Anticas expertise covers evidence synthesis, data and code standards, evolutionary ecology of bonding, and life-history trade offs. She is one of the pioneers in studying and promoting Open Science practices in ecological and evolutionary research. Much of her current work is dedicated to meta-research. Via meta-research and Open Science she strives to help ecology to solve issues currently present in the research and publishing systems, increase diversity of researchers, and thus improve the scope, reach, and value of research.
Antica is a senior researcher at the Ruder Boskovic Institute, and a Honorary fellow at the Netherlands Institute of Ecology. She is a co-founder and executive committee member of SPI-Birds (www.spibirds.org) and SORTEE (https://www.sortee.org/). She is also on the advisory board of the FAIRsFAIR project (https://www.fairsfair.eu/advisory-board/egfc) and Open Knowledge maps (https://openknowledgemaps.org/team).
Open Scientific Research for better Society and Education
Research life-cycle has previously been largely closed to those outside of a research group. What others would be able to see, and only if published open access, was just the final research result, commonly published within a journal article. However, open science is changing this narrative – published result is only a tip of the iceberg. The bulk of the iceberg consists of research plan, collected data, protocols, data processing and analytical codes, and software. How can these be of use in research, society, and education? Is open science one of the ways to increase public trust in science? How soon do we need to educate young generation about transparent research practices?
In this talk, and based on my long-term involvement with open science, and science (ecology) I will provide some answers to the above questions. First, I will demonstrate how the outcomes of open science (registries of studies, data, software etc) can accelerate scientific progress, and where these can be found and used for educational purpose. Here, I will largely focus on ecology and life sciences, but the principles can be applied to other fields too. Then, I will discuss the role of open science in increasing trust in science, both by scientists and by general public. Finally, I will present my views on how early we need to start educating students in open research practices. Learning these skills is currently largely lacking in curricula, especially in early education (primary and secondary school). Yet, open science skills are essential component in the toolkit of a modern researcher.
