ECS and Open Science

Open science encompasses a wide range of practices and principles for making the process and outputs of research open and accessible, developing tools and approaches to facilitate open exchange among scientists. Researchers are increasingly interested in embedding open science practices in many phases of their work, through the use of open electronic notebooks, open data repositories, and open source software, among many other tools.

Researchers have always been willing to share their work, often without remuneration, in the spirit of discovery and the advancement of knowledge. ECS wants to return control of the research to the authors of it. ECS is working to match global growth in how science is done and communicated, thereby serving our mission to encourage research, discussion, critical assessment, and dissemination of knowledge. The way forward for ECS is to provide resources and tools for our community, enabling them to do open science, gain credit for work that happens in this way, and contribute to the greater good.

Initiatives

ECSarXiv: This free online archive for unpublished preprints and other technical content in electrochemistry and solid state science and technology helps to create a more comprehensive, transparent, and complete ecosystem of scholarly communication for electrochemistry and solid state science and technology, enabling faster, more relevant search results. There is no charge to submit, and no charge to read the posts.

Open Access: This well-known movement comes in many flavors, but essentially the term refers to online research outputs that are free of all access restrictions to access and free of many use restrictions. ECS took its first steps in open access when it launched Author’s Choice Open Access in February 2014.

Open Data: Data is being generated at unprecedented rates by experimental and simulation-oriented scientists and engineers. When data and software are open (freely available to everyone to use and republish as they wish, without restrictions from copyright, patents, or other mechanisms of control), scientific insight and effective engineering win.

Open Hardware: Most people have heard about open source software (voluntarily writing and exchanging programming code for software development), but now open hardware (information about hardware that can be easily seen so that others can make the hardware, or repair it) is becoming an increasingly interesting aspect of openness.

TOP Guidelines: Transparency, sharing, and reproducibility are core values of science, but not always practiced in the community of scientists and engineers. ECS is committed to openness in many forms, and has adopted the Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) Guidelines, supporting the scientific community in enabling reproducible research.

Free the Science: Free the Science is a business-model changing initiative that will make our research freely available to all readers, while remaining free for authors to publish. It is a new publishing standard for ECS, one of the last independent, nonprofit scientific society publishers. Electrochemistry and solid state science are the future: they are the leading sciences that will ensure our survival on this planet. ECS believes that by opening, and democratizing research, we can more rapidly advance our important sciences and society at large, while directly fulfilling our mission.

Timeline

Open access is an important part of open science, and its goal is to make the outputs of research open and accessible. Here is a very brief sampling of some prominent markers in open access, leading up to ECS’s steps in open access.

Resources