Credit: Madeline Monroe/C&EN/Shutterstock
In 2020, while preparing for his second-year candidacy exam in Prashant Kamat’s lab at the University of Notre Dame, Jeffrey DuBose hit a wall. He needed to teach himself about some of the techniques the lab used to probe the excited-state lifetimes of photocatalysts, but the senior graduate students with that expertise had left the group.
As a result, DuBose found himself digging through old textbooks and white papers from the scientific instrumentation manufacturer Horiba to learn the fundamentals for his exam. “I noticed it was very tough to find resources for these leading-edge techniques,” DuBose says.
What he needed—an in-depth tutorial on how to study excited-state lifetimes using time-correlated single photon counting that included limitations and nuanced data interpretation—didn’t exist. So DuBose took things into his own hands and created an educational tutorial on the technique, first sharing it with his lab and later, on a whim, as a YouTube video that has since been watched over 30,000 times.
Now a postdoctoral fellow in chemical engineering at the California Institute of Technology, DuBose had inadvertently stepped into the world of open education. He has stayed involved in it ever since and recently called on other physical chemists to do the same (ACS Phys. Chem. Au 2024, DOI: 10.1021/acsphyschemau.3c00078).
The open science and open-access movements sprung up with the rise of the internet, as scientists worldwide began sharing research-related information outside the confines of a university or journal.
“Once we began seeing the success of the open-access movement, with preprints and servers for sharing materials for research growing in use, it made sense to ask, ‘How can we share educational materials, too?’” says Abbey Elder, an open-access and scholarly communication librarian at Iowa State University.
Through the open education movement, instructors began creating open educational resources (OER), which are “openly licensed and free educational materials that people can reuse and remix in different ways,” Elder says.
An early example came on the scene in 2001 with the creation of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s OpenCourseWare, an open-access site that provides complimentary access to MIT courses. After that, digital textbooks were made available for free on sites like LibreTexts and OER Commons. People can now take undergraduate and introductory graduate chemistry classes gratis through initiatives such as Open Chemistry from the University of California, Irvine, and ChemCollective, which was developed by professors at Carnegie Mellon.
But while learning the fundamentals of chemistry is easier than ever, chemists looking for OER that are more technical and research relevant often run into the same issues DuBose did.
“There’s a gap between freely available resources for learning the basics of chemistry and the highly technical guides,” DuBose says. If you’re lucky enough to find a useful resource, it can be difficult to translate that in the lab, since methods included in supporting information aren’t always written to be reproduced.
Making what’s missing
In 2012, Jillian Dempsey was setting up her research lab at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and learning everything she could about cyclic voltammetry—a technique used to study catalytic reactions.
Dempsey had very limited experience in electrochemistry, so when she wanted to incorporate electrocatalysis into her own research group, “I was in the same boat as a graduate student,” she says. “I needed to learn the practical aspects and theory behind it before applying it in our research program.”
While scouring the literature for resources on the technique, she noted that “there wasn’t a single resource on cyclic voltammetry that really helped us put everything together.” She decided to develop an in-depth guide on the topic with the help of her first few PhD students. The aim was to create a resource for her lab as well as for the broader chemistry community.
Five years into her academic career, Dempsey published “A Practical Beginner’s Guide to Cyclic Voltammetry,” (J. Chem. Educ. 2017, DOI: 10.1021/acs.jchemed.7b00361), an open-access document featuring introductions to understanding, setting up, running, and analyzing cyclic voltammetry experiments. Supporting information contains five hands-on modules for using the technique in the lab.
Since its publication, the article has racked up 1.1 million views on the journal’s website. The keen interest has led Dempsey to develop workshops that train other researchers in electrochemistry techniques (J. Chem. Ed. 2024, DOI: 10.1021/acs.jchemed.3c00875).
When Dempsey visits a conference or gives a talk at a university now, she’s usually approached by attendees who found the article useful. “The widespread impact, including unsolicited emails I get from folks who found the guide critical for their own learning or their own research projects . . . it’s all been more than I expected,” she says.
There’s a gap between freely available resources for learning the basics of chemistry and the highly technical guides
Jeffrey DuBose, postdoctoral fellow in chemical engineering, California Institute of Technology
Andryj Borys is another chemist who took matters into his own hands to generate the type of resource he needed as a graduate student. When he joined Ewan Clark’s lab at the University of Kent, Borys lacked formal training in using a key inorganic tool: Schlenk lines. The few resources he could find were either outdated, unclear, or not comprehensive enough, so between experiments he began creating an illustrated guide in a personal notebook.
“As other people came into the lab and I was training them, it became obvious that the notebook could be handed down to others,” says Borys, who is now an assistant editor at the Royal Society of Chemistry. “That was kind of the inspiration to digitize everything and make a website to make the information more widely available.”
In 2019, Borys launched the open-access website The Schlenk Line Survival Guide, which features illustrated instruction on how to use the lines to perform sensitive reactions, transfer liquids, prepare nuclear magnetic resonance samples, and more. Since its launch, the site has received over half a million visits from people from 120 countries. “The initial popularity of it was a big surprise,” Borys says.
Four years after launching his site, Borys published an updated version of the guide in the peer-reviewed journal Organometallics (2023, DOI: abs/10.1021/acs.organomet.2c00535), which is available for free on his website. To further increase accessibility, the paper has recently been translated into Spanish, German, and French with the help of volunteer translators who are also experts in Schlenk line techniques.
Finding a home for open-access resources
Once these resources are created, it can be difficult to decide where to put them. Both Dempsey and Borys opted to use the amplifying power of scientific journals, but finding the right one requires some effort.
One option is chemistry education–themed publications like the Journal of Chemical Education or Chemistry Education Research and Practice, which is the route that Dempsey took. An editor at the former advised Dempsey that if the guide presented information that reflects best practices in teaching and learning, it would fit the title’s portfolio. “So we took the tutorial aspect and wrote it in a way that we thought was the best practices on how to present information,” Dempsey says. But the pedagogical requirements of these journals can exclude resources that are focused on technical content.
Journals that concentrate more on scientific research are another possibility. When deciding where to publish his Schlenk line guide, Borys put out a call to journals and received multiple offers. “Organometallics was the obvious choice because they had the tutorial review format, and the editors who reached out to me were recognized as being experts in that field,” he says. “So I knew it would be getting the proper initial assessment.”
Publishing his guide in Organometallics enhanced his project’s credibility, Borys says. “Academia relies a lot on citations,” he says. While people would cite his open-access website, “having it in a peer-reviewed journal gives people the confidence in citing it as a reputable piece of work.”
But paywalls and additional open-access fees make academic publishing a challenging space for sharing these resources, DuBose says. Outside the traditional publishing landscape, OER can end up on individual websites and YouTube channels. “There are openly available educational resources out there, but they’re scattered.”
Central repositories for research-specific procedures and tutorials do exist—just not in chemistry. In 2005, MIT graduate students launched the wiki site OpenWetWare to share microbiology protocols, educational tools like textbooks, and courses available to the public. In neuroscience, public repositories such as Open Neuroscience and Open Source Brain allow researchers to share data and analysis techniques in computational and experimental neuroscience.
Open Source Brain was an early example of sharing computational models and data within neuroscience, says Padraig Gleeson, a principal research fellow in neuroscience at University College London and the project manager for the repository. “Now, almost everybody is doing it,” he says. “It would be very strange to see a paper describing a software tool or computational model that wasn’t publicly available in some form.” Because software gets better as more people use it and report feedback, Gleeson says, computational neuroscience is more amenable to an open-access culture.
In the absence of field-specific open educational resource repositories, Elder at Iowa State encourages scientists to connect with a librarian at their institution for support in creating and distributing OER. When materials are produced and stored on personal websites, “they’re not integrated into existing support services that are available to other people doing OER work,” she says.
In the worst-case scenario, OER created through grants or by individual researchers may end up on a site that goes down once funding runs out. “Then those materials are just gone,” Elder says. Working with an institution on preservation and hosting can ensure that “you get more out of your project in the long run.”
Why open-access matters in chemistry
The kind of practical learning that happens in a research lab is inherently inaccessible to those outside the lab. “It’s not sealed away behind a paywall per se,” DuBose says. “But it’s sealed away in a physical building in the laboratories of domain experts.”
The widespread impact. . . it’s all been more than I expected
Jillian Dempsey, professor, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
The number of open data chemistry initiatives and labs working with artificial intelligence is growing, DuBose says. That growth also increases the risk that people who lack the proper training may misuse these technologies. But education can help here as well, he says.
To get the most out of a tool, “you need to know what goes on under the hood,” DuBose says. “Open-source education can assuage some of these concerns.” But most importantly, he says, OER can help break down barriers to access.
Borys agrees with that. He says accessibility was the primary goal when he decided to share his Schlenk line guide online. “I try to tell people, as a takeaway message, if you know a technique, it needs to be documented and shared.”
As Borys moved through different labs for a few postdoctoral fellowships, the knowledge he gained allowed him to add to the survival guide. He also made more specific versions of it for each lab he worked in, including photos instead of drawings of lab equipment.
Open-access resources can help labs close knowledge transfer gaps and ensure that lab-relevant resources stick around even after a subject matter expert has left. Dempsey says her guide has contributed to her lab’s training processes; she uses it to ensure that new students are well prepared for research. “Every new student in my lab is reading the practical beginner’s guide,” as well as assisting in running her summer electrochemistry workshops, Dempsey says.
Closing knowledge gaps
Beyond the laboratories where they were first built, open-source resources can help professors at smaller colleges and universities.
Deon Miles, a chemistry professor at the University of the South, regularly reads the Journal of Chemical Education to get ideas for both his teaching and research. When he came across Dempsey’s guide to cyclic voltammetry, he immediately began using it in his upper-level instrumental analysis class.
Part of what makes Dempsey’s article so useful is that it’s only 10 pages. “It’s an easy read,” Miles says. He thinks students and professors could benefit from similar types of guides for other spectroscopy, like ultraviolet–visible spectroscopy and mass spectrometry. “As professors, we’re done with graduate school, but that doesn’t mean that our learning stops.”
Dempsey says resources like hers can also help address gaps between coursework- and lab-based knowledge. “You will not learn everything in the classroom that you need to be successful in your career as a scientist,” she says. “That’s where things like Journal of Chemical Education articles, tutorial reviews, or other informal things like workshops and pedagogical lectures can fill this gap.”
Creating a more open-access-friendly research landscape can ensure that chemistry is standardized, reproducible, and available to those who can’t get certain information in the lab. “We need to make everything more widely available, especially in this digital age,” Borys says. “There’s no point keeping these secrets about how to do things.”
Bec Roldan is a multimedia science journalist based in New York City.
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