09/21/2022 Journal Entry

This week was the first week of the Cyverse learning course. For the first lecture, we mostly discussed open science and why it is important. This included discussing the six pillars of open science, namely, Open Acess Publications, Open Data, Open Education Resources, Open Methodology, Open Peer Review, and Open Source Software. We spent some time discussing each of these pillars and which ones may be most important. One of the things that I really took away from our discussion was that even though there has been a movement for more open science, complete open science is really hard to obtain. For example, looking at the Open Acess Pillar, some of the most important publications are usually published in the journal of Science or Nature. However, it cost 10,000 dollars to make these publications open for these journals. People that aren't as fortunate to have access to these journals won't be able to learn about these discoveries or methodologies. I thought it was also important to note that open science may not always be the right solution. For example, the indigenous tribes may not want their data to be shared.

Going into the future, I definitely want to apply more open science practices in my research. For the publications that I have been part of, we were good about sharing where we got the data from and our methodology. However, I wasn't aware at the time that sharing your code is also important for open science. This is something I will do in the future. One thing that did cross my mind was how I might apply open science in my career after graduating. If I work for the military or even private industry, open science may be hard to do as my employers may not want to share out research.