Key points:
Gede Primahadi Wijaya Rajeg is a lecturer in the Department of English Language and Literature at Udayana University in Indonesia.
Previous to lecturing at Udayana University, Gede was a PhD student in Linguistics at Monash University, who use Figshare for Institutions to store institutional research data and theses. He attended a workshop on Figshare and research data management at Monash. “I learned about, in my opinion, one of the most important ingredients of open science: data sharing,” said Gede. “The workshop also emphasized the value of Figshare in providing a persistent identifier - a DOI - and of having an open and unique identity as a researcher, which encouraged me to obtain an ORCID.”
After the workshop, Gede uploaded a number of different materials in monash.figshare.com:
Gede also uploaded his PhD thesis into Monash’s Figshare instance, available here.
“I did not want people to experience what I had experienced before when I wanted to read PhD theses from my lecturers that are not easily and openly available,” said Gede.
Not only does sharing his data help others, it also helps Gede stay more organized and pay closer attention to the validity of the materials he shares. It also helps him track usage metrics for the data he shares, particularly number of views, downloads, and social media attention through Altmetrics.
He has also experienced further collaboration as a result of sharing his data. He was contacted by a fellow Indonesian PhD student who was interested in referencing his paper and has become a close research collaborator as a result.
As for the future of open science, Gede believes that it will grow and gain wider acceptance from a wider range of disciplines, including his area: Humanities, particularly language sciences (linguistics); this is evidenced by the presence of TROLLing (The Tromsø Repository of Language and Linguistics), PARADISEC (Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures), and The Language Archive of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, among others. “While open research and data sharing has not yet been mainstream in Indonesia, especially in my field, I am glad to know that a group of Indonesian researchers recently initiated the Sains Terbuka Indonesia (Indonesia Open Science Community), which has just released their MOOC (called WIBISANA) about open science on Eliademy,” said Gede. “I think this kind of community-based initiative and educational support regarding open science will not only foster open science as a paradigm and mindset, but also deepen our understanding about the merit of open science.”
