My talk for the 6th European Phycological Congress (#EPC6 on Twitter). http://www.epc6.org/student-symposium

1. Modern Tools & Rationales
for 21st
Century Research
Ross Mounce (@RMounce)
Natural History Museum, London
European Phycological Congress,
Student Symposium 2015-08-27
XKCD 1179 on ISO 8601
Slides available online: slideshare.net/rossmounce

2. Sharing is caring
If you wish, please do share, tweet, discuss, re-use this talk
I'm a firm believer that research should be open by default,
specifically including conference talks & posters!!!
Previous meetings to have got this wrong include: SVP '14
and ESA '15, as documented in Nature News recently…
http://www.nature.com/news/conference-tweeting-rule-frustrates-ecologists-1.18207
#EPC6
Twitter & other social media are legitimate tools of
great utility in academia. Tweet your talk slides &
you'll get a much wider audience for your talk!

3. Open, online benefits you
I bet more people have read Seth's poster than any other
poster here that hasn't been tweeted

4. Open, online benefits you
Nature Communications
Open (blue) vs Paywalled (orange),
article views per day
Mean: Open
Mean:
Paywalled
DOI: 10.1007/s11192-015-1547-0

5. Open, online benefits you
Piwowar HA, Vision TJ. (2013)
Data reuse and the open data
citation advantage. PeerJ
1:e175
“...open data citation
benefit for this sample to
be 9%”
relative to papers providing
no public data, for gene
expression microarray data
10.7717/peerj.175/fig-2
See also previous work by
Piwowar:
10.1371/journal.pone.0000308

6. Open, online benefits you
Because the software is
open source, online I could
look at it and contribute
suggested improvements
Users can easily
report issues / bugs
& feature requests
Demonstrate that people are
interested in your software

7. Research tools are
rapidly improving
Image credit:
https://innoscholcomm.silk.co/

8. Analysis tools and their communities
These are my favourites, in no particular order.
They are tools AND friendly communities. Important.
/

9. Supp. Data Needs to Die
From the 1990s to 2010s, online supplementary data was used as a way of
dumping data online in an ad hoc manner... It was available *shrugs*
Traditional, journal-hosted supplementary files bury data. Additional files are
bunged online with little or no additional metadata describing them.
Thus typically, SI isn't searchable. That's a huge problem
Data should be FAIR:
Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Re-usable
It should be findable independent of the research article
https://www.force11.org/group/fairgroup

10. Data sharing platforms
https://zenodo.org/http://figshare.com/
http://datadryad.org/
Free-to-use but commercial
Free-to-use,
CERN backed
Not-for-profit
Not-for-profit,
Better curated
Charges to keep sustainable

11. Data Paper Journals
http://www.mdpi.com/journal/data/about

12. Data Standards & Data File Formats
Adhere to existing standards! e.g. 2015-08-27 for dates
xkcd 927 on standards
ISO 8601

13. 'Data paper' journals
http://www.mdpi.com/journal/data/about

14. Intelligent data papers allow databases
to automatically pull-in your data
Many publishers (e.g. Pensoft) intelligently
markup data papers so that the data can be
automatically ingested into appropriate db's
on the day of publication!
Data
data
Biodiversity
Data Journal

15. Those who share data, do better science
Wicherts, J. M., Bakker, M. & Molenaar, D. (2011)
Willingness to share research data is related to the
strength of the evidence and the quality of reporting of
statistical results. PLoS ONE 6, e26828+ URL
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0026828
The authors examined psychological papers for the quality of statistical
reporting & asked the authors of those papers for the full data underlying
the reported results. Generally, those who shared, had more statistically
robust, reproducible results.

16. “Email the author for data” - doesnt work
Wicherts JM, Borsboom D,
Kats J, Molenaar D (2006)
The poor availability of
psychological research
data for reanalysis.
American Psychologist 61:
726–728 link
A well-known problem, which
I myself have also faced
many times!!!
Many legacy journals
unfortunately still pretend
that “email the author” is
still acceptable.

17. Authoring Tools
Microsoft Word is crap.
Publishers have to spend significant time & effort (= $$$) converting MS Word
documents into scholarly publications. Citation styling is stupid too.
Many problems could easily be avoided through use of better authoring tools:
http://biodiversitydatajournal.com/
https://paperpile.com/
+ ShareLatex, BlueLatex, FidusWriter, RVRite...
https://www.authorea.com/ https://www.overleaf.com/

18. Discovery Tools
Finding & obtaining access to research isn't easy. These tools can help
https://openaccessbutton.org/
Browser-plugin to help find
you free access versions of
paywalled research articles
http://www.sparrho.com/
https://www.pubchase.com/
Sparrho & PubChase provide personalised literature
recommonedations, like Google Scholar but with more flexibility

19. Preprint platforms
A brilliant way of getting your article out there early & in a non-paywalled way
https://peerj.com/preprints/
http://biorxiv.org/
http://arxiv.org/
Background reading:
The Case for Open Preprints in Biology
(2013) PLOS Biology

20. Open Access Journals
http://biodiversitydatajournal.com/https://peerj.com/
There are thousands out there. But these are my picks:
$99 per author,
lifetime publishing
High-tech, integrated
publishing from Pensoft

21. PeerJ is the epitome of modern, efficient
publishing

22. A quick reminder of the cost of paywalls
(per year, for 2014)
Institute Total Subscriptions (£)
1: University of Manchester 3,205,702
2: UCL 3,052,170
3: University of Cambridge 2,963,821
4: University of Nottingham 2,578,716
5: Imperial College London 2,472,530
6: University of Bristol 2,395,654
7: University of Birmingham 2,178,558
8: University of Oxford 2,153,840
9: University of Glasgow 2,062,353
10: Cardiff University 2,007,977
Source FOI requests, peer-reviewed here: http://f1000research.com/articles/3-274/v3

23. In Summary
There are a wealth of new, better tools out
there. Use them!
Share: Data, Code, Presentations, Posters,
Grant Proposals, Preprints, and Papers
Opening-up your work has benefits to you.
Thank you for your time!