Eurodoc, the Council of Doctoral Candidates and Junior Researchers, is an umbrella organization composed of 28 National Associations present in 25 Countries, representing Early-Career Researchers (ECRs), which includes doctoral and/or postdoctoral researchers. Eurodoc was founded in 2002 and then established in 2005 as a non-profit, international volunteer organization based in Brussels. It advocates for positive change in the policies, culture and environment that affect the quality of training, well-being and employment conditions of early career researchers.

We spoke with Giulia Malaguarnera, President and Open Science ambassador at Eurodoc, about their support of Open Research Europe (ORE) as one of our expert partners.

Why is Open Science important to your organization?

Eurodoc believes that Open Science is ‘good’ science for several reasons;

• Firstly, sharing knowledge and innovative products to the public domain is a duty for researchers, particularly if they are publicly funded or if funders request a more powerful impact to the society. In my opinion, there shouldn’t be any reason to hide results (unless for sensitive or commercial data covered by law) or being ashamed of negative results (which could save a lot of money by investing in different research methods next time).

• Secondly, education and innovation for us are democratic values: knowledge should not be retained by rich institutions and countries with higher gross domestic expenditure on research and development (GERD). This increases inequalities, decreases networking and collaboration opportunities, and may not solve societal issues faced by small or poorer communities.

• Lastly, and more important for us, Open Science changes the mindset into a collaborative work environment. Acknowledging the value of findable, accessible, interoperable, and reproducible research can reward all actors participating in a research group, not just the principal investigator or those who provided the grant to cover the research expenses (see the CRediT system). Eurodoc is working closely with policy-makers and research organizations to change the Research Assessment and rewarding the variety of expertise in the research system.

We have already seen the beneficial impact of Open Science during the COVID-19 pandemic. Sharing data has been fundamental in shaping policies and raising awareness among citizens. It’s amazing to see more people reading graphs, thinking critically, and analysing data and we, as scientists, should be more open to explain when misunderstanding occurs. Another tangible effect of Open Science has been the development of different vaccines from various companies, thereby accelerating the treatment and management for an unknown virus. Can you imagine what is possible for treating cancers and rare diseases?

What motivated you to partner with F1000 on ORE?

Eurodoc works hard to raise awareness about what Open Science is and how to practice it. We formed an international cohort of Open Science Ambassadors in Europe who are championing Open Science by building awareness.

F1000 is providing the tools to perform Open Science, so I believe it was a natural partnership. Funder platforms powered by F1000 have a transparent publishing process, with open peer-review, open data, accessible manuscript revisions and rebuttal letters. Moreover, having a unique platform for Horizon projects such as ORE may increase collaboration among public and private grant beneficiaries, and shows practical examples for ECRs to build their grant proposals.

How do you engage the Eurodoc Open Science Ambassadors to utilize the Open Research Europe platform?

We started with our conference in Warsaw (online) on 22-23 July 2020 and we will continue in the next one, in hybrid form on 14-15 July 2021 in Prague.

Last year, we conducted an exploratory survey about open scholarly publications to understand the initial awareness, knowledge, and perception that researchers have in Europe towards ORE. The final results will be available soon.

Social media engagement, internal discussions in our working groups, and the Q&A webinar about ORE have raised awareness and curiosity from our members. Several challenges had been raised by our community, but ORE has also unlocked plenty of enthusiasm from the community!

You hosted a webinar in April this year which featured a discussion on the opportunities of ORE for early career researchers. Can you touch on the outcomes of that session?

The ambassadors and, in general, the ECRs are more willing to embrace Open Science than those who have already built their career through journal metrics. Those wanting to engage in Open Science are still fearful of not being acknowledged and rewarded for their career. This is one of the main reasons Eurodoc is in the project: for championing, providing feedback, and raising awareness for better policies for ECRs.

Other outcomes with regards to the benefits of Open Research Europe are:

• The platform offers speedy publications which then enables beneficiaries to add the publication in their project reports at an earlier date.
• ECRs can be reviewers (or co-reviewers), they can see their peers’ revisions and other research output examples.
• ORE also allows researchers to publish all research outputs including code, and negative results.

Learn more about Eurodoc: http://www.eurodoc.net/