According to Professor Ben Marwick, many people mistakenly think that open access is a special type of journal where you have to pay to publish your article. But open access in general is making an article free in any way so that everyone can read it. Why is open access needed? Firstly, to contribute knowledge and information to the social community, secondly, to improve the "coverage" of the research article.
Professor Ben Marwick illustrates the publishing process with a flowchart. In the first stage, the researcher completes his research, then sends the manuscript to the publisher for peer-review. The author then makes necessary revisions and resubmits; after two or three reviews, the editor assesses the article’s publishability. While the manuscript is still in word file format, the author can still make changes until the final version reaches the editor. After that, the publisher converts it to PDF and the author cannot edit it anymore. So while the author has the final word version, he can upload it to the preeprint repository website. This is a free site where anyone can access and download your article.
Unlike a regular article, after it has been published in a journal, users have to pay to download it. Libraries at universities often pay for subscriptions to a certain journal so that lecturers and researchers in the school can download articles and data. However, many schools do not have enough funding for this. Therefore, if researchers want to publish their article in a journal, but still want as many people to read it as possible, preeprint is a solution.
The speaker is Prof. Ben Marwick (University of Washington, Seattle, USA). In recent times, the University of Social Sciences and Humanities has regularly invited international scholars to present, talk and share knowledge and scientific information on many topics for young staff.
Professor Ben Marwick also introduced the Social Archive Preprint search service, which is very suitable for the social sciences. Anyone in the social sciences can post to this archive. This open archive is trustworthy, as the website must provide you with a digital object identifier, making it easier for others to cite your article, making it more visible. Second, it provides statistics on the traffic to your article.
Discussing the public benefits of open access, Professor Ben Marwick said that researchers always want to contribute to society and the community. Harvard University was one of the first schools to encourage its scholars to post articles for free, and they built an open access repository in 2008. They also let readers comment on articles and have received thousands of comments expressing their reasons for wanting to download the articles. In addition, open access also brings very clear economic benefits to universities and researchers.
Regarding the personal benefits of open access, the speaker asked: how do you get more citations for your articles, mainstream journals or open access? In a study of more than 100 articles, it was found that open access articles were 25-500% more likely to be cited than mainstream articles. Another statistic shows that open access articles in economics were 3 times more likely to be cited, and the same was true for social sciences and humanities articles.
“So if you’re doing research in a fast-moving field, you need to post it to an open-access source so people can see your results right away. In addition, these websites encourage you to share the link to the article on Facebook, Twitter, or a related article on Wikipedia. There are many scholars who debate their articles on Twitter. So we need to acknowledge the importance of social media and other informal sources,” said Professor Ben Marwick.
The speaker's advice for young researchers: if you have published an article in a journal, you should also post the final draft on an open access site, to expand its coverage. Second, if you find a research paper on Google Scholar and it also appears on an open access site, you should learn more. Third, you can share the benefits of open access with your colleagues at the university, to increase the "coverage" of your research. Universities often have a committee in charge of selecting reputable open access sites to share with their scholars and researchers.
Talking about open data, the speaker said that sharing data is to promote scientific progress in general. By sharing data with others, people can combine knowledge from many fields to enrich their research.
Open data can be any data that scientists share with each other: results of measurements, observations; results from a computer model, experimental experiments; not only files, text, sounds but also images… We have open data repositories online that users can access for free, such as Switzerland's zenodo.org, the Open Science Framework data repository…
In reality, not everyone wants to share data. According to various studies, the probability of an author agreeing to share data with another researcher via email ranges from 0-66%; while the ideal should be 100%. So open data repositories will be the solution. On a personal level, articles with shared open data also get more citations. In addition, more and more international journals require authors to share data in public repositories before accepting them for publication. Many universities also encourage data sharing among scientists and advocate for open data policies at their universities.
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Prof. Dr. Pham Quang Minh (Rector of the University of Social Sciences and Humanities) introduced the speaker and the presentation content: "Professor Ben Marwick comes from the University of Washington, Seattle (USA). He received his PhD in Anthropology in 2008 from the Australian National University. His doctoral thesis was on Thai Anthropology and he is interested in Vietnamese Anthropology, development and history. His topic reflects the desire to improve international publication activities and enhance the quality of international articles of the University. It focuses on young lecturers - the future of the country's academics. I appreciate the presence of the Professor, his voice shows that this is not only a Vietnamese issue but an international issue, a transnational issue. Because if they want to become a research university, universities must pay attention to transparency and openness. Regarding the issues of open data, open access, open source code, Prof. Marwick has written and presented many times on these contents. This The important thing is how to apply these questions and methods to our own research and teaching work. |
Author:Thanh Ha
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