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Introducing Jennifer Crane, a member of the Early Career Researchers Advisory Board for Wellcome Open Research. She explains why Wellcome Open Research is a space to be celebrated, and wants to help other early career researchers to navigate the challenges of open access research, particularly in a rapidly changing policy environment.

Jennifer Crane is a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow in the History Faculty at the University of Oxford. Her current project explores the labelling and resistance of ‘gifted children’ in the post-war world. Her previous work has looked broadly at themes of expertise and experience in the contexts of child welfare and the NHS, focusing on post-war Britain.

What inspired you to apply for and join the Wellcome Open Research Early Career Research advisory board?

I’ve been aware of Wellcome Open Research for a few years, since a colleague received a mug in the post inviting us to, ‘Rapidly publish any results worth sharing’. I have long been interested in this platform as somewhere to publish open access research for free (for Wellcome funded researchers), very quickly, and as a space to celebrate the breadth and range of Wellcome-funded research. 

However, as a historian, I’ve never been quite sure if this platform is the best place for my work, as it does not yet feature a great deal of historical research (though it does have some excellent articles in this area, for example on the historical contexts of envy as pathology; the career of psychiatrist David Stafford-Clark; and the cultural pre-history of the face transplant).

I wanted to join this advisory board to see if I could help to identify and break down barriers preventing medical humanities scholars from publishing in Wellcome Open Research, and also more broadly to see if I could help other early career researchers to navigate the challenges of open access research, particularly in a rapidly changing policy environment.

What are the benefits for researchers for publishing on Wellcome Open Research?

I think that one key potential benefit to publishing on Wellcome Open Research is the fast turnaround time. While we often wait for months and even years for peer review from many academic journals, with Wellcome Open Research the median number of days from submission to passing peer review is 72 days. 

This means that researchers, and particularly early career researchers, are not left wondering if their articles will or won’t be published. They could find themselves unable to send them elsewhere in the meantime, at a time in which having publications is so important for career progression, but also when people have pressing research which they’d just like to get out there.

Have you published on Wellcome Open Research? If so, why would you encourage others to do so?

I have not yet published on Wellcome Open Research. However, I am tempted to do so, especially with some of my planned and draft articles which are methodological, or looking to do something a bit different to traditional research-based pieces. 

It is my hope that this could be a good platform for these types of work, as Wellcome Open Research publishes reports, reflections, and protocols as well as research. To be honest, though, I’ve also been a little daunted by the open peer review, and afraid of receiving ‘Not approved’ peer review reports that are published online alongside my article.

Staff at WOR however reassure me that their peer review – perhaps because it’s open – is typically kind and generous. Even if an article was first given corrections, you can make these revisions, and the final version of the article will be published online too. So, I’m thinking about it.

Have you experienced any difficulties or challenges in publishing research? Please discuss.

Like everyone, I’ve had challenges in publishing research, for example long waits to hear back about articles, during which time you can’t submit them elsewhere, so you just have to wait and see. I’ve also had peer review that I’ve felt could have been more constructive and framed kindlier, in a way that hadn’t made me question myself as a scholar.

At the same time, the majority of my experiences of publishing  have been really positive, and I have had some incredibly encouraging  peer review and editorial help from a range of journals, where editors and reviewers, doing this on a voluntary basis, have clearly spent significant time and intellectual effort thinking about how to improve my work. 

Having had this variety of experiences, like most academics, I’m invested in thinking about how Wellcome Open Research can facilitate the latter type of engagement, and encourage such thoughtful and generous interactions between reviewers and authors.

How do you think open research can benefit the community?

I think that open access research is more downloaded and cited, which potentially means that it can be more widely read and used, by a broad range of communities inside and outside of academia. Potentially, this could allow our research to have meaningful impact. At the same time, I don’t think that we should be complacent about only publishing our academic articles open access and then assuming that they’ll be automatically disseminated.

I think that working and funding structures need to also support time for active collaboration, encouraging scholars to identify who would benefit from their research, and giving us time to work productively with those groups to communicate our knowledge in accessible ways, and to learn from key stakeholders to enhance our future research too.

What do they think needs to change to help ECRs? As an ECR advisory board member, how do you hope to resolve these issues?

One specific challenge at the moment for historians like me is that Wellcome Open Research does not yet have a lot of articles published from the humanities. This means that humanities researchers are likely to wonder whether this journal is the right place for their research. As an Early Career Researcher advisory board member, I’m suggesting that this is potentially addressed in many ways.  

We could start by providing more targeted information and ‘demystifying’ the process; perhaps by encouraging senior humanities researchers to submit their work here first; perhaps by the platform using their social media to highlight and celebrate humanities content; and I also think the platform could potentially benefit by introducing a humanities early career researcher  article and essay prize.

I’m very open to other suggestions from medical humanities scholars on how Wellcome Open Research could become a more appealing platform for them, so please do get in touch if you wish to discuss this!