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ScienceOpen offers content hosting, context building and marketing services for publishers. See our tailored offerings

• For academic publishers  to promote journals and interdisciplinary collections
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ScienceOpen provides researchers with a wide range of tools to support their research – all for free. Here is a short checklist to make sure you are getting the most of the technological infrastructure and content that we have to offer. What can a researcher do on ScienceOpen? Continue reading “What can a Researcher do on ScienceOpen?”   

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A researcher’s complete guide to open access papers

Mathilde Darbier

Marketing Communications Manager

Open access is one of the most effective ways of ensuring your findings can be read and built upon by a broad audience. Sharing your papers and data without restrictions can help to build a better research culture, and lead to faster, more advanced outcomes for the global challenges we face today.

Open access isn’t an easy concept to grasp, however. In this blog, we provide you with a full overview of the various aspects of open access. We also cover the tools designed to help you discover freely-accessible papers and journals, including the Web of Science ™ and Journal Citation Reports ™.

• what open access is and how it developed
• the advantages of open access resources
• what to look out for when publishing open access papers
• the different types of open access available
• the costs involved in open access
• where you can find open access journals and papers

Looking for open access articles? Watch our video to quickly find and focus your search in the Web of Science.

What is open access and how did it develop?

Open access (OA) is the name for free, digital, full-text scientific and academic material made available online. As defined by Creative Commons, open access papers are “digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.” 1 The 1990s saw the beginning of the open access movement brought on by the widespread availability of the World Wide Web, although researchers in physics and computer science had been self-archiving work on the internet long before this method of publication was officially named open access. Self-archiving articles into an online depository helped researchers share their papers more widely, optimizing access and maximizing its subsequent impact.

What are the advantages of making papers open access?

One of the greatest benefits of making your material open access is that you can disseminate your research more rapidly and to a broader audience. Your work will be available to a wider set of researchers, including to researchers and students from a diverse setting, helping them advance their work more quickly and enrich their learning without restriction 2 . This widespread distribution helps share new ideas, stimulate new studies, and greatly improves research and discovery in a vast number of academic disciplines. It may also increase your chances of more citations and impact. 2

Benefit from open access data in the Web of Science and Journal Citation Reports

The Web of Science is one of the most trusted solutions for researchers to discover open access publications. Our publisher-neutral approach means that you can quickly find papers that are not only free to read, but also from reputable sources worth your time and attention.

Using the Web of Science, you can access more than 14 million peer-reviewed open access papers. 32% of 2015 to 2019 Web of Science Core Collection™ records point to open access content.

Watch this video or read our blog to learn more about how to discover open access content on the Web of Science. This also extends to the Journal Citation Reports, where we included new open access publication data in early 2020 ( find out more ). This helps the research community better understand the contribution of gold open access content to the literature and its influence on scholarly discourse.

The different types of open access

There are no single, agreed-upon definitions of open access types. However, there are five relatively common types of open access worth knowing about, regardless of whether they’re “officially” accepted:

These different types of open access describe various ways to make academic work freely available online. We discuss these in more detail below (click any of the above links to skip to this section). First, here’s a short summary about Creative Commons Licences.

Creative Commons Licences

Open access papers sometimes have lenient copyright and licensing restrictions depending on the open access route they have been published through, allowing anyone on the internet to read, download, copy and distribute material within reasonable use.

Derivative work can also be produced using some open access papers, providing the original author is credited. Creative Commons licences help you share scholarly material legally online with standardized copyright licences. Below is a brief explanation of the different Creative Commons licences available.

With Creative Commons licences covered, what are the differences between open access types?

Green open access

Green open access makes the author responsible for making an article freely available and archiving it, whether it is archived by sharing it through an institution’s repository, a personal website or another public archive.

Some versions of Green OA papers may not have been copyedited, but may have been peer reviewed:

• Pre-publication Green refers to the version of your work before it has been submitted to a journal, and is sometimes called the pre-print version.
• Post-publication Green refers to the final draft of your work that has been accepted for publication by a journal, before it has been copyedited, typeset and proofread. It is also referred to as the post-print version.

The publisher will keep a copy of the full, peer reviewed version of your work, which is called the Version of Record (VOR) and readers can access these reviewed, full-text versions of the paper for a fee. This version is not Green open access, but alternative versions such as the pre-publication and post-publication version can be accessed under Green open access. The rights for reuse may be limited with Green open access, and access to Green OA papers may be limited by a publisher embargo period. An embargo period is when access to scholarly articles is not open to readers who have not paid for access. Different journals may have different embargo periods, so it is important to find out if the journal you have chosen to publish with will apply one to your work.

Bronze open access No open access fee is paid for Bronze open access, with the publisher choosing to make material freely available online. 5 Publishers are entitled to revoke open access rights to Bronze materials at any time, leading some to debate whether this is in line with true open access criteria.

Gold open access

Gold open access means the publisher is responsible for making the published academic material freely available online. Gold open access papers mean that the Version of Record is published and made freely available online. A Creative Commons licence will be applied to Gold open access papers in most cases. The Version of Record will be the final, peer reviewed paper.

Gold OA will not charge readers to access a paper, instead often charging an article processing charge (APC) to cover the publishing and distribution costs, for which the author isn’t always responsible. An institution or funder may pay the APC. A key benefit of Gold open access publishing is that as the author, you will retain copyright over your work under a Creative Commons licence. The full, unrestricted reuse of published work, providing the original author is cited, is allowed with Gold OA.

Platinum and Diamond open access In the Platinum and Diamond open access models, authors, institutions, and funders do not pay open access fees, and material is made free to read online. The publisher will pay any fees applied during the publication process. Platinum and Diamond open access models are popular with university presses that account for publishing costs in their budgets.

Hybrid open access

Hybrid open access is a mixed model where journals publish both Hybrid and subscription content. It allows authors to pay an article publication charge and publish specific work as Gold open access papers.

As an author, you can benefit from Hybrid open access because it allows you to publish with trusted journals. Authors often are more concerned about which journal is best to publish with than which business model (i.e. subscription or open access) journals use.

This can help a journal transition to operating on an open access business model as it will increase the amount of open access content its community is publishing.

Despite these advantages, Hybrid open access is not without its critics. Some take issue with the practice of so-called ‘double dipping’, where publishers charge institutions twice for the same content: authors who make their papers available as OA, and libraries who subscribe to the journal. With a number of charges applied to the publication process, it’s important to know what fees apply to making your work open access, and who is responsible for paying them.

What are the costs involved with open access?

There are a huge number of journals to submit academic work to, and it can be hard to know which journal is right for your work.

If you are the author of a paper, you may have to pay a fee to publish your work, or your research funder or institution may pay the fees in part or in full for you. A 2011 report showed that open access publication fees were only paid with personal funding in 12%  of cases, with funders paying in 59% of cases, and universities in 24% of cases. 6

APCs, also known as publication fees, are applied by many open access journals to account for peer reviewing and editorial costs, and to make material available in both open access journals or hybrid journals. There are still journals that do not apply article processing charges, but these charges are the most common way journals generate their income.

Luckily, as an author you may not always have to pay the full fees when publishing your work. For instance, some libraries offer deals to publishers, charging reduced rate fees if they publish your work in specific open access journals. This means you may be able to save money on article processing charges when submitting your papers to these peer reviewed journals.

In some cases, charges may be lifted due to financial hardship or due to the economic status of an author’s geographic location. If you do not have funding for APCs, ask the journal’s editorial team for their waiver policy. We also recommend checking whether the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) lists the journal you would like to be published in. Make sure you also read our blog to learn how products like Journal Citation Reports and the Master Journal List ™  help you find the right open access journal for your research in the fastest possible time. You can also watch our on demand webinar on the same topic.

Where can I find open access journals, papers and data?

There are a number of online tools that can help you source OA journals and papers, and below are just a few.

• The Web of Science allows you to discover world-class research literature from specially selected, high-quality journals, and users can easily access millions of peer-reviewed open access articles. You can also use Kopernio , a free browser plugin featured in the Web of Science to get one click access to your PDF faster using open access alternatives when the PDF you are looking for is not available via your existing institutional subscription. Watch our video to learn more .
• Master Journal List Manuscript Matcher is the ultimate place to begin your search for journals. It is a free tool that helps you narrow down your journal options based on your research topic and goals, with special filters for open access journals
• Journal Citation Reports is the most powerful product for journal intelligence. It uses transparent, publisher-neutral data and statistics to provide unique insights into a journal’s role, influence and the open access options available to you.
• Directory of Open Access Journals is a community-built directory that provides access to peer reviewed journals.
• PubMed Central is run by the National Institute of Health and is a full-text archive of biomedical and life sciences journals, which increases visibility of scholarly material.
• Check.Submit. is an international, cross-sector initiative offering tools and resources to help you identify trustworthy journals for your research.
• ROAD allows you to search for OA papers by name, subject or ISSN number.

If you’re looking for open access data , make sure you also check out the Web of Science Data Citation Index ™. It boasts 9.7 million datasets sourced from 380 repositories.

Open access is central to advancing discovery and improving education worldwide. It helps authors distribute their work more widely, and enables researchers like you to access quality, often peer reviewed work for free.

To ensure you can get the most out of open access publishing, don’t forget to check out our video about discovering open access content on the Web of Science. If you want to better understand the open access journals available when publishing your work, this blog (and on-demand webinar) will point you to the right tools to use.

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How to Access Journal Articles Behind Paywalls

Science can’t advance without researchers being able to share their publications with collaborators and others and to access published papers as bases for their own hypotheses and work. The trend toward open-access availability of papers and the push for mandating publicly-funded research to be freely accessible to the public is still ongoing [1,2]. Until more literature is easily accessible, the path from the publication of an article to the eyes of a researcher in need of it is not always straightforward.

In this first of a two-part series, we review legal ways to access journal articles . Look out for our upcoming article on sharing your articles.

Access Journal Articles Behind Paywalls for Free

It’s an all-too-familiar frustration: you’re writing your latest research paper and sifting through PubMed [3] for sources to cite, and you come across an abstract where the authors describe experiments that would confirm or deny your burgeoning point…only to hit a paywall.

Another common dilemma: it’s your turn to lead journal club, and you want to cover the latest major publication on the gene many members of your group are researching, but like many just-published papers, it’s paywalled for the next 12 months.

How can you dig deeper to support your manuscript properly, or nab access to that hot new paper for group discussion, without paying the usually hefty single-article fee [4]…or breaking the law?

Check Your Institutions’ and Associations’ Subscriptions

Universities, colleges, and companies usually subscribe to a number of journals relevant to their research. You might have hit a paywall simply because you’re not logged in through your institution. If you’re on-site, check your internet connection. Your Wi-Fi device might have reverted to guest access that lacks privileges afforded to students, faculty, and staff of the institution, a common glitch.

If you’re working from home, have you logged in to your institution’s VPN or library proxy server? Some papers (especially older ones) that are not available via PubMed even when you log in through VPN or proxy could still be available through your university’s library. Clicking around on the library’s site often reveals different ranges of issue dates sorted under different databases, particularly for long-running journals.

Institutions where you are an alumnus could also be helpful here. Many universities include some extent of library access—often for a small annual fee—in their alumni programs. It’s frequently limited to physical copies or to a single database that is separate from the greater variety available to current students, but it could just uncover that specific article you seek.

Finally, are you a member of the Biophysical Society, AAAS, ASBMB [5,6,7], or other science society? These usually offer free or discounted subscriptions to the journals they publish.

Investigate Other Library Options

Your local library might subscribe to the journal(s) you’re trying to access. In many cases, the resources are only available on microfilm or microfiche.

And don’t forget good old interlibrary loans. It will take a few visits to websites of libraries where you aren’t a member and maybe a few phone calls as well, just to see which library has the right issue of the journal. Then, call your institution’s or city’s library and arrange for a loan from that other library. This may cost a nominal fee and may only allow you access to a hard copy. Also, keep in mind how soon you need the resource, as interlibrary loans often take weeks.

Get it From the Author

The first page of most papers contains an email address for the corresponding author for situations exactly like this! Contact info is also available on that webpage with the abstract preceding the page with the paywall. It might feel awkward to cold-email a researcher you don’t know for their paper, but if they respond, it would be all worthwhile.

Be sure to ask the author about any permission they have from the journal to share the paper, and give them the chance to check with the journal as they might also not know. (You could also look on How Can I Share It whether an author is allowed to share their work [8].) In many cases, journals give authors permission to share only pre-print versions of their papers, which suit most purposes and shouldn’t inhibit your work that uses that paper.

If you write to the corresponding author and can’t seem to get a response, check the authors’ lab group pages on their institutions’ websites as well as their social media pages. Some publishers, such as Springer Nature [9], are allowing authors to share their work, often in view-only mode, on social media, networks for researchers, personal websites, and public repositories without it being a copyright violation.

Try Unpaywall

Unpaywall [10], a service from the organization Our Research (formerly Impactstory) [11,12], legally harvests content from open-access sources such as university and government databases and authors’ and publishers’ webpages and makes them available in one place [13].

While there isn’t a search bar on its site to look for papers directly, it is integrated into Dimensions [14] and Scopus [15], where its database feeds into your search results [16]. If you’re accessing the web from a University of California campus or through their VPN or proxy, you’ll see Unpaywall as a link for accessing many of your search results. Otherwise, you may want to install Unpaywall as a browser plug-in; it’s available for Chrome [17] and Firefox [18]. It runs in the background while you browse, without the need for you to paste in article DOIs as in its previous iteration, OA Button (which is still available [19]).

Look for an Open-Access Alternative

Are you looking for an article to cite for backing up a statement? You might not need the particular one you’ve targeted. Similar work with results pointing to the same fact could be published elsewhere. This can happen because competing research groups often tend to publish parallel research at the same time, or else because findings are frequently reproduced by other labs to verify their integrity.

Sometimes a lab will publish figures analyzing the same data they had previously published in a new way, either in a review paper or in a subsequent research article where new, related data build over the old data. Alternatively, a review paper by another lab citing the paper you can’t access could cite the fact you seek substantially enough to serve as an adequate citation.

With any luck, you could find a source fitting any of these scenarios that is open access and can replace the citation you’d initially desired.

When it’s Time to Open Your Wallet

If none of the above options works, you may have to fork it over and pay the journal. Here are your options:

Purchase or Rent the Individual Paper

If it’s a particular paper that you can’t obtain for free and for which you just can’t find an open-access substitute, you may need to invest in access to that one paper. It may not be necessary to purchase it at the full price indicated by the paywall.

If the journal is published by a scientific society of which you are a member, the price is likely discounted for you. If the paper is from a Nature -branded journal, you could use ReadCube [20], which offers three different tiers of access:

• most cheaply, to rent the paper for 48 hours;
• intermediately, to purchase cloud access;
• and most expensively, to purchase the full PDF.

If this is a journal club article , you’ll need to purchase the PDF because you wouldn’t otherwise be able to print or share the paper with your group, just as you wouldn’t be able to import it into your reference manager. The lower tiers would still allow you to read the information from the paper for your use, and of course, you could always enter all the citation info into your reference manager.

Get a Personal Subscription

If you find yourself wishing you had access to different papers and a large proportion of them are from the same journal, it might be worthwhile to subscribe to that journal.

Perhaps you’re having a year during which you’re writing more than usual—the last year of your PhD, a period of grant-writing for a nonprofit startup that likely has few or no journal subscriptions of its own, or a year several years into a professorship at which point you’re hoping for tenure next quarter—and you might want to subscribe to a journal or two that particularly pertain to your work for that year (subscriptions are annual in most cases).

Admittedly, this is an expensive option, although personal, non-commercial subscriptions are usually priced lower than institutional ones. For instance, yearly individual subscriptions are $235 for PNAS [21], $835 for JLR [22] (though a subscription comes free of charge to members of ASBMB [23]), and $845 for Environmental Microbiology [24].

Have we missed any legal ways to access articles? If so, leave us a comment below. Also, make sure to check out our related Bitesize Bio articles on Common Myths of Copyright and Open Access: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly for more answers to your burning questions about copyright and open access.

For more tips on keeping track of the scientific literature, head over to the Bitesize Bio Managing the Scientific Literature Hub .

• Piwowar H, Priem J, Orr R. The Future of OA: A large-scale analysis projecting Open Access publication and readership . bioRxiv 795310; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/795310 [PREPRINT]
• Rabesandratana, T. Will the world embrace Plan S, the radical proposal to mandate open access to science papers? Science , Jan. 3, 2019.
• PubMed . Accessed Sep. 9, 2020.
• sporte (Porter, S). How much does it cost to get a scientific paper? ScienceBlogs, Jan. 9, 2012. Accessed Aug. 31, 2020.
• Biophysical Society . Accessed Sep. 9, 2020.
• American Association for the Advancement of Science . Accessed Sep. 9, 2020.
• American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology . Accessed Sep. 9, 2020.
• How Can I Share It . Accessed Sep. 9, 2020.
• Springer Nature. SharedIt . Accessed Sep. 9, 2020.
• Unpaywall: An open database of 20 million free scholarly articles . Accessed Sep. 9, 2020.
• Our Research . Accessed Sep. 9, 2020.
• Heather. Impactstory is now Our Research . Our Research blog, July 4, 2019. Accessed Sep. 1, 2020.
• Unpaywall due for release 4th April . LibraryLearningSpace, March 22, 2017. Accessed Sep. 1, 2020.
• Dimensions . Accessed Sep. 9, 2020.
• Elsevier. Scopus . Accessed Sep. 9, 2020.
• Heather. Elsevier becomes newest customer of Unpaywall Data Feed . Our Research blog, July 26, 2018. Accessed Sep. 1, 2020.
• Chrome Web Store – Extensions . Accessed Sep. 9, 2020.
• Unpaywall – Get this Extension for Firefox . Accessed Sep. 9, 2020.
• Open Access Button . Accessed Sep. 9, 2020.
• Papers App. What is ReadCube Checkout? What are the purchase options? Accessed Sep. 9, 2020.
• Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 2021 Subscription Rates . Accessed Sep. 9, 2020.
• Journal of Lipid Research. Print Subscriptions . Accessed Sep. 9, 2020.
• Member subscriptions . American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, 2020. Accessed Sep. 9, 2020.
• Wiley Online Library. Step 1 of 4 – Choose Subscription . Accessed Sep. 9, 2020.

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Apps that can help you locate open articles.

• Open Access Helper There are more than 23 million Open Access versions of otherwise "paywalled" scientific articles. Open Acess Helper for iOS and Open Access Helper for Safari (macOS) are designed to help you get easy access to these articles, with a lot of help from the awesome APIs from unpaywall.org and core.ac.uk.

There are extensions you can add to your browser, which will help you identify Open Access articles.

• Unpaywall Extension – Based on the Unpaywall database , their browser extension will use the information on a web page to link you to an open version of an article is freely available.
• OAButton – Once you know about an article, you can enter the title or DOI into the website and determine if an Open Access version is available. There’s also a Firefox extension you can use while you’re searching. From OA.Works .
• CORE Discovery - Based on the CORE Discovery d atabase.

Open Access Articles

You've heard about Open Access journals. If you’re a student you will leave JHU at some point and that means you won’t have access to our extensive library collection. You’ll need open access then. Perhaps you're interested in Open Access as a social justice issue and wish to utilize openly available articles in your own research right now. The Library can help with that! Below are groups of tools and resources that can help you find Open Articles about a topic.

Innovation and research around Open Access, Open Data, and Open Science is ongoing, so more tools will become available with time. Check back with the library to learn more about the always-changing world of scholarly publishing. And let us know if you find other resources that point to Open Access articles.

Library Databases

Since many research funders and institutions require articles to be openly available, many library databases index Open Access journals like PLOS Biology , Nature Communications , and Sociological Science . While many databases include OA journals, they don’t all give you an easy way to limit a search to just OA articles. The databases below let you limit to Open Access articles.

• Scopus – Once you have a result list, click the Open Access box under Access Type in the left column.
• Web of Science – Once you have a result list, click the Open Access box under Filter by in the left column.
• PubMed – Once you have a result list, click ‘Free full text’ under Text Availability in the left column.

Some disciplines and funding agencies have repositories whose purpose is to openly and freely share research. These repositories offer a variety of types of articles. Without getting into a lot of detail, the article types include:

• Preprint – an article that hasn’t gone through peer review at a journal.
• Postprint – an article that has gone through peer review, but doesn’t include the final copyediting and page numbering from the journal. This is also referred to as the author’s final version/manuscript.
• Version of record – the article as it appeared in the journal; it has been peer reviewed and copyedited. This is also referred to as the published article.

Two of the best known repositories are

• arXiv is the oldest repository, hosting articles on physics, mathematics, computational biology, and other fields of research. Preprints, postprints, and published papers are available here.
• PubMed Central is run by the National Institutes of Health. The NIH requires articles resulting from their funding to be openly available 12 months after it’s been published. The articles in PMC are either postprints or the version of record.

There are plenty of other repositories out there. Take a peek at OpenDOAR , the directory of open access repositories.

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• Research Skills Blog

5 free and legal ways to get the full text of research articles

By Carol Hollier on 07-Apr-2021 13:23:17

1.  Use your library if you have one !

If you are affiliated with a university, you probably have free library access to the full text of millions of research articles.   The library will have subscribed to these journals on your behalf. The smartest thing you can do for accessing research articles is familiarize yourself with your own library.

• If you search a database your library will link from the records to the full text if they have it—all you need to do is click through the links.
• When they do not have a copy of an article, a university library can get it for you from another library. This inter-library loan service is usually free to users.
• Your library might use a browser extension like Lean Library or LibKey Nomad to link you to the library subscription or open access full text from wherever you are on the internet.
• Google Scholar lets you configure your account to get links straight to your library’s subscription copy of an article.  But remember--side-by-side to library subscriptions for legitimate research, Google Scholar includes links to articles published in predatory and unreliable journals that would be unwise to credit in your own work.  Learn more about predatory journals.

If you are not affiliated with a university library, there are still ways you can successfully—and legally—get the full text of research articles.

2.  Open Access browser extensions  

More and more research is published Open Access as governments around the world are mandating that research paid for by taxpayer money be freely available to those taxpayers.

Browser extensions have been created to make it easy to spot when the full text of an article is free.   Some of the best are CORE Discovery , Unpaywall and Open Access Button .

Learn more about difference between discovery and access and why it matters for good research: Where to search - Best Practice for Literature Searching - LibGuides at IFIS

3. Google Scholar

You can search the article title inside quotation marks on Google Scholar to see if a link to a copy of the article appears.   If it does, be sure to pay attention to what version of the article you are linking to, to be sure you are getting what you think you’re getting.  These links can lead to an article's published version of record, a manuscript version, or to a thesis or conference proceeding with the same title and author as the article you expected to find.   

4.  Researcher platforms

 A Google Scholar search might lead you to a researcher platform like Academia.edu or ResearchGate .   There, if you set up an account, you can sometimes download or request a copy of the text.  Again, pay attention to which version of the text you get!

5.  Write to the author

If you can’t get a copy by other means, you can write to an article’s corresponding author and (politely!) ask them to send you a copy. Their contact information, usually an email address, will be listed in the information you find about the article, either in a database record for the article or on the publishing journal’s page for it. Many authors are happy to share a copy of their work.

Three bonus ways that might work depending on where you live:

1.  A nearby university library might offer access to articles even if you do not work or study there.

Members of the public are sometimes allowed access to university journal subscriptions through visitor access or a walk-in user service. You usually need to use the collections from a dedicated computer terminal located in a library and may need to make an appointment before you go. Do your research before showing up to make sure you bring the correct documents and equipment (like a flash drive) along.

2.  Try your public library

In some countries, public libraries partner with publishers to give the public access to research articles.   In the UK, for instance, many public libraries participate in the Access to Research scheme, which gives members of the public on-site access to over 30 million academic articles. Contact your local public library to learn what is available to you.

3.  Research4Life

In other countries, your institution might have access to a massive collection of research articles and databases through the publisher/library/United Nations agency initiative Research4Life . Check to see if you already have access, and if not, if your institution might be eligible to join. Membership is only available on an organizational or institutional level.  

Remember —even though you now have a lot of strategies for finding the full text of articles, research should never be led by the articles you can access most easily.

Good research is driven by first figuring out what articles are most relevant to your question and then getting the full text of what you need. One of the best ways to do this is to use a good discipline-specific database, like FSTA for the sciences of food and health.  

Learn more about difference between discovery and access and why it matters for good research:

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Publish with ScienceOpen

Researchers can publish different types of manuscripts on ScienceOpen. Your work will be published with a creative commons CC BY 4.0 attribution license and assigned a Crossref document object identifier (DOI). Submission of articles or posters is free of charge.

To submit a manuscript for publication, first register at ScienceOpen and create a user account ( www.scienceopen.com/register ) attached to your ORCID ID .

Publishing your work on ScienceOpen

You are invited to publish your work on ScienceOpen to get credited immediately for your work and let your peers review and comment your paper.

Our BASIC publishing model with FREE submission and open peer-reviewing works in 2 steps:

Step 1 — you submit your manuscript as a PDF and then it is uploaded as a preprint on ScienceOpen Preprints to receive immediately a fully citable CrossRef document object identifier (DOI) for your work. See the next section for how it works. You can then use the ScienceOpen platform to invite peers as potential reviewers. Submitted reviews will be openly displayed on ScienceOpen together with your work. According to the recommendations of the reviewers you may modify your work and submit a second, revised version, if required.

Step 2 — after having received at least 2 independent reviews with recommendation for acceptance in its present version, you can decide to finally publish your work on ScienceOpen Research . We will then provide a full typesetting and digital conversion of the manuscript to prepare a final PDF and XML version of your work. Your work is furthermore automatically added to our publication platform with over 90 million scientific records. ONLY if you made your decision for this option in step 2, we will charge you or your institution 400 USD for our additional services.

Publishing preprints

The “Preprint” is a format to share early stage results with a larger community for feedback, while retaining the right to publish formally in a scholarly journal at a later date. Wikipedia hosts a list of academic journals by preprint policy and publisher policies can also be found at can also be found at SHERPA/RoMEO .

Submit your preprint via the “Submit a manuscript” button on our ScienceOpen Research Preprints collection page. The simple upload form allows you to link your ORCID ID, add co-authors, declare funding, link to datasets and more. After submission your preprint will undergo an editorial review to check for completeness and basic scholarly integrity in line with our general publication guidelines . Preprints in all languages are welcome but we recommend to include an English language abstract and title to make your work accessible to a broader audience worldwide. After acceptance by the editorial team, your preprint will be published on ScienceOpen at ScienceOpen Research Preprints with a Crossref digital object identifier (DOI), a CC BY 4.0 attribution license and a preprint flag. The preprint is then open to peer review on the ScienceOpen platform. See our peer review guidelines and get involved.

ScienceOpen has a preprint filter integrated in our search engine to make preprints easily discoverable among our over 90 million records – 2 million of which are preprints. ScienceOpen aggregates preprints by integrating arXiv , BioRxiv , Preprints.org , PeerJ Preprints , ChemRxiv , and Open Science Framework repositories . Simply check the ‘preprint’ box after selecting the filter to restrict your search to preprint content. Preprint articles can then be filtered by discipline or keyword and sorted by Altmetric score, average rating, citations, date of publication, view count, and relevance.

Preprints can also be added to ScienceOpen Collections by collection editors and can at a later stage be exchanged for a fully published article (see the first section above). Adding preprints speeds up research communication and diversifies available research on the topic of the collection. Preprint authors can at any time add a lay summary, change a thumbnail image, or keywords and disciplines to increase the discoverability of their research within the ScienceOpen environment and the wider scholarly community.

There are many benefits to publishing preprints and including them in ongoing research. You would like to hear an expert opinion on your work? Invite a reviewer! At ScienceOpen, your published preprint can be openly and publicly reviewed by expert peers.

Publishing posters

Conference posters are an effective way to  communicate the essence of a research project in a compact space  and provide an opportunity to present preliminary results and get feedback from the scientific community before publishing. Early career researchers often have their first experience of presenting their work in the form of a conference poster.

To help researchers share their results beyond the conference, ScienceOpen allows any scholar to publish a poster on our platform for free in just a few minutes. Simply register on ScienceOpen with your  ORCID  and then click on the ‘Submit manuscript’ button in the  ScienceOpen Posters  Collection header. Upload your poster as a PDF file and add metadata such as title, abstract and keywords plus a catchy image and you are ready to go! An editor will review your submission before publication. ScienceOpen offers a range of tools to  increase your digital profile . You can share your published poster on social media with just a click and then track usage on the article page. Next to a full suite of tools to promote and track usage and impact, all posters receive a CC BY license.

Conference organizers interested in promoting a selection of their posters or proceedings, as for example the  Model Reduction of Parametrized Systems  conference that took place in Nantes in April 2018, should contact the  ScienceOpen team  for a quote. A branded collection landing page can significantly increase your reach.

This feature is still in beta testing, so your feedback is particularly welcome under [email protected] .

How to peer review?

ScienceOpen offers a full suite of tools to peer review preprints and posters. See our peer review guidelines . Reviews are published with the author’s ORCID and a Crossref DOI for certain discoverability. Any user on ScienceOpen can invite another researcher to formally review any preprint .

To peer review a preprint, first register with ScienceOpen and ORCID. During the registration, link your ScienceOpen profile to ORCID publication history. Reviewers are required to have published at least five scientific manuscripts. If you have questions about updating your ORCID profile to reflect your prior publications, feel free to contact us  here . Before you review an article, make sure to check out our Checklist for Reviewers and read the detailed guidelines for peer review at ScienceOpen here . Reviewers have to declare any potential conflicting interests before submitting their review – read our Competing Interests policy for more information.

Competing interests

Reviewers and authors must declare any potential conflicting interests arising from personal, financial or professional/academic relationships or dependencies that may have influenced their objectivity or professional judgment. Authors should declare any conflicting interests upon manuscript submission; reviewers before submitting their review.

The transparent declaration of competing interests allows others to evaluate the neutrality of the reviewer’s judgment and to estimate the influence of third parties on the presented content.

Please see here for further details or contact the editorial office ([email protected]) in case you are uncertain whether a specific conflict has to be declared or not.

SpringerOpen

The SpringerOpen portfolio has grown tremendously since its launch in 2010, so that we now offer researchers from all areas of science, technology, medicine, the humanities and social sciences a place to publish open access in journals. Publishing with SpringerOpen makes your work freely available online for everyone, immediately upon publication, and our high-level peer-review and production processes guarantee the quality and reliability of the work. Open access books are published by our Springer imprint.

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May 1, 2024

18 min read

Can Scientific Thinking Save the World?

A physicist, a philosopher and a psychologist are working together to bring better, smarter decision-making to the masses

By Lee Billings

Kislev/Getty Images

A physicist, a philosopher and a psychologist walk into a classroom.

Although it sounds like a premise for a joke, this was actually the origin of a unique collaboration between Nobel Prize–winning physicist Saul Perlmutter, philosopher John Campbell and the psychologist Rob MacCoun. Spurred by what they saw as a perilously rising tide of irrationality, misinformation and sociopolitical polarization, they teamed up in 2011 to create a multidisciplinary course at the University of California, Berkeley, with the modest goal of teaching undergraduate students how to think—more specifically, how to think like a scientist . That is, they wished to show students how to use scientific tools and techniques for solving problems, making decisions and distinguishing reality from fantasy . The course proved popular, drawing enough interest to run for more than a decade (and counting) while sparking multiple spin-offs at other universities and institutions.

Now the three researchers are bringing their message to the masses with a new book, Third Millennium Thinking: Creating Sense in a World of Nonsense . And their timing is impeccable: Our world seems to have only become more uncertain and complex since their course began, with cognitive biases and information overload all too easily clouding debates over high-stakes issues such as climate change , global pandemics , and the development and regulation of artificial intelligence . But one need not be an academic expert or policymaker to find value in this book’s pages. From parsing the daily news to treating a medical condition, talking with opposite-minded relatives at Thanksgiving or even choosing how to vote in an election, Third Millennium Thinking offers lessons that anyone can use—individually and collectively—to make smarter, better decisions in everyday life.

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Scientific American spoke with Perlmutter, Campbell and MacCoun about their work—and whether it’s wishful thinking to believe logic and evidence can save the world.

[ An edited transcript of the interview follows .]

How did all of this begin, and what motivated each of you to take on such an ambitious project?

PERLMUTTER: In 2011 I was looking at our society making big decisions: “Should we raise the debt ceiling?”—things like that. And surprisingly enough, we were not doing it in a very sensible way. The conversations I was hearing about these political decisions weren’t like those I’d have over lunch with a bunch of scientists at the lab—not because of politics, but rather because of the style of how scientists tend to think about solving problems. And I thought, “Well, where did scientists learn this stuff? And is it possible for us to articulate what these concepts are and teach them in a way that people would apply them in their whole lives, not just in a lab? And can we empower them to think for themselves using the best available cognitive tools rather than teaching them to ‘just trust scientists?’”

So that was the starting point of it. But that’s not the whole story. If you put a bunch of physicists together in a faculty meeting, they don’t necessarily act much more rational than any other faculty members, right? So it was clear we really needed expertise from other fields, too, such as John’s expertise in philosophy and Rob’s expertise in social psychology. We actually put a little sign up looking for people who’d want to help develop the course. It said something like, “Are you embarrassed watching our society make decisions? Come help invent our course; come help save the world.”

MacCOUN: When Saul approached me about the course, I was delighted to work with him. Even back in 2011 I was filled with angst about the inefficacy of policy debates; I had spent years working on two big hot-button issues: drug legalization and open military service for gay and lesbian individuals. I worked with policymakers and advocates on both sides, just trying to be an honest broker in these debates to help clarify the truth—you know, “What do we actually know, and what don’t we know?” And the quality of debate for both of those issues was so bad, with so much distortion of research findings. So when Saul mentioned the course to me, I just jumped at the chance to work on this.

CAMPBELL: It was obvious to me that this was philosophically very interesting. I mean, we’re talking about how science inputs into decision-making. And in decision-making, there are always questions of value, as well as questions of fact; questions about where you want to go, as well as questions about how do we get there; and questions about what “the science” can answer. And it’s very interesting to ask, “Can we tease apart facts and values in decision-making? Does the science have anything to tell us about values?” Well, likely not. Scientists always shy away from telling us about values. So we need to know something about how broader effective concerns can be woven in with scientific results in decision-making.

Some of this is about how science is embedded in the life of a community. You take a village—you have the pub, you have the church, you know clearly what they are for and how they function in the whole community. But then the science, what is that? Is it just this kind of shimmering thing that produces telephones, TVs and stuff? How does it fit into the life of the community? How does it embed in our civilization? Classically, it’s been regarded as a “high church” kind of thing. The scientists are literally in an ivory tower and do as they please. And then occasionally, they produce these gadgets, and we’re not sure if we should like them or not. But we really need a more healthy, grounded conception of how science plays into our broader society.

I’m glad you brought up the distinction between facts and values. To me, that overlaps with the distinction between groups and individuals—“values” feel more personal and subjective and thus more directly applicable to a reader, in a way. And the book is ultimately about how individuals can empower themselves with so-called scientific thinking—presumably to live their best lives based on their personal values. But how does that accord with this other assertion you’ve just made, saying science likely doesn’t have anything to tell us about values in the first place?

PERLMUTTER: Well, I think what John was getting at is: even once we develop all these ways to think through facts, we don’t want to stop thinking through values, right? One point here is that we’ve actually made progress together thinking about values over centuries. And we have to keep talking to each other. But it’s still very helpful to separate the values and the facts because each requires a slightly different style of thinking, and you want people to be able to do both.

MacCOUN: That’s right. Scientists can’t tell us and shouldn’t tell us, in fact, what values to hold. Scientists get in trouble when they try that. We talk in the book about “pathologies” of science that sometimes happen and how those can be driven by values-based thinking. Regarding values, where science excels is in clarifying where and how they conflict so that in public policy analysis, you can inform the trade-offs to make sure that the stakeholders in a debate empirically understand how its various outcomes advance certain values while impeding others. Usually what happens next is finding solutions that minimize those trade-offs and reduce the friction between conflicting values.

And let’s be clear: when we talk about values, we sometimes talk as if people are either one thing or another. You know, someone may ask, “Are you for or against ‘freedom?’” But in reality, everyone values freedom. It’s just a question of how much, of how we differ in our rankings of such things. And we’re all looking for some way to pursue more than one value at a time, and we need other people to help us get there.

PERLMUTTER: And let’s remember that we’re not even consistent within our own selves about our individual rankings of values, which tend to fluctuate a lot based on the situation.

I love how our discussion is now reflecting the style of the book: breezy and approachable but also unflinching in talking about complexity and uncertainty. And in it, you’re trying to give readers a “tool kit” for navigating such things. That’s great, yet it can be challenging for readers who might assume it’s, say, a science-infused self-help book offering them a few simple rules about how to improve their rational thinking. This makes me wonder: If you did have to somehow reduce the book’s message to something like a series of bullet points on a note card, what would that be? What are the most essential tools in the kit?

CAMPBELL: This may be a bit ironic, but I was reading somewhere recently that where AI programs such as ChatGPT really go wrong is in not giving sources. Most of these tools don’t tell you what evidence they’re using for their outputs. And you’d think, of course, we should always show what evidence we have for anything we’re gonna say. But really, we can’t do that. Most of us can’t remember the evidence for half of what we know. What we can usually recall is how likely we thought some assertion was to be true, how probable we thought it was. And keeping track of this is a worthwhile habit of mind: if you’re going to act on any belief you might have, you need to know the strength with which you can hold that belief.

PERLMUTTER: We spend a fair amount of time on this in the book because it allows you to see that the world doesn’t come to us with certainty in almost anything. Even when we’re pretty sure of something, we’re only pretty sure, and there’s real utility in having a sense of the possibility for something contradicting what we think or expect. Many people do this naturally all the time, thinking about the odds for placing a bet on their favorite sports team or about the chance of a rain shower spoiling a picnic. Acknowledging uncertainty puts your ego in the right place. Your ego should, in the end, be attached to being pretty good at knowing how strong or weak your trust is in some fact rather than in being always right. Needing to always be right is a very problematic way to approach the world. In the book, we compare it to skiing down a mountain with all your weight rigid on both legs; if you don’t ever shift your stance to turn and slow down, you might go very fast, but you usually don’t get very far before toppling over! So instead you need to be able to maneuver and adjust to keep track of what it is that you really do know versus what you don’t. That’s how to actually get wherever you’re trying to go, and it’s also how to have useful conversations with other people who may not agree with you.

MacCOUN: And that sense of working together is important because these habits of mind we’re discussing aren’t just about your personal decision-making; they’re also about how science works in a democracy. You know, scientists end up having to work with people they disagree with all the time. And they cultivate certain communal ways of doing that—because it’s not enough to just be a “better” thinker; even people well-trained in these methods make mistakes. So you also need these habits at a communal level for other people to keep you honest. That means it’s okay, and necessary even, to interact with people who disagree with you—because that’s how you find out when you’re making mistakes. And it doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll change your mind. But it’ll improve your thinking about your own views.

So in summary:

Try to rank your confidence in your beliefs.

Try to update your beliefs based on new evidence and don’t fear being (temporarily) wrong.

Try to productively engage with others who have different beliefs than you.

That’s a pretty good “top three” list, I think! But, pardon my cynicism, do you worry that some of this might come off as rather quaint? We mentioned at the outset how this project really began in 2011, not much more than a decade ago. Yet some would probably argue that social and technological changes across that time have now effectively placed us in a different situation, a different world. It seems—to me at least—on average much harder now than it was 10 years ago for people with divergent beliefs and values to have a pleasant, productive conversation. Are the challenges we face today really things that can be solved by everyone just getting together and talking?

CAMPBELL: I agree with you that this sort of cynicism is now widespread. Across the past few decades we seem to have forgotten how to have a conversation across a fundamental divide, so now we take for granted that it’s pointless to try to convert those holding different views. But the alternative is to run society by coercion. And just beating people down with violent subjugation is not a long-term tenable solution. If you’re going to coerce, you have to at least show your work. You have to engage with other people and explain why you think your policies are good.

MacCOUN: You can think of cynicism as this god-awful corrosive mix of skepticism and pessimism. At the other extreme, you have gullibility, which, combined with optimism, leads to wishful thinking. And that’s really not helpful either. In the book we talk about an insight Saul had, which is that scientists tend to combine skepticism with optimism—a combo I’d say is not generally cultivated in our society. Scientists are skeptical, not gullible, but they’re optimistic, not pessimistic: they tend to assume that problems have a solution. So scientists sitting around the table are more likely to be trying to figure out fixes for a problem rather than bemoaning how terrible it is.

PERLMUTTER: This is something we’ve grappled with, and there are a couple of elements, I think, that are important to transmit about it. One is that there are good reasons to be disappointed when you look at the leaders of our society. They’ve structurally now gotten themselves into a fix, where they seem unable to even publicly say what they believe, let alone find real compromises on divisive issues. Meanwhile you can find lots of examples of “citizen assembly” events where a random selection of average people who completely disagree and support the opposite sides of the political spectrum sit down together and are much more able to have a civil, thoughtful conversation than their sociopolitical leaders can. That makes me think most of the [people in the] country (but not all!) could have a very reasonable conversation with each other. So clearly there’s an opportunity that we haven’t taken advantage of to structurally find ways to empower those conversations, not just the leaders trying to act for us. That’s something to be optimistic about. Another is that the daily news portrays the world as a very scary and negative place—but we know the daily news is not offering a very good representative take on the true state of the world, especially regarding the huge improvements in human well-being that have occurred over the past few decades.

So it feels to me that many people are living in “crisis” mode because they’re always consuming news that’s presenting us crises every moment and driving us apart with wedge issues. And I think there’s optimism to be found in looking for ways to talk together again. As John says, that’s the only game in town: to try to work with people until you learn something together, as opposed to just trying to win and then having half your population being unhappy.

CAMPBELL: We are maybe the most tribal species on the planet, but we are also perhaps the most amazingly flexible and cooperative species on the planet. And as Saul said, in these almost town-hall-style deliberative citizen assemblies you see this capacity for cooperation coming out, even among people who’d be bitterly divided and [belong to] opposite tribes otherwise—so there must be ways to amplify that and to escape being locked into these tribal schisms.

MacCOUN: And it’s important to remember that research on cooperation suggests you don’t need to have everybody cooperating to get the benefits. You do need a critical mass, but you’re never going to get everyone, so you shouldn’t waste your time trying to reach 100 percent. [Political scientist] Robert Axelrod and others studying the evolution of cooperation have shown that if cooperators can find each other, they can start to thrive and begin attracting other cooperators, and they can become more robust in the face of those who are uncooperative or trying to undermine cooperation. So somehow getting that critical mass is probably the best you can hope for.

I’m sure it hasn’t escaped anyone’s notice that as we discuss large-scale social cooperation, we’re also in an election year in the U.S., ostensibly the world’s most powerful democracy. And sure, part of the equation here is breaking down walls with basic acts of kindness and humility: love thy neighbor, find common ground, and so on. But what about voting? Does scientific decision-making give us some guidance on “best practices” there?

PERLMUTTER: Well, clearly we want this to be something that transcends election years. But in general, you should avoid making decisions—voting included—purely based on fear. This is not a time in the world where fear should be the dominant thing driving our individual or collective actions. Most of our fears divide us, yet most of our strength is found in working together to solve problems. So one basic thing is not to let yourself be flustered into voting for anyone or anything out of fear. But another is to look for leaders who use and reflect the scientific style of thinking, in which you’re open to being wrong, you’re bound by evidence, and you’re able to change your mind if it turns out that you were pursuing a bad plan. And that’s something that unfortunately we very rarely see.

CAMPBELL: At the moment we have an abundance of free speech—everyone can get on to some kind of social media and explain their views to the entire country. But we seem to have forgotten that the whole point of free speech was the testing of ideas. That was why it seemed like such a good thing: through free speech, new ideas can be generated and discussed and tested. But that idea of testing the ideas you freely express has just dropped out of the culture. We really need to tune back in to that in how we teach and talk about free speech and its value. It’s not just an end in itself, you know?

MacCOUN: And let’s be mindful of some lessons from history, too. For a lot of these issues that are so polarizing and divisive, it’s probably going to turn out that neither side was completely right, and there was some third possibility that didn’t occur to most, if any, of us. This happens in science all the time, with each victorious insight usually being provisional until the next, better theory or piece of evidence comes along. And in the same way, if we can’t move past arguing about our current conception of these problems, we’re trapping ourselves in this one little region of conceptual space when the solution might lie somewhere outside. This is one of very many cognitive traps we talk about in the book. Rather than staking out our hill to die on, we should be more open to uncertainty and experimentation: we test some policy solution to a problem, and if it doesn’t work, we’re ready to rapidly make adjustments and try something else.

Maybe we can practice what we preach here, this idea of performing evidence-based testing and course correction and escaping various sorts of cognitive traps. While you were working on this book, did you find and reflect on any irrational habits of mind you might have? And was there a case where you chose a hill to die on, and you were wrong, and you begrudgingly adjusted?

MacCOUN: Yeah, in the book we give examples of our own personal mistakes. One from my own research involves the replicability crisis and people engaging in confirmation bias. I had written a review paper summarizing evidence that seemed to show that decriminalizing drugs—that is, removing criminal penalties for them—did not lead to higher levels of use. After writing it, I had a new opportunity to test that hypothesis, looking at data from Italy, where in the 1970s they’d basically decriminalized personal possession of small quantities of all drugs. And then they recriminalized them in 1990. And then they redecriminalized in 1993. So it was like a perfect opportunity. And the data showed drug related deaths actually went down when they reinstituted penalties and went back up again when the penalties were removed. And this was completely opposite of what I had already staked my reputation on! And so, well, I had a personal bias, right? And that’s really the only reason I went and did more research, digging deeper on this Italian thing, because I didn’t like the findings. So across the same span of time I looked at Spain (a country that had decriminalized without recriminalizing) and at Germany (a country that never decriminalized during that time), and all three showed the same death pattern. This suggests that the suspicious pattern of deaths in fact had nothing to do with penalties. Now, I think that leads to the correct conclusion—my original conclusion, of course! But the point is: I’m embarrassed to admit I had fallen into the trap of confirmation bias—or, really, of its close cousin called disconfirmation bias, where you’re much tougher on evidence that seems to run counter to your beliefs. It’s a teachable moment, for sure.

CAMPBELL: It takes a lot of courage to admit these sorts of things and make the necessary transitions. One cognitive trap that affects many of us is what’s called the implicit bias blind spot, where you can be really subtle and perceptive in spotting other people’s biases but not your own. You can often see a bias of some sort in an instant in other people. But what happens when you look at yourself? The reaction is usually, “Na, I don't do that stuff!” You know, I must have been through hundreds and hundreds of student applications for admission or searches for faculty members, and I never spotted myself being biased at all, not once. “I just look at the applications straight,” right? But that can’t always be true because the person easiest to fool is yourself! Realizing that can be such a revelation.

PERLMUTTER: And this really informs one of the book’s key points: that we need to find better ways to work with people with whom we disagree—because one of the very best ways to get at your own biases is to find somebody who disagrees with you and is strongly motivated to prove you wrong. It’s hard, but you really do need the loyal opposition. Thinking back, for instance, to the big race for measuring the cosmological expansion of the universe that led to the discovery of dark energy, it was between my team and another team. Sometimes my colleagues and I would see members of the other team showing up to do their observations at the telescopes just as we were leaving from doing ours, and it was uncomfortable knowing both teams were chasing the same thing. On the other hand, that competition ensured we’d each try to figure out if the other team was making mistakes, and it greatly improved the confidence we collectively had in our results. But it’s not good enough just to have two opposing sides—you also need ways for them to engage with each other.

I realize I’ve inadvertently left probably the most basic question for last. What exactly is “third millennium thinking?”

PERLMUTTER: That’s okay, we actually leave explaining this to the book’s last chapter, too!

MacCOUN: Third millennium thinking is about recognizing a big shift that’s underway. We all have a sense of what the long millennia predating science must have been like, and we all know the tremendous advances that gradually came about as the modern scientific era emerged—from the practices of various ancient civilizations to the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, all those shifts in thinking that led to the amazing scientific revolution that has so profoundly changed our world here in what, until the end of the 20th century, was the second millennium. But there’s also been disenchantment with science, especially recently. And there’s validity to concerns that science was sometimes just a handmaiden of the powerful and that scientists sometimes wield more authority than they deserve to advance their own personal projects and politics. And sometimes science can become pathological; sometimes it can fail.

A big part of third millennium thinking is acknowledging science’s historic faults but also its capacity for self-correction, some of which we’re seeing today. We think this is leading us into a new era in which science is becoming less hierarchical. It’s becoming more interdisciplinary and team-based and, in some cases, more approachable for everyday people to be meaningfully involved—think of so-called citizen science projects. Science is also becoming more open, where researchers must show their work by making their data and methods more readily available so that others can independently check it. And we hope these sorts of changes are making scientists more humble: This attitude of “yeah, I’ve got the Ph.D., so you listen to me,” that doesn’t necessarily work anymore for big, divisive policy issues. You need a more deliberative consultation in which everyday people can be involved. Scientists do need to stay in their lane to some extent and not claim authority just based on their pedigree—the authority comes from the method used, not from the pedigree.

We see these all connected in their potential to advance a new way of doing science and of being scientists, and that’s what third millennium thinking is about.

CAMPBELL: With the COVID pandemic, I think we’ve all sadly become very familiar with the idea that the freedom of the individual citizen is somehow opposed to the authority of the scientist. You know, “the scientist is a person who will boss you around, diminish your freedom and inject you with vaccines laced with mind-controlling nanobots” or whatever. And it’s such a shame. It’s so debilitating when people use or see science like that. Or alternatively, you might say, “Well, I’m no scientist, and I can’t do the math, so I’ll just believe and do whatever they tell me.” And that really is relinquishing your freedom. Science should be an enabler of individual power, not a threat to your freedom. Third millennium thinking is about achieving that, allowing as many people as possible to be empowered—to empower themselves—by using scientific thinking.

PERLMUTTER: Exactly. We're trying to help people see that this combination of trends we’re now seeing around the world is actually a very fertile opportunity for big, meaningful, positive change. And if we lean into this, it could set us in a very good position on the long-term path to a really great millennium. Even though there are all these other forces to worry about at the moment, by applying the tools, ideas and processes from the culture of science to other parts of our lives, we can have the wind at our back as we move toward a brighter, better future.

Energy & Environmental Science

All-perovskite tandem solar cells from fundamentals to technological progress.

Organic-inorganic perovskite materials have gradually progressed from single-junction solar cells to tandem (double) or even multi-junction (triple-junction) solar cells as all-perovskite tandem solar cells (APTSCs) have advantages: (1) the tunable optical bandgap, (2) low-cost because of solution-processing, inexpensive precursors, and thin film process, (3) scalability and lightweight, and (4) an eco-friendly technology related to low CO2 emission. However, APTSCs face severe issues regarding stability caused by Sn2+ oxidation in narrow bandgap perovskites, low performance due to Voc deficit in the wide bandgap range, non-standardisation of charge recombination layers, and a challenging thin-film deposition as each layer must be nearly perfectly homogenous. Here, we discuss the fundamentals of APTSCs and technological progress for each layer of the all-perovskite stacks. Furthermore, the theoretical power conversion efficiency (PCE) limitation of APTSCs is discussed by utilising simulation research.

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J. Lim, N. Park, S. I. Seok and M. Saliba, Energy Environ. Sci. , 2024, Accepted Manuscript , DOI: 10.1039/D3EE03638C

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Earthquakes Are Moving Northeast in Midland Basin of Texas

AUSTIN, Texas — After analyzing seven years of earthquake data from the Midland Basin, a team of scientists at The University of Texas at Austin has found that seismic activity is probably on the move northeast toward the community of Big Spring.

Although most past quakes happened in the southwest region near Odessa and Midland, the researchers identified a seismicity trend moving along a newly identified and extensive seismogenic fault zone stretching toward the northeast edge of the basin.

“The fault zone has been activated, and it has the capability to trigger additional earthquakes that can be felt by humans, especially because it’s so close to major cities along Interstate 20,” said Dino Huang, a research assistant professor at the Jackson School of Geosciences who led the research.

The results were published in the journal Seismological Research Letters .

The study is based on data collected by TexNet, a statewide seismic monitoring network operated by the Bureau of Economic Geology, a research unit of the Jackson School. From January 2017 to November 2023, TexNet recorded 1,305 earthquakes in the area, the vast majority of them very small and causing no damage.

The TexNet seismometers detect earthquakes by recording the ground motion caused by seismic activity. The researchers used this data to determine the depth, location and orientation of geologic faults — large cracks under the ground where earthquakes can occur — using a technique called a passive seismic analysis. Unlike active seismic analysis, this technique does not require manually firing a seismic energy source, such as an air gun, to explore the underground fault structures.

The analysis allowed the researchers to piece together previously unmapped parts of the Midland Basin fault system. Major features include what looks like a rift structure stretching across the middle of the basin in the deep basement rock that is slowly widening over time. This rift structure is surrounded on either side with a complex network of smaller faults.

Within this fault system, the researchers identified 15 distinct earthquake-producing zones — places where earthquakes have already occurred and where the quakes can be traced back to common sources of stress in the subsurface. The researchers then combined the data on earthquake frequency and magnitude from all the zones to determine the future seismic potential of the entire Midland Basin — that is, the potential for future earthquakes to occur.

A composite figure showing the seismic landscape of the Midland Basin from 2017-2023. Researchers from The University of Texas at Austin recently described earthquake-generating structures and zones in the region. The research shows that earthquakes appear to be moving northeast toward the edge of the basin along a rift structure. The figure shows induced seismicity (gray crosses), large earthquakes of Magnitude 4 or higher (light blue stars), a subsurface structure the researchers think is a rift (pink dashes), and earthquake producing zones (numbered green boxes). A dark blue star marks the location of the Range Hill event, a Magnitude 5.2 earthquake that occurred on Nov. 16, 2022. After the event, two earthquake swarms (denoted by two black circles) occurred in March and November 2023 (labeled A and B, respectively), suggesting that earthquake swarms have migrated northeastward. The earthquake cluster near Snyder is outside the scope of the Midland Basin study but is currently being studied by the scientists. Credit: Credit: Dino Huang, et al. / Jackson School of Geosciences

Using statistical analysis of TexNet data, the researchers determined that the basin seismicity has elevated since 2018. Although this potential indicates that the basin has a higher likelihood of future earthquakes compared with earthquake risk before 2018, it does not provide insight into future earthquake frequency, magnitude or when they might strike. However, based on recent seismic activity, the researchers have an idea of which zones will be more prone to earthquakes in the future.

The team hypothesizes that a 5.2 magnitude quake that struck Range Hill in 2022, which is in zone 6 and northwest of the city of Midland, introduced additional stress into the fault system that has propagated northeastward along the same path as the rift structure revealed by their passive seismic analysis. The scientists expect more quakes to happen in zones 6-8, northwest of the cities of Big Spring and Stanton, as the stress travels through the fault system. The researchers point to two recent earthquakes in zone 8 — a 3.7 magnitude and a 3.8 magnitude that occurred in March and November of 2023 — as evidence for their hypothesis.

The Midland Basin is one of the major hubs for oil and gas extraction in Texas. Over time, the injection of wastewater from these operations into the subsurface has introduced stress along faults that has triggered earthquakes. According to the researchers, data from TexNet is helping them understand that state of stress on the fault system and how to mitigate induced seismicity associated with it. Also, knowing which regions where earthquakes are more likely to occur can help operators make adjustments to wastewater injection operations to keep stress low and the basin productive.

The research was funded by the Center for Integrated Seismicity Research at the bureau. TexNet manager and research professor Alexandros Savvaidis and research assistant professor Yangkang Chen are co-authors of the study.

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