As well as the recording above, please see this post for webinar speakers’ key takeaways and answers to attendee questions. Slides can be found here.

PhD students take on openness and academic culture

We are pleased to announce the final OASPA webinar of 2019, in which we are inviting a number of speakers to consider contemporary debates in open research and open access publishing

Date: Tuesday 17th December 2019

Time: 3.00 pm – 4.15 pm GMT (other timezones: 7.00 am Pacific Time, 9.00 am Central Time, 10.00 am Eastern Time, 12.00 pm Brasilia Time, 4.00 pm Central European Time, 4.00 pm West Africa Time, 5.00 pm South Africa Standard Time, 8.30 pm India Standard Time)

The OASPA Webinar Series is delighted to focus its final webinar of 2019 on the current realities of academic culture from the perspective of the PhD student. The hypercompetitive grant, tenure and evaluation system that rewards researchers on the basis of a very limited set of outputs directly impacts the way research is practised, communicated and published. What is the impact of this culture on those right at the start of their career? What is their perspective on our academic culture, and how we share and publish scholarly knowledge and what role do they see for openness and open access?

We are delighted to hear from three PhD students – Gareth O’Neill on the PhD perspective on academic culture, and Open Access policies such as Plan S, Noémie Aubert Bonn on Research Integrity and Open Science, and Nadia Soliman on Leadership in Academia, and how this relates to publishing.

The panellists will each speak for 15 minutes, followed by a short group panel discussion and we will then open it up to questions from the audience.

Panelist biographies

Gareth O’Neill (@gtoneill)

Gareth O’Neill is a doctoral candidate in theoretical linguistics at Leiden University and a consultant on Open Science for the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). He has represented researchers in the Netherlands and across Europe for many years and is former president of the European Council of Doctoral Candidates and Junior Researchers (Eurodoc). Gareth is an ambassador for the Open Access policy initiative Plan S under cOAlition S, an expert on Open Science for the Dutch government and European Commission, and a member of the H2020 Advisory Group on Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA).

Noémie Aubert Bonn (@naubertbonn)

Noémie Aubert Bonn is a PhD student who does research on research. Originally from Québec (Canada) where she studied cognitive neurosciences, Noémie rapidly became concerned about core aspects of research, in particular, publication ethics and research integrity. Leaving her field aside, she decided to see what can be done to make science better. From an internship at Cochrane, a masters of bioethics, and a lot of house (and country) moving, Noémie is now finishing her PhD in Hasselt University (Belgium) in which she studied the attribution of success in science and the way in which the reward mechanisms in place affect research practices and research integrity. You can find more information at https://re-sinc.wixsite.com/ project or on her orcid 0000-0003-0252-2331.

Nadia Soliman (@Nadia_Soliman_)

With a BSc (Hons) Pharmacology, Nadia has returned to academia having served in both the regular and reserve of the British Army for over ten years. Specialising in explosive threat mitigation her service has taken her around the world and she continues to deliver strategy, risk and performance management services. Since returning to academia she has gained an MSc in Drug Discovery Skills and MRes in Cellular and Molecular Biosciences and is in her second year of a PhD at Imperial College London. Her PhD is focused on developing automation technologies to improve the feasibility, efficiency and accuracy of preclinical systematic reviews while addressing neurobiological questions of interest. Specifically, she is currently trialling an application data extraction application within a systematic review (‘Systematic review and meta-analysis of studies in which cannabinoids were tested for antinociceptive effects in animal models of injury-related or pathological persistent pain’), using crowd science. This review will provide empirical evidence to improve the field of pain and cannabis-based medicine animal research, the use of machine assisted technology and how to employ a crowd of scientists from around the world to ensure that research conduct is rigorous, interpretable, open and transparent. She has an interest in sharing her military experiences and knowledge of leadership development to engender a more positive research culture.

Chairs

Catriona MacCallum (@catmacOA) is Director of Open Science at Hindawi. She has 20 years experience in scholarly publishing and 15 years in Open Access Publishing. She has a PhD from Edinburgh University and went into publishing as a professional Editor initially working for Elsevier, where she was Editor of Trends in Ecology & Evolution, before joining the Open-Access publisher PLOS in 2003 to launch PLOS Biology as one of the Senior Editors. She also acted as a Consulting Editor on PLOS ONE, leaving PLOS as Advocacy Director in 2017. She is currently a member of the European Commission’s Open Science Policy Platform and the UKRI Open Access Practitioners Group. She serves on the Advisory Board of the Royal Society (Publishing), and is on the steering committee of the relaunched DORA initiative. She is a founding individual of the I4OC (Initiative for Open Citations) campaign.

Claire Redhead (@OASPA) is Executive Director of OASPA. Her publishing background began back in 2000. Editorial positions in UK publishing houses in the 12 years that followed provided her with valuable opportunities for developing key skills and varied experience in the academic journal and book publishing industry. In 2012 Claire joined the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA), initially responsible for managing membership and communications for the organisation. Claire quickly took the lead to develop and grow OASPA during this time, and was appointed Executive Director of the association in 2016.

Note that previous OASPA webinar details and recordings can be found here.