Five things you can do today to make tomorrow’s research open

It is becoming increasingly clear that the current method of publishing scientific findings does not make the most of the vast amounts of data generated during scientific investigation. The message from the #SciData17 conference, held in London on the 25th of October, was that making data, code and detailed methods openly available will increase reproducibility, decrease redundancy and allow scientific discovery to advance at a faster pace. Funding bodies and journals are taking steps to encourage this kind of open research policy, and the decision to release datasets usually sits with lab heads or PIs, but there is a place for bottom-up change from students and postdocs too. Read more