¿A journal club to fix “ciencia”?: The double challenge of promoting Open Research in non-english speaking environments.

Open Research objectives / Practices

Introducing Open Research concepts and practices into teaching and learning.

Introduction

To overcome the irreproducibility in research is one of the goals of Open Science. In the editorial “A journal club to fix science” [1], Amy Orben presents the ReproducibiliTea journal club, as a solution to promote the discussion about the reproducibility in science and embrace better research practices . She mentioned how quickly this initiative grown in the first year, from 1 university to 27 in 1.5 years, mainly promoted by PhD students and early career researchers. By 2020 there were about 100 journal clubs around the world. Noteworthy, there were only two journal clubs in Spanish speaking countries (one in Spain and one in the whole Latin America).

Motivation

There are more than 1800 officially recognized universities in Latin America, many of them currently involved. Nevertheless, the discussion about Open Science and the promotion of its practices is scarce. Given the fact that during 2020 all the education activities were virtual, I founded and organized a ReproducibiliTea journal club in the city of Puebla, Mexico. The idea was to discuss with PhD students and early career researcher the problems related to the irreproducibility in research, as well as promoting good research practices (preregistration, reproducible coding, etc). The journal club was hosted in the Institute of Astrophysics, Optics and Electronics; and early career researchers from four local universities were invited (the meetings were also open to other universities as well).

Lessons learned

It is well known that the Open Science movement is mainly driven by early career researchers, and that its aims are even opposed to the already stablished agenda of academic institutions in terms of productivity and science dissemination. Accordingly, the current 137 ReproducibiliTea journal clubs are hosted and maintained mainly by PhD students and postdocs.

The most interesting lesson is the demographic picture of the scientific community obtained during the first year of the journal

URLs, references and further information

References.

1. Orben A. A journal club to fix science. Nature. 2019 Sep;573 (7775):465. doi: 10.1038/d41586-019-02842-8. PMID: 31551562.

URL: https://reproducibilitea.org/journal-clubs/#Puebla