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
- Cited 169
- Views 24,997
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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.
Article and author information
Author details
Reviewing Editor
- Peter Rodgers, eLife, United Kingdom
Publication history
- Received: April 8, 2016
- Accepted: July 4, 2016
- Accepted Manuscript published: July 7, 2016 (version 1)
- Version of Record published: July 29, 2016 (version 2)
Copyright
© 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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- 24,997
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- 4,285
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- 169
- Citations
Article citation count generated by polling the highest count across the following sources: Crossref, Scopus, PubMed Central.
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Further reading
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Researchers can benefit from making their research findings freely available online.
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- Biochemistry and Chemical Biology
Research careers are typically envisioned as a single path in which researchers start being one of a large number of researchers working under the guidance of one or more experienced scientists and, if they are successful, end with the individual leading their own research group and training future generations of scientists. Here we study the author contribution statements of published research papers in order to explore possible biases and disparities in career trajectories in science. We used Bayesian networks to train a prediction model based on a dataset of 70,694 publications from PLoS journals, which included 347,136 distinct authors and their associated contribution statements. This model was used to predict the contributions of 222,925 authors in 6,236,239 publications, and to apply a robust archetypal analysis to profile scientists across four career stages: junior, early-career, mid-career and late-career. All three of the archetypes we found - leader, specialized, and supporting - were encountered for early-career and mid-career researchers. Junior researchers displayed only two archetypes (specialized, and supporting), as did late-career researchers (leader and supporting). Scientists assigned to the leader and specialized archetypes tended to have longer careers than those assigned to the supporting archetype. We also observed consistent gender bias at all stages: the majority of male scientists belonged to the leader archetype, while the larger proportion of women belonged to the specialized archetype, especially for early-career and mid-career researchers.
