How open science helps researchers succeed
- National Autonomous University of Mexico, Mexico
- National Institutes of Health, United States
- University of California, Davis, United States
- Laura and John Arnold Foundation, United States
- BioMed Central, United Kingdom
- CrossRef, United Kingdom
- University of Texas at Austin, United States
- Center for Open Science, United States
- University of California, Berkeley, United States
- Mozilla Foundation, United States
- Gesmer Updegrove LLP, United States
- Washington State University, United States
Abstract
Open access, open data, open source, and other open scholarship practices are growing in popularity and necessity. However, widespread adoption of these practices has not yet been achieved. One reason is that researchers are uncertain about how sharing their work will affect their careers. We review literature demonstrating that open research is associated with increases in citations, media attention, potential collaborators, job opportunities, and funding opportunities. These findings are evidence that open research practices bring significant benefits to researchers relative to more traditional closed practices.
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© 2016, McKiernan et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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How open science helps researchers succeed
eLife 5:e16800.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.16800
Further reading
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Researchers can benefit from making their research findings freely available online.
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Yerba mate (YM, Ilex paraguariensis) is an economically important crop marketed for the elaboration of mate, the third-most widely consumed caffeine-containing infusion worldwide. Here, we report the first genome assembly of this species, which has a total length of 1.06 Gb and contains 53,390 protein-coding genes. Comparative analyses revealed that the large YM genome size is partly due to a whole-genome duplication (Ip-α) during the early evolutionary history of Ilex, in addition to the hexaploidization event (γ) shared by core eudicots. Characterization of the genome allowed us to clone the genes encoding methyltransferase enzymes that catalyse multiple reactions required for caffeine production. To our surprise, this species has converged upon a different biochemical pathway compared to that of coffee and tea. In order to gain insight into the structural basis for the convergent enzyme activities, we obtained a crystal structure for the terminal enzyme in the pathway that forms caffeine. The structure reveals that convergent solutions have evolved for substrate positioning because different amino acid residues facilitate a different substrate orientation such that efficient methylation occurs in the independently evolved enzymes in YM and coffee. While our results show phylogenomic constraint limits the genes coopted for convergence of caffeine biosynthesis, the X-ray diffraction data suggest structural constraints are minimal for the convergent evolution of individual reactions.
