How can open research practices help you progress in your career as an early-career researcher?
| 7 November, 2025 | Jack Nash |
Traditional publishing models can create barriers for early career researchers, which can delay career progression. This includes lengthy review cycles that can limit opportunities for early career researchers to develop professional skills and experience with peer review, editorial collaboration, and scientific communication.
Open research platforms, such as Wellcome Open Research, offer alternative pathways, providing practical environments where early career researchers can build career-relevant skills through collaborative open research practices. This approach creates additional opportunities for professional growth, allowing emerging researchers to gain valuable experience while contributing meaningfully to the scientific community.
In the following blog post, we discuss how open research practices can help accelerate your career progression as an early career researchers and offer insights into how to get involved with Wellcome Open Research.
Wellcome Open Research: A practical training ground for early career researchers
Open peer review
Early career researchers can benefit greatly from Wellcome Open Research’s open peer review model. It provides a unique learning opportunity to help you understand how to effectively evaluate the work of your peers. The transparency of the model allows you to read detailed reviewer comments on published articles, helping you learn how experienced researchers approach assessing research. By gaining visibility into the review process, you gain invaluable insights into the peer review process that traditional closed review models cannot provide.
As an early career researcher, you can also participate in the peer review process as a co-reviewer alongside experienced reviewers. This creates a constructive learning environment where you can practice peer reviewing under the guidance of more experienced reviewers. This approach allows mentors to demonstrate how to balance constructive criticism with encouragement—a nuanced skill that often takes years to develop on your own.
Through co-reviewing, you’ll learn to distinguish between major methodological flaws that threaten study validity versus minor presentation issues that can be easily fixed, an important skill for peer review. Structured feedback during co-reviewing will gradually build your confidence, helping you develop expertise without the pressure of reviewing independently.
Importantly, an open peer review model recognises your contributions as a co-reviewer, letting others see your review portfolio and build your professional reputation. This transparency ensures that your peer review reports are documented, supporting your career advancement in ways that traditional closed review practices cannot offer.
Beyond developing your skills, co-reviewing also helps build valuable professional networks. As an early career researcher, you can establish connections with researchers in your field, potentially leading to future collaborations and wider professional opportunities.
Open Data and reproducibility
The FAIR principles—Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reusability—can help teach you how to optimise your data for sharing and reuse. Learning to present data in understandable and usable ways to other researchers requires you to develop clear communication and data presentation skills and an understanding of standardised formatting styles.
Wellcome Open Research’s focus on data sharing and repository management can help you as an early career researcher to learn how to build projects around transparency from the outset, rather than retroactively adding data-sharing capabilities once the project is nearing its end. This forward-thinking approach will help you to develop project planning skills while ensuring compliance with funding body requirements and institutional mandates that increasingly prioritise open data practices.
These publishing requirements help to provide practical training in methodology documentation, giving you experience in articulating your experimental designs with precision and clarity, increasing the reproducibility of your study. This in-depth documentation naturally improves experimental design capabilities, as you need to think through each step systematically to communicate effectively with peers, leading to better research planning and execution.
Additionally, navigating open data and ethics requirements on Wellcome Open Research provides valuable compliance training that prepares you for high institutional standards you may encounter throughout your career. Understanding data protection regulations, consent protocols, and data sharing agreements becomes second nature through practical application. This hands-on experience with compliance frameworks gives insight into evolving expectations of funding bodies, institutions, and collaborative partners who prioritise reproducible and transparent open research practices you may encounter throughout your career.
Editorial and leadership experience
Early career researchers often assume that editorial opportunities are exclusively available to established academics with extensive experience. However, Wellcome Open Research is actively transforming this landscape by providing opportunities for you to gain editorial influence at earlier career stages.
Wellcome Open Research also allows researchers to propose and manage themed collections. This responsibility involves identifying emerging trends within your field and curating relevant research to create a comprehensive collection of related research outputs for the broader scientific community. These collections serve as valuable reference points that enhance citation potential and establish your reputation as a knowledgeable contributor within your field.
For early career researchers, engaging with open publishing platforms should be considered an integral component of career development strategy. The skills acquired through open research practices form the foundation of successful academic careers in an increasingly transparent research landscape.
To learn more about how to get involved as a reviewer or collection advisor on Wellcome Open Research, email dalia.williams@F1000.com