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In this Q&A, Fiona Cresswell shares her excitement to be on the Early Career Researchers Advisory Board for Wellcome Open Research and her hopes for changing the future of publishing for the better.

Fiona Cresswell, a clinical PhD fellow at London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, is a member of the Early Career Researcher Advisory Board for Wellcome Open Research. Over years of training as an HIV and Sexual Health physician, she developed an academic interest in advanced HIV disease and opportunistic infections. For the last 3 years, Fiona has been based at the Infectious Diseases Institute in Uganda and is undertaking clinical trials and community engagement work in Uganda with the aim of reducing stigma around HIV and improving access to better diagnostics and drugs for advanced HIV disease.

What are you currently working on?

My research, funded through a Wellcome clinical PhD fellowship in Global Health, is focussing on TB meningitis, a highly fatal brain infection which can occur in advanced HIV. I am conducting a clinical trial of high dose rifampicin in TB meningitis to see if this intensified treatment results in higher levels of rifampicin reaching the cerebrospinal fluid, which might in turn reduce death and disability from this disease.

I am also looking at better ways to diagnose TB meningitis using both complex technologies, such as next generation sequencing, and simple technologies, such as bedside urine tests e.g. TB-LAM and clinical prediction scores.

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

Currently we are in a defining period of time in the course of scientific publishing history, and I am keen to be a part of a positive change. The growth of publishing house monopolies and the tsumani of predatory journals has not been a universally good thing for researchers and academic institutions. I hope that fully open access publishing platforms, such as Wellcome Open Research, will make science a more transparent endeavour and all will stimulate sharing of both protocols, laboratory processed information and data, as well as results. 

I hope to widely encourage the use of Wellcome Open Research with ECRs both in the UK and in Africa, as well as increase awareness of the platform with other key stakeholders. I’m excited to be part of a diverse board and hope I can contribute to shaping the platform into the most useful tool possible for ECRs.

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

Firstly, the open peer review process has a number of positive impacts:

• Open review means that the reviewer comments and author responses are available for public viewing which increases transparency. As a result, the comments made by reviewers are crafted thoughtfully and constructively, as is the author’s rebuttal. The reader can therefore come to a balanced decision having read both sides of the argument and having seen all the changes that have taken place prior to final publication. Both the author and the reader can benefit a lot from this open review process.
• The platform also allows readers anywhere in the world to leave unsolicited scientific comments, which can enable ECRs to start an open and constructive dialogue with experts in the field and build a potentially important new network, who might become future collaborators or provide opportunities for future career options.
• Importantly, the open review process means that submitted research is available for public viewing within a week or two of submission, which avoids the delays of many months that can arise with a closed review process. This means your work can begin being cited soon after submission and it can be used promptly in grant applications.

Secondly, the breadth of work that can be published on Wellcome Open Research includes protocols, laboratory processes, research notes, software and data, which provides a wealth of information for researchers as they embark on their scientific endeavours. There is no deterrent from publishing null results on Wellcome Open Research, which historically can be harder to publish in some traditional journals, and the absence of article processing to be paid by Wellcome funded researchers means more money to use on research.

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

I have published 5 articles (protocols x 2, research article x1, research note x1, case report x1). I’ve contributed to the Tuberculous Meningitis International Research Consortium collection on Wellcome Open Research. The collection is on TB meningitis as part of an international consortium with researchers in Vietnam, India, USA and Africa. The collection is an interesting option to explore if you are part of a big collaboration or amongst fellow researchers in your institutions who are working on a similar topic. I have also reviewed one article and will be happy to review more in future.

I have been very happy with the experience so far and would definitely encourage others to publish on Wellcome Open Research. The submission process has been seamless and the reviewing process has been fast and constructive so far in my experience.

The platform does require that the work itself or one of the authors is Wellcome-funded and thus researchers without Wellcome support may be precluded from using the platform. Hopefully other funders will follow suit and create their own platforms, so researchers will always have an open research platform available to them.

Have you experienced any difficulties or challenges in publishing research?

Some friends and colleagues have experienced some challenges during the review process. If you work in a niche field of research it can be challenging to suggest reviewers who satisfy the criteria of being ‘independent’. Frequently, one of the authors may have published previously with one of the suggested reviewers, which can raise queries and render the reviewer as being ‘non-independent’. Yet choosing a reviewer far removed from your research field means that they may not be an expert on the topic. The Wellcome Open Research editors do a good job of trying to find a happy medium but it can take some time.

It is also theoretically possible that reviewers may feel unable to be too critical or reject a paper since their name is attached to the review and they don’t want to commit any political faux pas. However, in this day and age it’s important to encourage and trust in transparency and integrity.

How do you think open research can benefit the community?

I believe for the community the Wellcome Open Research platform is more penetrable and user-friendly than some journals. The absence of pay walls means that anyone can access information, anytime, anywhere, at the click of a button and is totally free of charge.

The inclusion of supporting data enables other researchers to reanalyse, replicate and reuse data, all of which support the drive towards making research more reproducible. The Wellcome Open Research platform publishes biomedical science, population health, applied research, humanities and social science, public engagement and arts projects, so the community can read a wealth of information in one place.

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

Presently we are still in the somewhat flawed impact factor era and ECRs may feel they need to publish in high impact factor journals to prove the quality of their work. Wellcome Open Research does not have an impact factor and this may deter some ECRs (or their bosses) from using the platform.

I hope that Wellcome Open Research will find a way of highlighting work that is of particularly impressive magnitude, high intrinsic merit or societal impact and will therefore encourage submission of great work. The platform currently uses a variety of quantitative and qualitative metrics to provide open, article-level information but this may require some refinement over time to further encourage use of the platform. I hope to be able to support the development of such metrics.

I am glad to hear that the title of the journal (and therefore its impact factor) in which an author’s work has been published will no longer be considered when making funding decisions. This approach also needs to be adopted by all Universities during appraisals and career progression decisions. I will encourage this within my institutions and try to support any ECRs who are finding this approach has not been adopted.

What are your thoughts on Plan S and its aim for all research results to be openly available to the scientific community?

I loathe pay walls, therefore I am a fan of Plan S. Plan S will change the publishing landscape at large and is therefore not going to be popular with everyone, but it has been carefully considered by experts, has international buy in and seeks to improve a publishing landscape that has become unsustainable. It’s time for publishing house monopolies to modernise and make their information freely available to all, even if this means their profit margins looking less rosy than they have done historically.

Why is open peer review important? 

The open peer review process has several benefits. Firstly, it means that the reviewer comments and author responses are available for public viewing, which are both very informative for readers and therefore having it available for the public eye is a positive thing.

Secondly, as everything is transparent, the comments made by reviewers are crafted thoughtfully and constructively, as is the author’s rebuttal. The reader can therefore come to a balanced decision having read both sides of the argument and seen all the changes that have taken place prior to final publication.

Thirdly, the platform also allows readers anywhere in the world to leave comments, which can enable ECRs to start an open and constructive dialogue with other experts in the field and build a potentially important new network, who might become future collaborators or provide opportunities for future career options. Lastly, the open review process reduces delays in results being available for public viewing, with work being citable within just a few weeks of submission.

How can we improve the quality of peer review?  

Reviewers are inherently busy people and writing a good review takes a lot of time. The open review process allows the reviewer’s name to be known making it easier for the number of reviews undertaken annually to be counted. I wonder whether having a reviewer rating would be a way of encouraging frequent good quality reviews? Becoming a highly rated reviewer could feature in appraisals, promotions and funding decisions.

Encouraging the use of published frameworks (e.g. PRISMA guidelines for systematic reviews and CONSORT guidelines for clinical trials) will also drive quality. Referee reports can be cited independently as they are assigned their own DOI which means that a high-quality review becomes a valuable piece of work in its own right. It’s important for reviewers to be aware of this.