Open Science Conversations: An Interview With Anwesha Sarkar, University of Leeds

As part of an ongoing series here on ACS Axial, we’re interviewing authors and librarians from around the world to find out more about their research, their published work, and the impact that open science is having on a changing landscape of research communication. This time, we talked to Professor Anwesha Sarkar, Professor of Colloids and Surfaces at the University of Leeds, UK.

Hello, Professor Sarkar. Could you tell me about your research group's current focus?

My research group focuses on alternative proteins, so proteins which are non-conventional but sustainable. Many of them come from plant sources: algae, fungus, and so on. What we're really interested in is their physical chemistry - trying to understand how they absorb at surfaces, whether they're liquid-liquid, liquid-air, or liquid-solid interfaces. We focus a lot on tribology and surface adsorption which have consequent impacts on mouthfeel. If we understand friction, we can design more pleasurable food without adding lubricant additive such as fats and saturated fats. Ultimately, we focus on generating fundamental understanding of how we can modify structure to have performance benefits with alternative proteins.

Tell us about the work in your paper, "Insights into the Multiscale Lubrication Mechanism of Edible Phase Change Materials."

What we were doing in this paper is looking at a phase-changing material. The model was chocolate, because everybody can understand what it is from personal experience. Our hypothesis was that fat is linked to lubricity: if you have more fat in the material, the product is more lubricious in mouth.
We focused on the process it goes through during eating. When you take a chocolate in your mouth, it first rubs your tongue, mixes a bit with saliva, then it starts melting, then it starts making an emulsion, and then you swallow. We examined each step using a very cool setup which involved tribology with a biomimetic tongue-like surface (which was also published in the same journal), which helped us understand what happens to the material when it's rubbed between a synthetic tongue and palate and also visualized those using in situ tribo-microscopy in some cases. This allowed us to ask the question if fat matters in each of the steps, and what we identified is that initially, fat content is indeed an important part of the process, but this importance decreases with each step, particularly when the emulsion is already generated in mouth.

We identified a gradient that shows that fat is still important, but it turns out you don't actually need that much beyond the initial phase. The applications of this are interesting: imagine a phase-changing food like chocolate where the surface which is initially in contact with your tongue has a higher fat content, but subsequent layers gradually have less, because when you start eating you don't need it that much.

The work was published in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces - how did you find the experience?

It was fantastic. I really enjoyed the process because the reviewer comments were very appropriate and specific, which led to a lot of improvements to the paper. We also added our raw data to the paper.

We also had a lot of good press coverage thanks to press releases from our institution and ACS, and we also got accepted as part of the journal cover program. It's been a phenomenal journey, and we still have the highest altmetric score of all articles published in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces, showing that there's a lot of interest in our findings.

Your paper was published about two years ago. What kind of impact do you think it's had since then?

We've had a lot of contact with other academic researchers about the paper, and it's also getting cited a lot which is a good way to say people are using the work. We've also seen an increase in citations of our earlier works which were referenced in the paper, particularly the tongue-like surface paper. That shows a real drive to understand this process, because the same model can be adopted for any other edible materials which undergo phase changes—things like cheese, gels for gelatin-based drug delivery, or anything of that kind.

As you might expect we've also seen a lot of interest from the industry side—not just confectionary, but any area where it's important to understand phase transitions in the mouth. These are often studied in a very subjective way, not objectively with data, so this could be very powerful.

The article was published as open access under your institution's agreement - how did you discover this was available?

Our university initially told us about the agreement. The research was funded by a grant from the European Research Council (ERC), which mandates that articles are published open access so that they can be read by the largest number of people. We had to make sure the journal we were submitting to met the ERC's requirements for open access, whether it was a good fit for audience of our work, and ideally was covered by an agreement between our institution and the publisher to cover the open access charges. ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces met all these criteria, and it was easy to make it open access with the university's read and publish agreement, which is fantastic.

What are your thoughts on open access?

I think in today's world, there is no other way to do it: only open access will do. I know there are still plenty of subscription journals, but science is for everyone, whether they're located in the Global South where there may be fewer funding opportunities, or in locations where access to libraries might be the limiting factor. We simply cannot exclude anyone from access to the latest science—so for me, open access is a must for every single science and needs to be factored into what we do, how we do it, and how we pay for it.

That's a separate discussion, but fundamentally all our work has to be made available as open access, otherwise it does not make any sense. As of the last five years or so, my team and I no longer publish outside of open access, and it's usually through an agreement between my institution or funder and a publisher.

What are your thoughts on open science more generally?

I have published open data a lot—in some journals that's almost mandatory—and I think that it's very powerful. Not just in terms of other people being able to use your data, but also through continued access to your own data—because PhD students and postdocs move on, putting all your data into a repository means that you can go back to them easily. Combined with all the advancements in machine learning and AI, I think being able to access data freely is going to be very important in the future.

I have also done open peer review, where the reviewer comments and author responses are open. This can be very helpful because it shows the journey a paper goes through and how the exchange between authors and reviewers helps shape it. It can be very important for early career researchers to see things like the amount of time it takes to progress through peer review, how to write a response to reviewers, how to properly identify what the reviewers are looking for, and so on—these are all very powerful, and as I mentioned, it's not just a world where published research is concentrated in a small number of countries. It's a very different world now than when I did my PhD in 2010, and open science has been instrumental in that change. The more we make things accessible, the better it is for the global advancement of science.

What do you think are the biggest recent developments in open science and open access?

I think open data is interesting, but there are still issues with making the data available in a form which is more accessible. The issue is that often the data are not very clear, because they may be presented in a figure or after a lot of data curation has happened. Even if you have the full dataset there may be problems with how it is presented and labelled that makes it very hard to understand.

Maybe we need more widespread standards or some kind of accepted way to publish data, for example in a journal that specializes in datasets, but there needs to be a way to make data available in formats that are useable by other people, with the appropriate permissions for reuse, and an easy way to cite those data. Solving these issues will be very important in how science evolves.

Where do you see OA in 10 years' time?

I think preprints will become more important. I don't use them myself very often, but I can see them becoming more important than even published journals, because the publication process can sometimes take a long time, but people— especially early career researchers—need papers for their career development to showcase proof of their work and secure their next placement. Of course, preprints aren't peer reviewed and validated in the same way as journal articles, but with some way of gathering comments from readers, they could take science to the next level.

I think we need a faster publication platform, and I think preprints give that opportunity, although to date they're not as well used in chemistry as —for example whilst quite well-established in computer science and physics.

What do you think you'd be doing if you weren't a researcher?

I think I'd definitely be a chef! I'm really a good cook, I'm passionate about it, and I think I would really enjoy creating new recipes. If you think of chemistry, it's about atoms, molecules, ions, and how they undergo reactions. When I think about food, I always think about complex matrices, and indeed molecules for that matter macromolecules interact because of how cooking changes so much of the structure of things. It actually makes me think of a thoughtful reviewer comment I received for one article where they said the work helped them understand that polymer chemists have it so good because their work involves known chemical elements, and with food it's a lot more complex and often way more difficult to characterise and 'impure' in comparison. It's quite amazing to think of things that way!