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Helping fellow early career researchers seek new research opportunities and networks through open research. In this Q&A, Cherry Lim, a member of the Early Career Researchers advisory board for Wellcome Open Research, a partner platform with Wellcome, shares her aim to achieve this goal.

Cherry Lim works at Mahidol Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit (MORU) and Nuffield Department of Medicine, Oxford University. Researching epidemiology and health burdens of antimicrobial resistant bacterial infection in Southeast Asia and the impact of antibiotic use on patient survival.

What inspired you to apply for and join the Wellcome Open Research ECR advisory board?

The Wellcome trust has supported me throughout my research career so far. Wellcome Open Research is a great platform, which supports the sharing of research works in a timely manner and I believe open research can help early career researchers seek new research opportunities and networks.

As an early-career researcher, I wish to contribute to and be part of the team with Wellcome Open Research to support open research.

What are the benefits for researchers for publishing on Wellcome Open Research?

Researchers publishing on Wellcome Open Research benefit from the faster processing times, enabling the research to be reviewed sooner than via traditional publishing, as well as providing transparency in reviewers’ comments and in changes of manuscript versions. This open accessibility to science knowledge, means research can reach a wider audience, which opens more opportunities for collaborations.

How do you think open research can benefit the community?

Open research ensures research results can be shared with the community and with those who do not have access to subscription materials. This increase transparency would help to bridge the communication gap between scientists and the community. Moreover, engaging with the community and sharing our results with as many people as possible allows others to benefit either directly or indirectly, which is one of the key purposes of doing research.

What do they think needs to change to help ECRs? As an ECR advisory board member, how do you hope to resolve these issues?

One of the things that may help ECRs is to feature the research they publish in open access journals, to help their work gain visibility and for the authors to gain recognition for their efforts. ECRs often need strong publication records for job applications and to help them progress in their research career. So, a positive recognition for a good piece of research regardless of whether the result is positive or negative is crucial for ECRs. This could be done through media promotion such as podcasts, blogs, or featuring the works as research highlights in outlets.

Why is open peer review important?

Open peer review encourages constructive discussions from a wide audience. This could increase opportunities to validate findings, helping to improve the overall quality of published outputs. It also engages readers of various expertise and skills and this could increase opportunities of collaborations and generation of new research ideas.

How can we improve the quality of peer review?            

One of the ways we can improve quality of peer review is by providing formal training to early career researchers, who are the future reviewers, on how to review a manuscript and how to give constructive feedback.

Online discussion between reviewers on publishing comments could be helpful both in saving time and to increase the quality of review comments.

Involving more post-doctoral students in peer reviewing process could be helpful in preparing for the future experienced reviewers. They often have more time to review manuscripts, compared to senior researchers, and are experienced in the research areas they are in or have been working on.

Another way of improving the quality of peer review could be to increase the motivation of being a good reviewer through I think an individual/institutional credit system could be a way to help motivate good reviewing.

I think we could also improve the quality of peer review through increasing the transparency in study methods. Authors should be encouraged to publish and share their study protocol first (including those of retrospective studies) and then submit the results through Registered Reports, where the methods of sample collection, processing, data generation, and analyses should be as transparent and precisely described as possible.