1. FSCI 2019
The FORCE11 Scholarly Communications Institute 2019 (August 4th-9th 2019, UCLA) was the third iteration of the summer institute that was conceived as a means to bring together the community of scholars, librarians and other stakeholders interested in open scholarly practices. FSCI eschews the traditional conference format and instead uses courses, discussions, keynotes and a “Do-a-thon” to start conversations around and seed action in the open scholarship movement. As a scientist-in-training, I wanted to learn about open practices in the sciences and visions for the future. I was fortunate to have received a travel scholarship to attend this year’s edition. Here is a summary of my notes from the five days. At the bottom are some other participants’ reflections of their time at FSCI.
2. “Open” and copyright
Non-open access publishing practices make the end product of research unavailable to the reader by making it inaccessible (behind paywalls). Open publication practices in addition to redressing these limitations of non-open access publishing also encourage less restrictive licensing and copyright barriers. In the course “Understanding Copyright: Vital Skills for Navigating Scholarly Communications” by Heather Briston and Martin Brennan (pictured), we discussed over two sessions the basics of U.S. Copyright Law, its applicability to research items and open access licenses.
These aren’t issues I have to think about frequently for my research, but of the several important things I learnt the one that was emphasized several times over the course was not to sign away my rights to reuse my published writings. This seemed like a common-sense cautionary, and like most common-sense-sounding advice, is often overlooked: don’t click through contracts if you don’t want to give away your rights to your work!
It was a useful course that set me thinking about the ways that copyright, while intended to protect creators can impede research progress.
3. Scientific publishing today, and the scientific paper of the future.
2012 marked the 350th anniversary of the first academic paper (Rallison 2015). A comparison between the format of Maxwell’s original publication in Philosophical Transactions, and a typical scientific paper today reveals few differences in structure or elements (think text, figures, equations, references and endnotes). The use of a static document styled after handwritten letters is an “underwhelming use of today’s technology”. It also is clear to anyone who has read and/or published papers in the sciences that the scientific paper can be improved upon. How can we reimagine the scientific paper to bring it into the 21st century and build into it principles of open access and reproducibility? Enter the research compendium.
In the course “Author Carpentry: Writing a Research Compendium and the Future of Scientific Reporting” by Donna Wrublewski and Tom Morrell we discussed the features of the scientific paper, as a step towards first defining and then learning to build a “research compendium”. A research compendium is a “findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable/reproducible” (FAIR) digital document. We read How to Read a Research Compendium and then had a video call with the author Daniel Nüst. And over the four days of the course we built our own research compendia (I am still thrilled to see the end product, one month on!).
In the final discussions in the class we all agreed that ideas like research compendia are fantastic alternatives to the old static paper format, but the major issue that stands in the way of their widespread adoption is the resistance of academicians, and to a lesser extent, that of publishers, to change.
The course itself was fantastic, and I highly recommend it if you are interested in learning about R markdown and binder. It was also my first carpentry experience, and now I’m looking forward to being a part of more of these.
4. The future of the scientific communication
While the Author Carpentry course was a nice introduction to thinking about using technology to improve on the scientific paper, the course on “The Scientific Paper of the Future” by Deborah Khider and Daniel Garijo took a broader approach to examining the elements of STEM research in the context of improving reproducibility, metadata publishing and data sharing practices.
We talked about and played around with what the instructors termed the components of open science:
1. Shared repositories like Zenodo and GitHub for sharing data, code, pipelines, etc.
2. Persistent unique identifiers such as DOIs, RRIDs and ORCID.
3. Licenses, to ensure that your work is adequately protected, even as open and FAIR practices allow you to maximize citations.
I left this course with a deeper appreciation of the different elements that constitute open science and how they can together increase the value of academic science publishing and communication.
5. “Imagine what you could achieve if you were 10% more brave”
FSCI 2019 was a wonderful way to make new friends from all over the world who were all deeply passionate about scholarly communication. Apart from engaging conversations with librarians, graduate students and researchers about rethinking the research publication pipeline and implemementing FAIR principles at the institutional level in STEM, I was also able to get a glimpse into the vast worlds of STS scholars and reproducibility practices in the humanities. To tie up all these themes, Juan Pablo Alperin from the ScholComm lab in his keyote talk on the last day described the results of his work that suggest that while scientists care about and understant the value of open science, they don’t believe other people in their field do and that this is the major limiting factor in widespread acceptance of open access ideas. While sobering, this conclusion motivates all the work that remains to be done in the field of scholarly communication. But it also sets the stage for more productive FSCI’s in the future!
Reflections by other FSCI2019 attendees
FSCI 2019 attendees spanned many different disciplines, and this, combined with the variety of courses meant that everybody took home something unique at the end of the 5 days. Here is a short list of the impressions of some other FSCI attendees:
Alice Fleerackers: https://www.scholcommlab.ca/2019/08/14/fsci2019/
Sara Lafia: https://www.force11.org/blog/scholarly-communication-and-geographic-information-first-impressions-fsci