Stefan Skupien, coordinator  for Open Science of the Berlin University Alliance, discusses the value of Open Science and accessibility of scientific products both to academic and non-academic actors. During the interview he explains what Open Science is and how it could be used by new doctoral researchers while working on their thesis.

Highlights

„Science as knowledge and knowledge of society should be open to society, and everyone should be able to use it“

„(…) it’s just pragmatic to share research results to others, because then they can use it and makes it to get better science“

Stefan Skupien, coordinator for Open Science of the Berlin University Alliance

Transcript

Welcome to the podcast. I would love to have you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about what you do.

Thank you. Thank you for the opportunity. I am Stephan Skupien. I am the scientific coordinator for Open Science of the Berlin University Alliance, and I work at the Center for Open and Responsible Research that is part of the Berlin University Alliance. As you perhaps know, the Berlin University Alliance is a new project of an alliance that’s constituted of the Freie University, Humboldt University, TechUniversity and our University Medicine Hospital Charité. And I am responsible for the topic Open Science, working closely together with colleagues who work on research integrity on good scientific practice. And we developed a cluster of activities that I will be happy to speak about yes.

So, my first question for you is what is open science? What maybe I’m sure a lot of most of our listeners have heard of open science before, but you could maybe give us a brief overview so that we’re all on the same page. What do you mean by open science?

We mean by open science, basically a movement of researchers and others who want to let me start over. Okay. So basically, by open science, we mean a movement that emphasizes the value of accessibility of scientific products. Mostly scientific products that are financed by public funds. So, there are several arguments for open science. There was one very interesting study done about 10 years ago and the authors tried to cluster different approaches to open science calling it schools of thoughts about open science. And one would for example, be a pragmatic school. What you find maybe in some fields of research and climate science or in geological science or in computer science is that it’s just pragmatic to share research results to others, because then they can use it and makes it to get better science. Another one would be a democratic argument is that. Science as knowledge and knowledge of society should be open to society, and everyone should be able to use it. You also have the moral argument, or the ethical argument is to say that you’re obliged to open your research because it’s funded by us as scientists.

So, there are different schools out there with how you can justify open science. It’s also an international movement. It’s carried on by several actors especially among research funders lately. But also, the UNESCO recommendations on open science are a document of reference, and they include very several practices by open science, we try to cover the whole research cycle from the input of ideas to the output of research results. And we try to understand open science also as a bundle of principles and the principle that we emphasize in our mission statement are inclusion and cooperation as one set of principles. Then transparency, re-usability, accessibility. And validation or so, yes, those are like, try to always bring forwards and strengthen through our activities. And they cover the whole research cycle, and they also affect a lot of other aspects of the research community.

Thank you. Excellent. If I am a doctoral student and I’m thinking about open science or not open science, what would you say the benefit is of doing open science versus maybe the alternative where I’m not doing open science why should this be interesting to me or why should I get excited about it?

That’s a very good question. So, I see two major benefits. The one is it improves your own science your own scientific work. And the other one, it helps you to be in contact with the scientific community, but also with any other user outside of the scientific community. I am myself a social scientist by training. But now in my work, I have come in contact with a lot of different disciplines and some disciplines, for example it’s very common that you being given a problem or puzzle by someone or by your supervisor or study. And they say could you just replicate the study just to see whether it works or how does it work?

So, you would want to have access to protocols. You would have wanted access to the data so that you can replicate it. And here we come to the inner academic aspect of open science is that more to at least accessibility to good research results or to good documented research result helps you to improve science. And in general, because it improves the quality of science there have been some crisis and some disciplines replication crisis and psychology, but also some of our life science experts say that if there would be more openness, we would save a lot of time to develop medications. For a and we could plan our studies better.

So, it, and the other thing is that many of the researchers want by themselves to solve also problems that are posed by society, like we call it grand challenges and individual university alliance where you have to work together with non-academic actors. And if you have a good documented and accessible research results, be it like publications or data, then you can share it easily with other actors like NGOs, civil society, administration, industry, and others to solve societal problems.

Yes, those are the two major aspects I see are the benefits. And of course, you learn a lot, you take a lot of skills that you can apply in other fields as well.

It’s really an interesting point. You said, skills you can take in other fields. It sounds doctoral researchers who are involved in open science are learning how to communicate with people that are not just in science, but also outside of science. Did I understand that correctly?

It can be one aspect of so that’s where the overlap often science comes with science communication. But some of the for example, a lot of people talk about research data at the moment, and it’s very tedious work to prepare. And it’s how you produce in physics you produce software that is specifically designed for your own research question. And then maybe you leave the department because you have a job, and you don’t work on your thesis any longer. If you document the software level and you leave it at your institute where you did your PhD, then someone else can actually work well with it. And that is at the moment that documentation and where to keep it is still not embedded, but of course it’s a lot of work. And takes more time to actually have good quality documentation of research results. But it can, it’s of course still linked to the benefits that I talked about earlier.

So, my next question is say that I really am interested in working. Openly having this open science approach in my doctoral thesis and my P. I. is sceptical. What are some of the challenges that I might face there? How might I navigate that? That discussion with my PR with my supervisor to get them on board and more excited, especially maybe a generation of supervisors who haven’t had that much experience with open science.

Then that’s also a very good question. And I can recommend that is to look into the practices of your research culture and see if you meet others at conferences and who and find. Allies who already have good practice in in open science practices documenting research data or publishing preprints in fields where preprints are not yet. That often you used like in the humanities, for example so you could find examples and make an argument that it’s already been used, and it’s led to these benefits and we should use it as well. Of course, very often the supervisor is also the one who has an overview of the field and who knows that you have to work.

On this topic now to get to the next step. And it’s very often a time question. But I guess there are a lot of arguments also within research cultures or disciplines that you could use to talk to your supervisor about what you could to, for example, publish a preprint or pre-register a study in a field where it hasn’t been done before. For example, the German Association for Psychology they have an open science working group and they try to set standards for the whole field. That’s psychology, but you will also find similar working groups in other fields. Where it’s not common to publish preprints or pre-register or to put your metadata in a very high qualified documentation somewhere. But yeah, that’s what would be my advice.

Thank you. So, at the beginning, you mentioned a little bit about what the Berlin University Alliance does and what you do to support open science. And I want to come back to that. And just hear a little bit more about maybe what does the Berlin University align to? What do you specifically do to support researchers and maybe to support doctoral researchers in the open science process?

The Berlin University Alliance was founded by the four institutions that I mentioned, and all of these four institutions already have high levels of expertise and research integrity questions and good scientific practice and providing open access infrastructures, for example, for publications. And we build on these and the idea of the Berlin University Alliance is to create a, like a kind of a common ground where we can exchange, where we can use synergies of our approaches and where we could add. If there’s a complimentary issue at Freie University and at Humboldt University, you could meet, for example, and could use the resources of the other partner. Specifically, we support trainings you will find on our website, you will find each, for each semester, you will find a list of courses that we collect from all partners and where we make sure that we also say that it’s open to others. Where, for example, if you want to have a general introduction into research data management. You could go to Freie University if at your institution at Humboldt University, there’s nothing available at the moment. So, this is one opportunity, for example, but there are also other courses on open science practices. And we also established a master’s course, which could also be interesting for PhD students if you are in need of credits or general overview about how science works. And there we talk a lot about research integrity and open science, and we try to embed it in coursework for students. So training is one very important thing.

Then the other one is where you could benefit is in our networking activities. We have regular meetings where we present case studies of open science and research integrity. We can also invite you to apply for our fellowship program that is for students and also doctoral students who are interested in either inviting guests. Or going out to some institutions where some open science practice is very frequently used and you want to learn from it. So that’s this mobility team you can use as, and we provide information about open science in Berlin monitoring it to some extent, the Berlin science survey will give you also a good set of arguments for discussing open science in your institute or with your supervisor by providing arguments, for example, about the value of open science seen by the scientific community in general, or where you where it’s just a need to improve the support system for open science lately. And that I would say in this podcast as well, if you’re interested in, and if your contract, It’s long enough we established an ambassador program, which is also open to doctoral students and there you will get training, you will get a small fund for organizing events yourself, and you can showcase your own work in open science and you will be able to network with colleagues from different disciplines across the Alliance and across Berlin.

That’s also open to doctoral students. We will send out the next call in March next or next year, so 2025. And you are invited to become open science ambassadors for your faculty. But you can also contact us already now if you want to contribute to the activities of the ambassadors that will work during the next year at doing this year 2024-25.

Was that okay? Do you want to know more about it, Amanda? Should I get more of what we do?

Yeah, that’s perfect. Yeah, that would be wonderful.

I was talking that there’s already a lot of expertise within the universities, for example the technical university has a very strong emphasis on transdisciplinarity that including non-academic actors in the formulation of research question and into the research. And they provide some services to organize such research that you can also access and they have a team, a dedicated team that is supported by the Berlin University Alliance, but works in and also at Technical University which you can use to open your research and also as a doctoral student. And we have a funded project in the digital humanities, where we could link you to, to the researchers either in engineering or digital humanities, where you could find also inspiration, new methods. Also, there is for, also for doctoral students the Crest Center for responsible research at Charité. They are organizing an annual summer school and open science at the Oxford-Berlin summer school, which you can also apply for and attend, where you will be given insight into a lot of specific technical questions, but also in overall general discussions.

What do you think? So, if I we’re thinking about whether or not I want to do open science. I have all these cool resources. I can reach out and maybe learn a little bit more about it, get involved with it. But maybe I’m still a little bit uncertain. What do you think if, say I’m a doctoral student today how does getting involved in open science help me in my research career? So, a lot of the benefits we talked about, or you talked about so far are about, for science, for society. What about if I say, okay, I really want to be successful. I want to stay in science, or maybe I want to go into industry, but I want to, stay in research. What is the benefit of getting involved in open science for me as an individual right now when I think about my future.

I said earlier that Open Science is a movement that’s carried by a very different set of actors, like individuals, institutions, and there you will find first examples of how far you can get if you apply open science principles. If you learn certain techniques that would allow the transparency and reusability and validation of your research results, which makes your own research better, there are within the practices of publishing preprints or publishing diamond open access, which means that there’s no barrier to at all that you don’t have to pay. And the reader doesn’t have to pay. That means diamond open access also increases your reach. We could also say that publishing open access at all increases your citation, which then again increases the response to your research. And you get in contact with new, maybe interesting research questions. So content wise, it improves the thing that you want to do the thing that you want to study and the work around it. And you, as I said earlier, you learn a whole lot of new skills. And Open Science is also driven by the technical advance. The whole accessibility is fostered by the digitalization of research.

And it’s maybe you could understand Open Science as an adaptation process to these new digital tools that are part of our research anyway and making it easier to access large data sets. You learn a lot of skills about programming, for example, in some disciplines, or you learn skill that you can then later transfer to others to other areas in your career, also apply to other methods and things just because open science is very much driven by the new tech, the tools available.

Thirdly, there are funders at the moment major funders also who expect you, if you write a grant proposal to say something about your open science practice. And the better you can explain your open science practice, going beyond okay, I publish open access because I have access to the financial funds of my university library gives you thumbs up or gives you an advantage to others. We don’t yet apply open science principle as profoundly as you would do after your PhD. If there are changes not so much in Germany, but in other international funders like the EU, that they really look at the open science section that you have to fill in and grant proposals. And it’s not just a nice to have, but it’s also giving you points in the overall Judgment of your grand proposal.

So, it’s also giving you skills and experience to showcase in grand proposals and in future research. Additionally, within this movement, there are several initiatives taking up in trying to think about how we can change or how we can alter the whole evaluation system of individual researchers trying to get away from publications and high citation impact. To more, to other diverse products. And then it could be that in the future, that some universities that are interesting for you that are a good spot to, to be because you would learn, you could apply because they have an open science policy, and they are very visible in the open science community.

You could say that I already did that, this and this with my own research. So, I’m very, keen to also expand my open science knowledge. You could also apply with more reasons to this place on the ground that you share the values of open science, the same universities and funders and public administration actors are thinking about how to get away from the focus on publication would also mean that you’re free to present other results.

As I said earlier, tedious work is necessary to prepare the documentation of research data. And that work is still not as much recognized as publishing an article or doing what they in life sciences say it’s very much needed is why is why are so, few people doing public why let me start over. As in the life sciences, that’s a big issue to publish negative results meaning that you follow the hypothesis, but it didn’t come out as you expected. And that itself is also a result for the overall scientific knowledge generation, but it’s not being incentivized to publish negative results because that’s okay, it didn’t work.

But if we shift away from the positive publication output would focus on Oxford journals or nature journals hit to other products of science, including negative result publications or taking care of repositories or being editors in diamond open access journals. In smaller settings will allow you to present yourself in a more diverse way than usually your career is being portrayed at the moment. And that again could lead to better research quality all over that if we have these very negative impacts. Be they intended on unattended to publish as much as possible. And then you start publishing in yeah in ways that are not conducive for the whole enterprise of producing scientific knowledge, like salami tactics or others actors for maybe not equipped science systems, let’s say in in countries such as Ghana or Ivory coast and others where they don’t have the funds to publish in Oxford journals open access for 3000 euros you could help to generate infrastructures that they could use that are equally recognized and your field with diamond open access, so that they don’t have to have another barrier. Previously, they couldn’t read the research because it was too expensive to buy subscriptions. And now it’s a barrier to publish research and to be visible in the system by having to pay for gold open access, for example. So, your work and your investment in your individual investment in open science. Values and practices also help others and that again comes back to you as a positive effect. I assume.

Thank you. So, I have I have a question. So, the second to last question would be what haven’t I asked you? So, is there something that you really want to share with the listeners of our podcast that you think they need to know, maybe about, about your work or about open science in general, about the Berlin University Alliance? What haven’t I asked you that you think we should hear?

At the moment I could use this spot to encourage you to just reach out either to us or to any of our colleagues at Berlin University Alliance, because many of the topics can relate to open science and research integrity. I mentioned the transdisciplinary approach at technical universities but also, we are in close contact with our colleagues from the international offices who having who are organizing a networking and trainings also for organizing research with researchers from less advantaged science systems and they also touch on the topic of open science. So, I would like to encourage you to just reach out if you have a question and use the Berlin science survey as an in your thinking about open science. You can also join several networks in Berlin. We have a map on our website. We’re trying to map the open science activities so that you can just join them.

Or if you have, if you know of a working group on open science in your research culture specific or in the disciplinary groups just reach out to them because very often they can give you a very specific information about how to deal with Open science or publishing your data or reusing data or doing replication studies I assume this is something that you will learn at least doing your doctoral studies anyway, but we also try to. Bring it into teaching much further even bachelor or master studies. So, if you want to teach open science, please also reach out to us in your courses, we can think about providing content or think about providing some sort of material either, either using what’s already out there, there’s an open science online master’s course. I hope I say it right. But and that can be used as a resource also for your teaching and that will bring you again into very fruitful discussions with students about the value and the benefits of open science. Otherwise no, I don’t think I, we forgot any major question.

So, I have one more question and maybe you can decide if you have an answer, it’s great if you don’t. We usually ask people in the podcast; we like to ask people who’ve done a PhD or done a doctorate. If you could go back to the beginning of your doctoral studies, knowing what you know now, maybe about open science or just in general, your experience in the work that you’re doing now what advice would you give yourself if you could go back to the beginning of your, meet yourself at the first day of your research? What would you tell yourself and what guidance would you give yourself for the doctoral process?

In general, or focused on open science?

You can decide.

I guess I would also think about applying open science principles more constantly and or at all publishing my research data, which was text which was copied from libraries in Ghana. And I could have transcribed the text better and shared it with my Ghanaian colleagues. So, sharing with the research partner would be like one, one thing I would advise myself.

The other more general thing is that writing consistently or writing frequently and using like different methods that are available since already a long time. For example, experimenting with what we call in German Zettelkasten. It’s a method to structure knowledge in a way that it can be reused at the end. And then also instead of writing only like in the second half of the PhD. So, those are two things I would advise myself.

And the third one is I had the privilege I was very lucky to be in a graduate school that was interdisciplinary, and I learned a lot from my colleagues. From the philosophy side, from the legal from the law side and from the historical side. And that was very fruitful for my own thinking. So, if you’re not in an interdisciplinary setting, which I doubt because I get the many interdisciplinary credits called at the moment. Just yeah, look out for other disciplines and follow their discussions. Even if you’re interested in natural sciences or in life sciences, because that is always a broadening of the horizon that can eventually lead you to new ideas transfer of metaphors of concepts of theories to your own thinking. And if I advise myself on the first day of the of starting the PhD, it’s yeah, use this source of the knowledge of the other disciplines by default.

Thank you very much. Thanks so much for sharing that with us. And also, for the information on open science. And we will link to many of the things that you mentioned in the podcast website. So, if you are looking at this on the website, you can find all the links below and please feel free to reach out if you have any other questions about, about open science at the Berlin University Alliance. So, thank you so much.

Thank you for having me.

This interview was conducted by our trainer and co-host of the podcast, Amanda Wichert