented extensively in many places including the Royal Society Report Science as a Public Enterprise in their definition of ‘intelligent openness’ – national security, personal privacy and protection of endangered species among others. Additional topics came up in conversation but I will skip over them for brevity.

The overwhelming impression was that there is a clear link between the major frustrations faced by research students and some of the proposed benefits of openness, but more needs to be done to address reservations and make it easier for people to share what they are doing. Students are operating within very different working models, sets of priorities and expected research outputs and these are heavily influenced by their supervisors and the general bureaucracy of research and academia. This means a constant negotiation in terms of where openness might be beneficial to them and that bar is sometimes very high.

There are no ground breaking revelations here, but the more often diverse groups of researchers have the opportunity to engage with each other about these topics, the better for informing their future decisions on how openness will play a role in their research. Feedback suggests that attendees enjoyed the opportunity to discuss these topics with others from a broad variety of research backgrounds so it’s certainly a session I’ll be running again.

I hope other members of the working group can share your own experiences discussing open science with research students. Please take up any opportunity to run sessions like this in your communities and institutes and report back to us on how things go!