Wednesday, July 13, 2016

Communication Science

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Several days ago I attended a workshop hold by the department of mine. We invited two guest speakers who delivered important materials for us lecturers and researchers. The first speaker is a geology lecturer from ITB talking about communication science and the second is a lecturer from medical faculty Universitas Padjadjaran, sharing about her experiences much in getting research grant. According to my position at the moment, the first material is much more relevant for me. So I am here to write some important points from that session.

Dr. Irawan, speaking in the first session, shared a lot about the importance of using Medias in writing as well as values in writing itself. He mostly talked about technical stuff which might not be familiar to most of us. Thankfully, I understood them since I am quite interested in the IT terms such as Linux, open source, R programming, research gate and academia edu.

He told us that the first reason of writing must not be to get sort of artificial appreciation such as to get impact factor or h-index, these two terms are common among researchers. Although getting these two things are crucial and they are pursued by many of us, the main reason of producing writing must not be them. Here are some reasons of writing scientifically and sharing with the world that I summed up from his lecture:

First, writing something must be based on the idea that we want to share with the world about the important facts and findings we have discovered. By doing this, we fill the gap in the field we are in. Besides, we develop the knowledge or science so it keeps developing. Thus, submitting our writing to journal is definitely not the main goal.

Secondly, a good writing should be read by as many audience as possible. Therefore, publishing our writing in Facebook notes, Blogs, Academia Edu and Research Gates are worth to do because the scope of audience is much larger than writing for a certain journal having narrower audience. If we cannot write in a journal especially in a reputable one, why not writing in easier platform such as our personal blog? No one has the right to ban us sharing important findings in blogs or Facebook notes. In fact, the popular journal platforms are criticized for being not transparent in their financial report. As an example, they charge every paper we download from their website but they do not pay any single penny to their reviewers.

Thirdly, in a more open world, writing and sharing information must be affordable and accessible for everyone. Sharing important facts and findings must not be so rigid and costly. Though some reputable journals charge nothing to the author, the readers or audiences must spend some bucks to access article, at least $25 per each. The idea here is, we must now use cheaper or free platform to share our finding such as using arXiv, research gates, Academia Edu.

He also added some points from the research of Foster 2015 that the open research has the following components:
• open data
• open methods
• (using) open source software
• open access to research outputs
• open peer-review (pre or post publication)

I absolutely agree with his idea that now communication science enables us to be more open in our research. In fact, the education is also currently more open with the presence of MOOC as an example. All in all, the future of our research results dissemination might change to be more open and accessible to all of us, hopefully.