Season 1
Episode 4. Summer of Open Science: A Discussion on Open Access ft. Dr. Peter Suber – Part 2
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In this episode of the Offspring Podcast, Srinath and Niko talk to Dr. Peter Suber, the director of the Harvard Office for Scholarly Communication. He has been involved with the Open Access Movement from the very beginning, even before the international initiatives were conceived.
Following up from the first part, this week they talk about research evaluation, the different kinds of open access publishing and about ways to take the Open Access movement forward.
You can find more about Dr. Peter Suber at his homepage and about his work on the Open Access Tracking Project Twitter. Get in touch with Dr. Suber on Twitter, and check out his book Open Access,, his latest book Knowledge Unbound, and his work on the Open Access Tracking Project.
Follow the Offspring Podcast on Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn.
Srinath: Hello and welcome back to the fourth episode of Offspring Magazine the Podcast! I’m your host Srinath Ramkumar and joining me today is again Nikolai Hörmann!
Nikolai: Hello, everyone!
S: So in this episode, we’re going to continue our discussion with Dr. Peter Suber. If you haven’t listened to the previous episode yet, please make sure you check it out, as we have discussed a variety of topics, including how he started with the Open Access initiative. And what do we plan to discuss in this episode with him, Niko?
N: So part of this episode will be publishing models. For example, there’s the gold standard of Open Access publishing, which is called Gold Open Access, and journals that have this model, they just publish every article accessible for everyone for free. Another type of Open Access is the Green Open Access and this is actually about repositories: basically, repositories make everything that is uploaded to them freely accessible. And you can basically upload things like the preprint or some other article version to that, which other people then can access. Then, one thing that many journals are doing nowadays is actually having a hybrid model: so, on the one hand side, they have their regular articles that are behind a payroll, but then authors can pay an extra fee, which is actually quite expensive sometimes, and then the article is Open Access, but only this article and not the whole journal.
S: Okay, so these are three very different models of Open Access.
N: Yes.
S: Okay, so this actually gives us some idea about what kind of publishing model the various journals are planning to use. And we should be aware of that when we’re planning to publish in these respective journals.
N: That’s right.
S: Okay, without any further ado, let’s get on with the discussion with Dr. Suber.
N: Another topic that I’d like to talk about is research evaluation. Because I think this whole movement of Open Access is also connected to research evaluation – how people can advance their careers in science. Because one thing that I have to admit I myself am still not so sure about is, for example, if right now, let’s say, I have really good results and my PI tells me this could be a Nature/Science/Cell paper or whatever, and then I would probably not tell him that I would rather publish it in e-Life instead. Because, of course, it shows something to people if it is in one of those journals. So what would you tell a person, or me I guess, in this case, to try to convince me to actually publish in in e-Life, for example?
Dr. Peter Suber: Are you saying the other person is the PI and you’re not?
N: Yes, I guess like the PI is telling me ‘okay, this work could be published in a high profile journal’, I guess, or like a prestigious journal.
PS: Usually, the PI makes that decision or if the PI has a strong preference, everybody else has to go along, so it’s not always a matter of advice, that is. It might be better for certain reasons to publish it in e-Life but you won’t cut any ice with your PI. On the other hand, my first advice is to try it out and try to persuade them, but another is just to remember that even if you publish in a non-open journal you can still make the work open.
N: Okay, yes.
PS: Remember that there’s Green Open Access or Open Access through repositories, not just Open Access to journals. So many junior faculty are under pressure to publish their work in high-prestige journals. Sometimes it’s because the decision is made by somebody else, namely, a senior PI. Sometimes it’s because the promotion and tenure committee makes that an important criterion – they give you more credit if you publish in a high perceived journal than if you don’t, and they give Nature and Science more credit points than they give e-Life, even though e-Life is now in the same category. But no matter what pressure you feel as a young researcher to publish in a non-open journal just remember there’s such a thing as Green Open Access. So you can go along with that pressure, you can say ‘okay, I’ll publish in that non-open journal but I will be careful to make sure that a version of it goes open in an open repository’,
N: That’s true. I actually have to admit I forgot about this. Yes, the like the embargo is, I think I remember, like six months to a year or something like this?
PS: Well, we have to be careful about that too but some funders permit embargoes on Green Open Access up to, say, 6 or 12 months but they don’t require embargoes of 6 to 12 months. Some publishers require embargoes and they say ‘you can make the same work open in a repository, provided you wait a certain time’. On the other hand, if your university has a Rights Retention policy, then they have a right to ignore that publisher’s request for an embargo, and, as I said, Harvard has this kind of policy and we do ignore those requests for embargo.
N: Okay, I see.
PS: We don’t ignore author requests but we do ignore publisher requests. So if the author has some reason to want an embargo we’ll respect that and if the publisher persuades the author to ask for the embargo, okay, we don’t even know about that, but we’ll respect that, too. But if the publisher has a standing policy that you can only make work Green Open Access after 12 months, our view is – we’re not getting permission from the publisher so we don’t need to follow that rule. We get permission directly from the author prior to the author signing the publishing contract.
N: Okay, I see. So it’s just a matter of getting this content from the author first and then it’s possible to put it on Green Open Access?
PS: It’s not just getting the content, it’s getting the rights.
N: Okay, I see.
PS: So when you write something new, you’re the copyright holder and you hold all the rights until you transfer them to somebody else like a publisher. And our policy works on that principle. So we ask the authors for these rights before they transfer them to any publisher.
N: Okay, I see. That’s nice. I mean, I have to admit I heard like a different story where it was basically the other way around – where a PI was actually telling me that he would love to publish only in Open Access journals because for his career it doesn’t matter anymore if he publishes Nature papers or not, but the problem is he doesn’t want the careers of his students to be bad because of that… So I guess there’s both sides to it.
PS: Yeah, that can happen too. And it’s unfortunately true that junior faculty are often judged on the prestige of the journals, in which they publish, and they get more points for publishing in a high prestige closed journal than in open journal. But even if you want to help them out that way – that is, help them with their promotion and tenure committee, help them get into a prestigious closed journal, you can still make sure that the peer-reviewed version of the article is Open Access in a repository. And one way to make that easier is to get a Rights Retention policy at your school. By the way, even without a Rights Retention policy, 70% or so of publishers permit Green Open Access, although they do it under terms and conditions, sometimes that’s an embargo.
N: I see.
PS: But if you want to avoid all those terms and conditions, if you want to make it Green even for authors who publish in the other 30% of those journals, if you never want to have to ask publishers for permission, then Rights Retention policy solves all those problems.
N: Okay, yeah, I think generally, if I speak about my institute, for example, it seems like people are… it’s like a mixed bag. There’s some people who are quite enthusiastic about Open Science and Open Access and they actually try to make an effort to do so – to publish in Open Access journals and also pay attention that they upload their data and make everything accessible. But then, this is not the case for all people, so I wanted to ask, what do you think of the Max Planck Society as a whole? Does it seem to push for Open Science and Open Access or is it just like one of the other institutes that tries to just sell stuff or do its research?
PS: I don’t know Max Planck from the inside, I know a little about it from the outside, I think of it as a leader in Open Access. It’s the, let’s say, the host, the founding host of the Berlin Declaration on Open Access. It has the Max Planck Digital Library, which is a leader in providing Open Access. It’s also providing advice to researchers about Open Access. It hosts these wonderful Open Science days. It’s the home of Open Access 2020, which is an important broad initiative to advance the cause of Open Access. Now, your question arose from the specific perspective of a researcher going through promotion and tenure, and I don’t know what Max Planck does there. I don’t know whether they provide good incentives to make their work Open or whether they provide bad incentives. For example, giving weight to journal impact factors is a bad incentive. It steers people toward, generally speaking, non-open journals. Some open journals have very high impact factors but impact factors discriminate against new journals. You can’t even get an impact factor until you’re two years old. That’s right, you need two years worth of data even to compute the impact factor. So brand new journals are ineligible, even journals one and a half years old are ineligible. And even after you’re two years old, it’s discretionary, whether you’ll get an impact factor. You have to kind of prove your worth to a private for-profit company. And most of the closed journals with the highest journal impact factors are quite a bit older than two years. That is, they’re venerable, they’re very well established. Some of them are more than a century old. And the average Open Access journal is young, the average Open Access journal is much much younger than the average high prestige closed journal. And notice, by the way, that impact factors not only discriminate against Open Access journals because they’re younger, they also discriminate against all new journals whether they’re open or closed. So if there’s some exciting new field of research, like COVID viruses or nanotechnology, something that we had no journals until very, very recently, then these criteria discriminate against them, too, because they’re too young to have impact factors or to have large impact factors. But, by the way, Open Access journals can play the impact factor game and win if they want to because Open Access increases the citations to work to individual articles and therefore increases the citations to the journals, in which they’re published. And journals that have converted from subscription to Open Access have said this, “we’ve noticed our citations go up and our general impact factor has gone up with it”. Nevertheless, it’s a bad incentive if promotion and tenure committees give high scores or, you know, credit to articles in high impact factory journals. On the whole, not in every case, but on the whole they’re discouraging publication in Open Access journals. That’s bad. That’s a bad incentive. A better incentive would be to say ‘if you want us as the promotion and tenure committee to read your journal articles and evaluate them, we’ll do it only if they’re on deposit in the institutional repository’.
N: Ah, okay, that’s nice.
PS: “We’re not telling you where to publish, we’re not telling you what to publish, we’re just saying it has to be there [available in a repository], otherwise we’re not going to pay attention.”
N: Okay, well that’s great! And I mean the thing is, I mean coming first of all back to the comment, it’s nice that the Max Planck society is being taken actually as an institution that tries to push for this. Because I think they’re trying to put some effort in there, definitely. So not only in money but also teaching people about it. And only last year, we actually had an Early Career Researcher Conference on Open Access. And then, coming back to the general impact factor, I think it’s quite one-dimensional, and the calculation and all this has a lot of issues by itself, so just using this as a metric is really difficult to assess research. Sorry, you were saying?
PS: I was focusing on the the problems or the disincentives for making work Open but the impact factor has lots of other problems. Among them, it can be gamed – you can drive up your impact factor if you really wanted to. However, the impact factor of an article is based on the citations to the whole journal, not to your individual article, and your article might be dragging down the average because it’s so bad, or your article might be bringing up the average because it’s so good. Moreover, finally, many articles are highly cited because they’re bad or because they’re wrong, and that gives a very misleading impression if we’re just counting citations.
N: So what kind of other metrics would you actually suggest? Or would come into play to evaluate research properly? I mean, yeah, I find one of the limiting factors in general is just time. I just heard actually today, when I was speaking to colleagues, that for one PI position at an institute they got a thousand applicants. So even if you’re a faculty of 30 people, each of them has to just review at least 30 people. So this can be an endless game where you just review people…
PS: That’s a hard problem. I’ve been on more than 20 searches in my career and in every case there were far too many applicants to treat everybody with the same time and respect. And the way most committees solve this problem in practice is to develop shortlists and say, of all these hundreds of applicants, which are the 20 that most deserve our attention? And you can often whittle down to a list of 20 just based on their areas of specialisation. And maybe you can whittle down to a list of five based on other factors. But then, when you have that shortlist, you look very very closely at everything they’ve done.
N: Okay, so basically just seeing what research would fit to the institute or university that they’re applying to, what the other faculty are doing, in general. Okay, I see.
PS: That’s right. If we’re talking about academic departments hiring faculty, they tend to hire people to fill a certain niche. They want people with a certain specialisation and, believe it or not, they get applications from people who do not have the advertised specialisation – people just send in their application as a shot in the dark, just to see what their chances are. It’s pretty easy to discard those. They might be very very good people but they have the wrong specialisations for the job.
N: I see. So that’s also kind of pushing up the numbers of the applications in the end?
PS: Right.
N: Also one of the issues is, the number of PhD students that exist nowadays is also a lot larger than the number of PI positions. So they were not growing at the same rate so, I guess, it’s only normal that the spots will be scarcer than before.
PS: Yes, and I’m afraid that problem will get worse. I think the pandemic recession will simply reduce the number of faculty positions everywhere. Wealthy schools and less wealthy schools alike, everything is shrinking, everything is taking a serious financial hit. And yet, the number of students who are trained to become faculty will shrink more slowly and there are still students in the pipeline. Let’s say, it may be harder to finish because of the pandemic but once you’re finished you’re competing with your peers for a smaller number of jobs. That’s not good.
N: Yeah. I mean the time scale it will take for the jobs to start picking up again, compared to the people finishing, is not in the same. I mean until the recession and everything will be better again or recovered it will take quite a few years, I’m afraid.
PS: That’s right.
N: Now, so actually going to the funders’ perspective, do you think that the funding is, I mean I heard kind of that it’s stagnant a bit. The scientific funding, how is it in the US? Is it like going up, the NIH?
PS: Well, before the pandemic, it actually was going up a little bit. And that was after it had gone down a little bit so that was some good news. On the other hand, the Trump administration has been removing some Open Access research funded by the Federal Government. It didn’t slash research budgets as much as it opposed Open Access to already published research, but the funding was going up at the Federal Research Agencies until the pandemic. And I’m not sure what’s going to happen now. So much money has been used for economic stimulus, justifiably, it leaves less money for other purposes, including good purposes. Almost all the other purposes are good but research funding is one of them. It’s too early to say what the outcome will be. We’re supposed to have the next Federal Budget in October. We almost never succeed in reaching the deadline and so we operate on, what are called, continuing resolutions in the absence of a budget. But the big fight will come about. Then we see how much money Congress is willing to allocate to research as opposed to all the other pressing needs that we face right now.
N: I mean I’m not too knowledgeable with the funding in the States, so is there some kind of incentive, coming back to Open Access, for funders? Or do the funders say that Open Access should be mandatory?
PS: Open Access has been mandatory for the largest funder, the NIH, National Institutes of Health since 2008. And in 2013, under Barack Obama, the largest two dozen federal agencies were asked to adopt policies kind of like the NIH. They were not asked to adopt policies exactly like the NIH but similarly to require Open Access. They were supposed to have those policies ready for inspection within one year. They did not do that but they did do it eventually. And so they’re slow, they were slow at being rolled out, but most of them have been rolled out. They had to be approved by the White House and most of them were approved by the White House, that was still under Barack Obama. Even the ones that have been approved, I would say, are still in the early days of implementation and, on the whole, unhappily, they didn’t learn all the lessons that the NIH learned. For example, it’s not enough just to say, ‘it’s mandatory to deposit in a repository’, you have to have sanctions for those who do not deposit. It took the NIH several years to learn that. And the other agencies have not taken the same lesson. But if you just look at the policies by themselves, about two dozen of the largest federal research funding agencies now do have Open Access requirements for the research that they fund. And when I say two dozen, it’s basically all the Federal Funding agencies that spend 100 million dollars or more per year on research. So the only ones that are exempted are the smaller ones.
N: Okay, I see. I mean I think, like also in Europe, they’re starting to get behind this. And the European funding, as far as I know, also requires the published research to be Open Access by now.
PS: That’s right. And so there are several European countries that have national Open Access policies or national Open Access mandate. They’re all smaller than the US, of course, and that’s one problem – we’ll never have a national policy that way that covers every single one of our funders or we probably never will. But one reason is, simply, that we’re so large the NIH policy by itself spends more money on research than all the public funders in the UK put together. It spends like five times more than all of them put together. So that gives you an idea of the size. And that’s only one agency. It happens to be the biggest of all of our agencies but it’s a good thing that it started first because the big one went first and it was easier for the smaller ones to follow. The smaller ones are now following. Yes, it’ll just take them a while to adopt all the lessons learned by the NIH but, in addition to those scenarios, in Europe, there’s plan S. And the plan S is picking up funders in many European countries but also outside Europe. And some of them are not the same as those already covered by existing national policies. Some of them are already covered but the plan S is stronger than the original policy was. And some of the plan’s funders are private and not public.
N: I mean, to be honest, the biggest changes I’m afraid will have to be made by the funders. Because if they can set the incentives to publish Open Access, make everything available…
PS: I completely agree.
N: So, if they can make the quickest change, I guess, because, I have to admit, I heard some of your interviews from before and you mentioned something – that this change to complete Open Science will require quite a generational shift or change before it will be more implemented. And I was hoping that actually if the funders were willing for it, it might actually be quicker. Or what is your view on this?
PS: You’re completely right. I can put it in a slightly broader perspective. The people who really regulate the pace of change, or the pace of Open Access, are authors. Because authors decide whether to submit their work to Open Access journals, whether to put copies in Open Access repositories, and whether to transfer their copyrights, and if so on what terms. And so authors could do this overnight if they wanted to, if they were enlightened, if they all acted together. And, of course, that’s not going to happen. But they could. And so they’re the key decision-makers. So the next question is, which institutions are in a position to influence author decisions? And there are two, two big ones – universities and funders. And between the two of them, funders have more power to influence author’s decisions than universities. It’s hard for universities to adopt strong mandates because that might trigger faculty resistance. That’s why the Harvard policy has this opt-out, even though the waiver rate is very low. But the NIH policy has no opt-out. The NIH policy is also a Rights Retention Policy. It says: you must put your work in an Open Access repository, you must retain the rights necessary to make it open, and you must exercise those rights to make the work open. And if your publisher doesn’t like that, you must seek another publisher. Period. No opt-out, no waiver. And the position of the author is: if I don’t like that, I have to seek my grant from somewhere else. And very often they don’t want to or they can’t or they’ve tried the others. So when funders issue a well-written mandate, it has far more power. It’s far more effective than when universities do the same, even though it’s better if they both do it.
N: Yes.
PS: So I think funders hold the reins and they can make change overnight. I also think it’s important to remember that funders are basically charities, They’re not-for-profit corporations. If they’re public funders, they’re government agencies who are duty-bound to act in the public interest. And if they’re private foundations, then they are literally charities. And either way, their goal is to pursue the public interest, not to seek revenue or profit, or pay shareholders. So their mission completely supports the idea of shifting over to requiring Open Access. It’s just taking them a long time to realise that. I think if funders… if funders are not already requiring Open Access they’re certainly thinking about it because they understand the logic of this.
N: Ah, okay, that’s good to hear. So maybe one last question to the future of open Open Science and Open Access. So, first of all, how long do you think this whole transition will take? Like do you think five or ten years? And then, also concerning more open data, I guess, do you think it will be easier or possible to get like really big repositories with good guidelines for open data soon-ish? Or do you think this is still something that will take quite long? Considering the Open Access, it started like 20 years ago, roughly.
PS: Yeah. Let me do the second one first. Open data already exists. Open data policies already exist. Open data repositories already exist. And open data, I think, is a messier problem than open access to texts. And if open data is moving more slowly, that’s the reason why. And the various stakeholders have to sort out these complexities. You already know what they are but, for example, research on human subjects often has data that has privacy problems, or you can’t just share it without thinking about privacy issues. There’s a timing issue – many authors that completely support Open Access want to be the first one to publish articles based on their data. And they don’t want to share their data before they have a chance to publish on it. The last thing they want is to be scooped with their own data. And some journals, by the way, which I support, have open data policies that say, “if you publish the text of an article in our journal, you must make the data open the same day, the day of publication”. And some authors, who are friendly to open, are reluctant to do that because they don’t want to publish just one article on their data, they want to publish five or ten articles on their data before they give it up. They’re happy to give it up eventually but they want exclusivity for a while, for a few articles. So that’s author’s self-interest. Even from people who support open – that’s a problem. Another problem is simply size – data sets in astronomy, or in some aspects of biology, are huge. And some of the ones in astronomy are actually literally too big to share on the internet. You can host them but you could never really download them in real-time because it would take days and weeks. So the best way to share them is for the user to visit the website and run queries without downloading any data at all. But then you need a very sophisticated website that supports querying, kind of like Amazon. You’ve got to build that kind of software. But another possibility, which Google tried once upon a time, is to ship the data sets on physical hard drives through the ordinary mail. No matter how big the data set is, you can always ship it that way if you had to. And Google had a cool program for a while that said it’s willing to do that, it’s willing to send anybody’s data set anywhere, provided Google got to make a copy of it first.
N: Okay, interesting.
PS: If we’re talking about research data that’s not a bad deal. You’re trying to share with the world so why not share it with Google anyway? Google, for some reason, pulled the plug on that program. But if you’ve got terabytes and terabytes of data, the best way to share it with somebody else is just to send them a piece of hardware.
N: Yeah, that’s true.
PS: It’s hard to reconcile with Open Access, or it’s hard to make it open in the very same way that we make it open. On the other hand, data is somehow, sometimes, in other respects, easier than Open Access to texts. For example, publishers never published data, they only published text, so if you make your data open they’re not losing anything. In fact, if you’re opening data that accompanies one of their articles, they’re gaining something, they can claim truthfully that the article is more reproducible, or that the readers benefit more from the article now with the accompanying data than they did before without the accompanying data. So many closed publishers support open data and they support it strongly. And then another related aspect is that most data sets are not copyrighted or copyrightable and so there’s nobody who’s got a legal basis to oppose the release of it, unless it’s on some other ground like privacy.
N: Okay, I see. Interesting.
PS: And, by the way, just back to policy, that’s why most publisher, I’m sorry, most funder open data policies don’t positively require open data. Instead, they require data sharing plans. And so you tell the funder how you plan to share data with people who need it or people who claim to need it, and your plan might be, they have to sign a non-disclosure form or they have to prove that they work in this certain area and then I’ll share it. But technically a research sharing plan could be – I’m not going to share with anybody, and that could comply with the funders. So if funders simply say, “no, you must make it open. Period. No matter what,” then they run into all these problems that I just mentioned. And they know about the problems and they don’t want those problems so they back up, they have a softer requirement.
N: And concerning the future of Open Access?
PS: That’s really hard. I don’t have a prediction about that. I’ll just observe that in all the time I’ve been working on it, which is roughly since the beginning of Open Access itself, progress has been steadily upwards. It’s not like the stock market, doesn’t go up and down and up and down, it’s steadily upwards. The slope of the curve is shallow compared to what we would like, that means it’s slow, but it’s slow and steady, as opposed to slow and faltering. So I think it’s not long before the slow and steady progress will reach some kind of tipping point. I don’t like the language of tipping points because it suggests that one day there’ll be sudden change but there really could be sudden change. But even without sudden change, there is this generational change and I think a much larger percentage of young researchers today understand what Open Access is and understand its benefits and want it for themselves than was true 10 years ago. And I think that’ll be even more true 10 years from now. And, as I said before about authors, that’s all it takes: if authors want Open Access to their own work, they can get it. They can get it tomorrow. They get it for all their new work starting tomorrow. And so one of the key variables is author understanding, correct understanding, as opposed to misunderstanding. There’s a large number of options for making your work open and it’s really hard to know about all those options. For example, as we pointed out, if you can’t easily publish in an Open Access journal, at least remember that there’s repositories. Many people do forget that but if you know all your options and if you want Open Access you can get it for your future work starting tomorrow. And more and more authors are educated about their options and they do want it. And I think that’s the most promising aspect of this. More universities are adopting policies, more funders are adopting policies, more Open Access journals exist, more Open Access repositories exist. So while authors and researchers are becoming better educated about their interests, we’re also getting the infrastructure necessary to host it all.
N: No, I completely agree.
PS: So I’m still optimistic.
N: Yes, thanks for that. No, I mean we’re trying to do our best. Also educating other people because, as you said, I think the authors have the power, they could decide if they wanted to go Open Access. All right, so thanks a lot for the interview. I think it was really great for us to speak to you. I hope you also enjoyed it to some extent.
PS: I did. Thank you for your good questions, I appreciate them!
N: And we will be hoping that the future will be looking a bit bright on this side!
PS: Yeah, and the younger researchers today who want Open Access will be the journal editors and the journal publishers and the promotion and tenure committee members of tomorrow, and that will make all the difference.
N: Yes, I’m looking forward to this future.
PS: Yes, me too.
S: Well, thanks for joining us, Dr. Suber. We really appreciated the interview!
PS: Okay, well, thank you, Nikolai and Srinath!
S: So what do you think of that conversation?
N: It was really intense. I mean I liked it a lot because the topic is, I think, very dear to me. And also it concerns myself and many other people that might want to go into academia. So having this conversation is very important but also difficult because it has so many different facets that have nothing to do with your PhD project. So having to think about all of this at the same time is making it a bit difficult.
S: I mean, of course, it tries to sort of open your eyes towards the various facets that are associated with not just doing the science but also getting the science out there and communicating the science in a way that is accessible for everybody. I think this is very important and this is something that everyone should be aware of as long as they’re involved in the scientific field and scientific industry.
N: Yes, I completely agree. It’s necessary nowadays to confront these issues that are in the research system, and the way that the publishing works, and the way that research evaluation works, and also, I guess, acquiring money. So thinking about it is really going to be necessary in the future, even more so than now I guess.
S: Yes and, as you said, we are sort of primed with the right tools to become the future PIs and future funders.
N: Yes, wow, and editors. Exactly you just desk reject everything.
S: Yeah, so Open Access is the way forward and even if it doesn’t take a generational change it definitely is going to take time so that it’s globally adopted.
N: Yes, definitely. But it will be nice when it happens. I mean it might still be now, it should hopefully still be in our lifetimes.
S: I would hope for that as well, yes.
S: Okay, thanks all for listening to this interview with Dr. Peter Suber. And I hope you guys enjoyed this. And if you want to look for more content and details of how to find them you can find them in the show notes below.
N: And also if you have any questions concerning any of the topics, feel free to write either an email to me or to the Open Science work group of the PhDnet, and we will try to help you solve your issues or questions. Because I think educating people, as we also discussed in the interview, is very important.
S: Great, very well articulated.
S: The Offspring Magazine Podcast is hosted by Srinath Rankumar and Nikolai Hörmann. It’s produced by the PhD networking group on Science Communication, called the Offspring Magazine, and produced by the Max Planck PhD network. If you would like to get in touch with us, please feel free to write to us at Offspring.podcasts@phdnet.mpg.de. The intro and outro tunes were composed by Srinath Rankumar and the pre-intro jingle was composed by Gustavo Carrico. Please feel free to check out the Offspring blog on the Max Planck PhDnet website, as we have many interesting articles coming up along the lines of the Open Science awareness initiative. We’ll be back with you next week with another exciting episode. Until then it’s a bye from me and bye from Niko!
N: Bye!