PhD Candidate
A good reference manager will save you countless hours of tedium and frustration. Students, researchers, and volunteers who work with references should all be using one. Zotero is my preferred option, because it is free, open source, actively developed, and solves many of the problems I’ve encountered during my work. In this guide I outline the way I set up and use Zotero for my PhD work.
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At it’s most simple, ‘open access’ is the idea that anyone should be able to read and reuse scholarly works free of charge.
The open access debate is sometimes framed as an all-or-nothing, take it or leave it kind of deal. But those in favour of OA are not necessarily in favour of forking out huge APC’s to OA or Hybrid publishers. Likewise, those with concerns about OA are not necessarily happy with big publishers making massive profit margins by paywalling taxpayer-funded research.
But rather than arguing for one business model or another (a task I’m vastly under-qualified to do), I simply want to remind researchers that in the mean time, we can make all of our work openly accessible entirely for free (for both authors and readers), with minimal effort, all while publishing in whatever journal we want.
Image CC0 by jarmoluk | Pixabay
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Students and early career researchers have a lot on their plates: we are expected to write papers, attend conferences, do field work or lab work, manage our project, manage our supervisor, manage our time, manage our sanity…all while being constantly reminded of our limited chances of landing our dream job when we finally leave student life behind.
In order to counter some of the cynicism, I’m a big believer in the value of crafting an ‘online presence’ for while we study, in order to create as many opportunities as possible. When I say ‘online presence’ I mean using a combination of a personal website, social media, and academic profiles. Whether you’re a high school student, an undergraduate student, postgraduate student, early career researcher, lab head, etc, we can all can get so much out of a web presence.
This post is a quick one-stop shop for setting up a simple personal website you can use to list your interests, show off your achievements, and maybe even start a blog.
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The first two posts in this series covered the core open science principles and touched on the importance of communicating your work.
To wrap up this series I spoke to Dr Jon Tennant. Jon is a palaeontologist, independent researcher, and passionate advocate for open scholarship. Jon completed his PhD thesis in January 2017 at Imperial College London (and made it available under a CC-BY license on figshare). Jon has contributed research on peer review and open access; founded a palaeontology pre-print server; founded a MOOC on open science; communicated huge amounts of science as a freelance writer; and much more.
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One of the reasons I write a blog is to communicate the science I do, and to share what other people are doing. Following open science principles is the first step in opening up science. We need to remember to get the word out about what we do!
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I’m a scientist-in-training who enjoys learning about the intersection of science and society, so this is a very important question for me. In attempting to answer this question for myself, I’ve become more and more interested in the concept of Open Science (OS):
Open science is the movement to make scientific research, data and dissemination accessible to all levels of an inquiring society, amateur or professional.
I wanted to learn more about the philosophies behind OS, and the practical steps that scientists can take to make their work more open. I wanted to understand the benefits and drawbacks of open science. This post explores what I have learnt so far.
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See update below
In my opinion, Zotero is the best reference manager out there.
I thought I would put together a quick guide for how to set up Zotero with Google Drive (or other similar cloud backup options). This way, you can sync as many documents as you want and access them on multiple devices easily. Just set up each of your devices as shown below. But just a heads up, with this method you won’t be able to sync files from group libraries, so if file syncing with groups is important to you I would suggest paying the small fee for a Zotero storage plan.
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My second ever scientific paper has just been published! You can read it here.
It’s published open access in the journal PeerJ, which means it is freely accessible by anyone.
This paper deals with the experimental part of my masters research. I put out loads of insect traps at a couple of sites in the Waitakere Ranges over the summer, and then used the resulting catch of native wasps to try to figure out more efficient ways of trapping them.
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