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In the top 10 scientific breakthroughs of 2017 published by the American journal Science on December 21, 2017, the "Rise of biological preprint communication" marked by bioRxiv was among them, which is considered to be a "major cultural change in academic communication". Preprints have become one of the main forms of academic communication. At the same time, open science is developing into a new scientific paradigm that changes scientific innovation and academic exchanges. Researchers with foresight and consciousness of science sharing have become the main promoters of the rise and development of open science. We interviewed Hu Chuanpeng from the Neuroimaging Center of the University of Mainz in Germany to learn about his views on preprinting and open access as a front-line researcher and pioneer of open science. Chuanpeng Hu, Ph.D. in Psychology from Tsinghua University, is now a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Neuroimaging at the University of Mainz in Germany. The 22nd Graduate Academic Talent Award of Tsinghua University, is one of the main leaders of 52brain.com, the largest Chinese brain science forum. As a researcher, Hu Chuanpeng has always been very enthusiastic about and promotes open science. Ambassador of Center for Open Science, he is the initiator of Open ScienceClub on wechat, Open Science on wechat (323 members) and the column "Open ScienceClub" on Zhihu. Here is the full transcript of the interview: 1. When did you know about the communication mode of preprint? What do you think of the rise of preprints? I learned about preprints around 2014 or earlier, first arxiv, then biorxiv. I think the rise of preprint is the Internet and information technology to "accelerate" or help research. In the information age, the sharing of scientific research results is increasingly relying on the Internet, including formal journals have electronic versions or even full-electronic versions. Therefore, it is an inevitable product of this trend that researchers share their results with their peers as soon as possible. The preprint is to normalize this rapid sharing.
2. What is your experience with the preprint platform? I have used biorxiv, Chinaxiv and psyrxiv. Among them, Chinaxiv and psyrxiv are used more, because they are more relevant to my own research background.
3. Why did you choose Chinaxiv to publish and update the manuscript? Because I hope that more colleagues can read our manuscript, so as to have more opportunities to get feedback from peers. It's also a good record for me to be able to see the changes from one version to the next. Being able to inform peers of this change also provides more and more complete information about the article for the field as a whole.
4. What impact do you think Chinaxiv has on researchers? The advantage is that you can quickly see the latest work of your peers, which is very good for keeping track of the progress in your field. Of course, this also needs more peers to join in, so that the ecology is more perfect, in order to achieve better results. However, preprint may also bring negative consequences. For example, many journals used to review manuscripts double-blind, in order to avoid the reviewer due to various reasons caused by the non-objective. However, after the preprint version appears, if the author puts his/her submitted article on chinaxiv, but the original journal still gives the article to the reviewer without the author and unit information, then the double-blind practice of the journal will be effectively invalid and become single blind. This may leave room for direct communication between reviewers and authors independent of the newsroom and may undermine the principle of neutrality. One solution is to make the entire review public, meaning the journal makes the reviewer information and review process public (elife, nat. comm.,frontiers, etc.). In this way, all the processes are under the "sunshine", which may avoid the practice of openly violating the review ethics.
5. How do you evaluate Chinaxiv compared with other preprints? What are the advantages and disadvantages of Chinaxiv? What needs to be improved in Chinaxiv? Chiaxiv has its own flavor. The advantage is that the Chinese preprint is rich, the subject is more complete. However, compared with the English-language preprint platform, the biggest problem with Chinaxiv is that it is not included in google scholar, which means that the preprint placed on Chinaxiv is difficult for international counterparts to find. If you can solve this problem, it will greatly benefit the internationalization of Chinaxiv. In addition, the process for uploading a new version of Chinaxiv is exactly the same as for submitting a paper for the first time (at least when I tried it before), which has caused some problems for authors. In addition, when submitting a paper, it will be more convenient if you can specify which authors are corresponding authors who have the authority to modify the information related to the paper, because only the submitter has the authority to modify now. If this submitter cannot modify the paper for some reason, then the whole paper cannot be modified and updated.
6. As a researcher, what do you think about preprint communication and open sharing among researchers? Personally, I think this is a very good trend. As mentioned above, if we can do a good job on the platform of preprint, make full use of our strengths and avoid our weaknesses, we may greatly shorten the communication cycle of scientific achievements and accelerate the process of scientific progress. Of course, it remains to be seen how the preprint papers will be recognized at a time when the reward system for research achievements is also changing.
7. What is your reason and vision for promoting open science? The reason why I promote open science is that I believe that transparency and openness in the research process will be more conducive to the development of science, the rational allocation of research resources, and the credibility of research papers than traditional "non-open" research methods. Due to the "repeatability crisis" caused by various reasons, the credibility of scientific papers has become extremely poor, especially in social sciences and biomedicine, most of the conclusions can not be trusted, need to be reexamined. Why don't we do rigorous, solid, well-tested research in the first place, instead of publishing false positives so that later researchers have to re-evaluate them? This leads to a serious waste of time, human and financial resources. My vision: If all basic research is designed to be tested, carried out transparently and objectively, our knowledge of the world will accumulate at a faster rate.
8. At present, open access and open science activities are emerging all over the world. What opportunities and challenges do you think this will bring to researchers? This trend towards open science, including open access, is inevitable and logical. Because all basic research around the world is for the good of mankind, whether it is funded by governments or privately. The product of basic research is not the private property of a scientist, let alone a publisher, but a public good supported by taxpayers' money (after government distribution). Of course, we need to encourage scientists and reward them for their outstanding contributions, but not by hiding the results of basic research, but in other ways. The results of basic research should be made available to other scientists around the world as soon as possible to build on. I think the Allen Institute is a great example: all of their work is available directly on their website, and some of the basis of their work is available on their website before publication. I think this is what basic research should look like. On the contrary, the current model of scientific publication, which is sold by large corporations, in effect transfers taxpayers' money to the private sector. In general, this private enterprise (including Elsiver, Nature-Springer, etc.) only needs to do the simplest editing work, and the production of the entire scientific paper is carried out by the researchers: from the completion of the research to the writing of the paper, to the review and revision of the paper, are all done by the scientists. They do this with taxpayer money, but when they write an academic paper, they hand over the copyright to the publisher, who then sells the rights to the paper to libraries (which are then bought with taxpayer money). If you really look at the process, scientists are supported by tax payers and make money for private publishers at no extra charge. The only benefit scientists gain is a platform to publish and exchange academic results, but the advent of open access means that this can be accomplished without transferring large amounts of taxpayer money into the private purse. Another point: Ordinary taxpayers cannot read papers sold to libraries by publishers, even if they support their creation. The model is absurd. The good news is that more and more scientists are waking up to these problems and starting to resist some publishers, as well as more and more open access journals. Of course, we have to admit that once these publishers form an interest group, they are strong at the moment and will find a way to continue making money, but I believe they will fade away over time. The development of open science as a whole, including open access papers, has helped to create a more decentralised, flatter scientific community where ordinary researchers have access to resources. For example, open data means that teams outside of data collection can analyze and interpret the data, allowing them to mine the data for meaning more fully than ever before. This flat structure of the scientific community may be more conducive to scientific discovery, because science itself requires the spirit of equality, criticism and doubt, and at the same time, science should be conducted on the basis of predecessors. Open science and the flat structure of scientific community it brings are very consistent with the spirit of science. For young researchers, it also means more abundant resources available to do good research at relatively low cost. Of course, it's very challenging to actually do research using the open science approach. The main reason is that open science has only emerged in the last few years, and most researchers do not have any training in this area, such as how to pre-register an experiment, how to organize their data for publication, how to organize their data analysis code and so on. The cost of adopting these practices at this stage is obvious: you have to spend a lot of time exploring. However, the return on these costs is not very obvious. It is possible that your published data may not be enough to get your paper published in a journal with a higher impact factor. It is possible that you may report all the results completely (rather than selectively reporting beautiful results) but make the reviewers think your experiment is not beautiful, etc. Given these challenges, it is understandable that many researchers, especially young ones, are hesitant to adopt an open science approach to research. But because of the benefits of open science, many Senior researchers (such as some professors) also publicly support it, and there are communities on social media to discuss it. If you decide to take an open science approach to research, young researchers can stay active in these communities and let people know what you've done and your contributions to science. That way, even if you don't publish a lot of papers, people may already know what you're doing and how well you're doing it, which could be good for your own career. |
