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Introducing Ben Steventon, a member of the Early Career Researchers Advisory Board (ECRs) for Wellcome Open Research. In this Q&A, we find out his inspiration for applying to join the board and discuss why the research community should move beyond the constraints of the traditional peer-reviewed article format.

Ben is leading the Laboratory of Comparative Developmental Dynamics at University of Cambridge, focusing on the development of stem cell populations to investigate the balance between self-renewal and differentiation. And now, without further to do, on with the interview.

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

I am excited by the possibility to make real change in how research is communicated, by broadening the range of formats by which to do this. Research communication is rapidly moving away from the lengthy presentation of original research data, into the presentation of bite-size inferences and conclusions. While this is clearly important due to the increasing size of the research community, we must also think of ways to give appropriate space and value to underlying methodologies and primary data.

I think it’s unreasonable to expect an entire research project to be communicated solely as a research article, and in forcing this situation, we are negatively biasing the kind of research that is valued and promoted. As an ECR, it’s up to us to take the lead in thinking and communicating our research in the ways that we think are the most appropriate, and Wellcome Open Research offers an opportunity to do so.

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

The main thing for me is that it provides new and more flexible ways of communicating your research, and I’m interested in opening a discussion about how this might be further increased to maximise one’s research output. Another advantage is the immediate publication of the research, so that there is very little delay in sharing research data. This is particularly helpful when trying to share primary research data in repositories, etc, as it allows one to effectively time the publication of a research article, data note, protocol and data deposition for open sharing.

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

So far, I have published a Data Note. I wanted to share a particular dataset that was associated with a research article published in Development, but provide sufficient information for others to make use of it. The open research model allows you to open out the data to readers/users who might not have come across the research paper in which the data was connected with. This is just one example of how researchers can use Wellcome Open Research to broaden the ways that they communicate their research output.

Have you experienced any difficulties or challenges in publishing research?

Quite a bit of my work is underpinned by some fundamental studies that address the basic principles governing embryonic development. This involves research that does not always provide an immediate molecular mechanistic model that would be easily accepted in conventional research article formats. I think we, as a community, need to place equal value on work that provides strong foundations to our science as to those studies that take leaps into the unknown and set trends in the field.

In building my own lab, I want to do both of these things, and I think this is possible now by making use of new publishing platforms and servers to publish in ways that go beyond the constraints of the traditional peer-reviewed article format.

How do you think open research can benefit the community?

I think science always benefits from increased collaboration, and this is more and more the case as researchers are reaching across disciplines to solve complex problems in the biosciences. By openly sharing research data, we create many more opportunities for a diverse range of people to access and work with primary research data. This can only further stimulate interesting new interactions of importance to the community as a whole.

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

The main issue relates to how ECRs are judged on hiring and grant awarding panels. As long as research value is judged based on named high-impact journals, we can risk a lot by opting to publish in open research platforms, which might be lesser known and considered by the community to be of lower impact. The Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) has helped a lot with this, by encouraging institutions to promote a deeper assessment of a candidate’s scientific strength, but to expect members of a particular panel to read all the research output of every potential candidate in detail is unrealistic. We need to go back to the community and stimulate new ideas of how science should be evaluated.

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

I think the aim of making all research open to the community is a very good one, and I understand the need to make a more drastic push to make this happen. However, there are real concerns faced by community-based publishing groups who operate with a non-for-profit model. The research community relies very heavily on the money that is taken by these journals and put directly back into the community. It’s not yet clear how this issue will be dealt with.

Why is open peer review important?

Open peer review is potentially one way to help hiring panels judge the quality of research outputs. Rather than having these comments hidden from view, it allows for reviewer’s comments to be a citable output of their own research.

How can we improve the quality of peer review?     

The danger with open peer review is that reviewers may not feel they can be openly critical of others work, particularly if ECRs are reviewing articles from more established researchers in their field. The current anonymous system is biased the opposite way however, with reviewers being overly critical as they are not known to the reader; may have their own agenda; or may simply feel that suggesting further experiments is part of providing a good review. How we balance these opposing biases in open vs. closed review is a major question. I do like intermediate models where groups of reviewers come to a collective decision before their comments go back to the author.