Open Science TV, a first independent scientific media platform about Open Science

Hi everybody! Thank you for welcoming me on this forum!

I would like to present you my rising project dedicated to the promotion of Openness in science and society

:tv:Open Science TV:tv:

It will be a first independent scientific media platform which will give a word to scientists that want to change the way science and academia function. We started by series of videos which are already available on Youtube, have a look :arrow_down: :arrow_down: :arrow_down:

To know more about the project: About Us · Open Science TV

Follow us on social media and support on crowdfunding platform https://opencollective.com/open-science-tv.

Here I will announce new videos, stay tuned!

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Our first introduction video is dedicated to the problem of peer review in traditional scientific communication process. In the view of recent scandals with articles retraction from prestigious journals such as hydroxychloroquine study from the Lancet, we must overview the need of peer review in the scholarly publishing system . What is a peer review? Why the peer review did not stop the Lancet from publishing the flawed article ? Does our peer review process hinder the progress in science by unfairly punishing and discouraging junior researchers ? Does our traditional publishing system prevent participation of citizens? What is the Open Science and the Open Peer Review ? And why do we need to transform our science to be open and transparent?

To answer these questions, we invited to the interview Matheus Pereira Lobo , Brazilian physicist and mathematician, professor at the Federal University of Tocantins, co-editor of the Open Journal of Mathematics and Physics (OJMP). He shares his thoughts about the traditional peer-review process and tells about an alternative approach taken by the OJMP, where not only collaboration with his colleagues is welcome, but also with anyone from the broader public.

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Awesome stuff, @stefaniia ! Congratulations and thanks for the great effort!

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For our second episode we invited German neurobiologist Björn Brembs . In the first part (from four) we discussed his scientific background in neurogenetics and research on the fruit fly and snail behaviour. Björn also told us about his way to the Open Science movement. Upon the development of his academic career he realised that there is no digital infrastructure using which he can store his results, data, code and share with other scientists. In addition, he found that the current academic publishing process is fully controlled by the commercial companies. For him Open Science means not only the openness in sharing information, it means the creation of a tool that needs to be used correctly in order to make scientific findings available for everyone.

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How to make a huge amount of money on scientific publishing? What is a link between scientific journal publishing houses and Jeffrey Epstein 's scandal? And how our guest, German neurobiologist Björn Brembs , together with his colleagues tried to fight against these businesses that monopolised scientific communication market? These and other questions will be discussed in the second part (from four) of our interview with Björn.

What is a difference between a news paper article and a scientific article ? " Elephants on the street " versus " There are no elephants but they should be there ". During the third part of our interview with Björn Brembs we talked about the traditional scientific publishing in commercial journals. In highly digitalised era, this process is certainly old-fashioned, as it is not scrutinised as it needs to be which can lead to a lot of mistakes with negative consequences. Despite having alternatives with free and open license scientific communication platforms such as ArXiv.org , scientists still tend to use journals (which they never read but libraries still pay for subscriptions) for their career promotion, tenures and grants. Björn suggests that instead of paying journal high fees (sometimes prices can reach millions of euros per year), universities should organise the suitable infrastructure for scientists where they can publish, comment and publicly scrutinise their and other researchers’ results, data and code.
9 circles of hell of a scientific paper publishing, or the world is full of non-elephants - YouTube

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During the last fourth part of our interview with Björn Brembs we talked about high impact scientific journals and their prestige. Our guest explained that numerous studies showed that research in these journals is often irrelevant, irreproducible and sometimes even flawed. But scientists still find to be published in this journals very prestigious and essential for their careers, and moreover, they teach new young scientists to do the same. From Björn’s perspective we need to get rid of journals and let universities set up the infrastructure for scientific research, text, data and code which will be affordable, sustainable, reliable and open.

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