Opening Up: open access publishing, data sharing, and how they can influence your neuroscience career

Opening Up: open access publishing, data sharing, and how they can influence your neuroscience career  T L Spires-Jones, P Poirazi, and M S Grubb DOI: 10.1111/ejn.13234

The Federation of European Neurosciences (FENS) and the Kavli foundation have recently founded the FENS-Kavli Network of Excellence (http://www.fens.org/Outreach/FENS-Kavli-Network-of-Excellence/) a group of young, outstanding neuroscientists dedicated to providing peer support for early career neuroscientists and serving as the voice for people at this career stage in shaping the future of neuroscience. Part of this support is this series of opinion articles whose primary goal is to provide advice about different aspects of career progression in neuroscience. 

No matter how often it might feel like it, science doesn’t happen in a bubble – the things we discover aren’t worth anything unless they influence other people. Luckily, this ability to reach others with our science is being made ever easier in the digital era. We have already moved far from the traditional model in which scientific findings were only ever presented in subscription-access, print-only journals. Nowadays there are huge opportunities to widen access, not only to complete scientific articles, but also to their underlying raw data, and there is a growing push from funders and other stakeholders to promote such openness. Here, we aim to outline these increasing demands for open access (OA) publishing and data sharing, to describe the routes available for their implementation, and to weigh up the costs and the benefits associated with such scientific openness, especially for early-career researchers.