In the podcast series The Road to Open Science, hosts Sanli Faez and Lieven Heeremans follow the path to adapting open science practices through the perspective of researchers from different disciplines. In each episode they talk to people within the academic community about their research, initiatives, or experiences in relation to open science.

In the first episode the podcast starts at the very beginning: what is open science and why does it seem so difficult to really make open science practices more common? For a lot of people within the academic community the subject is still an unclear or even an unknown territory. Others, who have already gained more knowledge on the topic, have different views when it comes to definitions and where to start.

In the second episode we talk to Kirstie Whitaker, Daniel Lakens, Anita Eerland and Loek Brinkman. We asked our guests, what motivated them personally to advocate for adapting open science practices and what is the most important role the university can play to foster open science.

In the third episode we had conversations with Christopher Jackson and Jean-Sébastien Caux, two researchers who started open access publishing platforms. Christopher Jackson is a professor of basin analysis at Imperial College in London and one of the initiators of EarthArxiv. Jean Sebastien Caux is a professor in theoretical condensed matter physics at the University of Amsterdam and founder of SciPost publishing portal.

In episode 4 we spoke with Rosanne Hertzberger and Egon Willighagen. Rosanne Hertzberger is a microbiologist, writer and columnist. She performs her research under principle of open kitchen science, defined by herself and  shares her findings, experiences and experimental protocols on her personal blog REBLAB.org. Egon Willighagen is assistant professor at Maastricht University, in the Department of Bioinformatics. Egon has been active in various initiatives connected to open science for more than 25 years.

In episode 5 we talked to Cameron Neylon. He is an advocate for open access and Professor of Research Communications at the Centre for Culture and Technology at Curtin University. From 2012 – 2015 he was the Advocacy Director at the Public Library of Science. In our converstaion, we focused on two of his recent papers. 1- “Excellence R Us”: university research and the fetishisation of excellence, and 2- Sustaining Scholarly Infrastructures through Collective Action.

In episode 6 we talked to we talk to Marleen Stikker and Bianca Kramer. Marleen Stikker is founder of Waag. She is also founder of De Digitale Stad (The Digital City) in 1993, the first virtual community introducing free public access to the Internet. Bianca Kramer is subject specialist Life Sciences and Medicine at Utrecht University Library. Bianca studied Biology at Wageningen University. She is the co-creator of the project “101 Innovation in scholarly communication.”