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chemzymes lab
chemistry & enzymology
Open Science
Science should be accessible to everyone.
Sadly, the current scientific landscape falls way short of that ideal. On many levels.
To make science more incluside, we are contributing to efforts in two main areas.
Responsible use of color in scientific communication
Color is a powerful design feature. Color allows you to highlight elements of a figure or guide the reader's eye. Color is often also easier to recognize than shapes and makes it a lot easier to recognize recurring concepts. However, improper uses of color can introduce visual artefacts into data or make the information content of a given figure inaccessible to people with color vision deficiences. That concerns more people than you might intuitively think, as around 4% of the human population have some sort of color vision deficiency. For example, protanomaly and deuteranomaly are the most common type of color vision deficiency, both of which make it harder or impossible to differentiate hues of green and red.
Thus, one needs to use color mindfully. Unfortunately, many authors of scientific publications or text books do not. In fact, around 70% of the literature published today contains figures that are at least partially inaccessible to people with color vision deficiences. Ironically, this problem is an easy one to fix. Most of the issue comes down to communication and awareness. To provide a concise reference material, we wrote about design principles for inclusive figure design. We also try to lead by example by using scientific color maps which preserve the information in their figures for all readers (e.g. this, this and this paper use plasma, while this and this one use viridis and/or batlow). In addition, Felix makes a point to bring up the issue at every (scientific) talk.
Data sharing
Research generates hypotheses; Hypotheses require experimental interrogation; Experiments yield data; Data demand analysis and interpretation; That in turn leads to conclusions and understanding.
That also happens to be (more or less) the way we report research findings in scientific papers. We describe hypotheses, experiments, methods, and results and discuss what we learned. However, that approach largely passes by the data.
To address that shortcoming, data sharing should be the default when publishing scientific findings. For that reason, we are committed to open and transparent science. Each of our research papers is accompanied by a zenodo entry containing all relevant raw data for that publication (see e.g. this, this or this entry). We, as the scientific community, we need to normalize sharing of raw data and we, as a research group, hope that our efforts make a small impact toward that.
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