In this interview, Dr. Cripwell discusses his group’s latest work in the field of thermodynamic modeling and the impact of open access in disseminating research in the global South.
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're speaking with Dr. Jamie Cripwell, Senior Lecturer at the Department of Chemical Engineering, Stellenbosch University, South Africa.
If we want scientists worldwide to be on a level playing field, then we all need to have access to the same materials.
Good afternoon, Dr. Cripwell. Could you tell us about your research group's current focus?
Our focus is predictive thermodynamic modeling. We like to say that we work at the interface between the measurement of the data and the modeling thereof, because those fields are distinct at times. We look at the kind of data that's needed to make thermodynamic models better and then try and measure that data ourselves.
Could you describe the work covered in your recent publication, for someone who isn't familiar with the area?
So in this particular work, we're looking at using a group contribution thermodynamic model. You can think of it as defining a model like LEGO® blocks, building it up from constituent pieces and then using it predictively. In that particular context, we were looking at the possibility of using nonaqueous cosolvents in carbon capture and storage (CCS). A lot of the conventional CCS technology uses aqueous amine solutions. There's been a drive to explore organic cosolvents, because that has a lot of benefits on heat duties, among other operational aspects. But unfortunately, as with a lot of these things, the data are limited and so correlative modelling has limited value. We're asking the question of how accurate can we be with these predictive models? This is one of a series of papers where we're building the capacity up to get the predictive model to a point where we can assess the predictive performance in these complex systems.
How was the experience of publishing in Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research?
We always try to publish in journals like I&EC Research because it's one of the most reputable journals within the field of applied thermodynamics. I&EC Research is one of the places where the big names in our field aim to disseminate and read work. The experience itself was really quite smooth—it typically is with ACS journals and we appreciate it, which is why we keep choosing it to submit to.
What kind of impact do you think your research has had since its publication?
I think it's a challenge for us down in South Africa, because there's sometimes a little bit of skepticism of work that comes out of the global South. But we're fortunate to have good ties with a couple of other research groups in in Europe that that know what we do. So far there's been quite positive feedback with peers telling us that the idea is intriguing.
We try to be as open as possible and not over-promise with the work, and we're being very frank with what the models show that this approach is capable of doing. I think people are excited about the prospect and seeing what might be possible, given limited data.
The article was published OA under your institution's read and publish agreement with ACS—how did you discover this was available?
It was communicated quite widely within our university. Again, coming back to the idea of being in the global South, one massive benefit we have from these kinds of agreements is that we can make this kind of work open access without having to pay for it personally. That's a huge benefit for us, as it increases the readership. I think we just really wouldn't be able to afford open access otherwise.
What are your thoughts on open access?
I think the idea is great. My institution is fortunate in that we generally have access to most paid subscriptions. But that's not generally the case, especially in South Africa, or I suppose the global South in general, those costs can be fairly prohibitive, so institutions have to be quite selective with what they get access to. We rely quite heavily on interlibrary loans otherwise, so the idea of open access—instant and barrier-free reading— is really important. It means that we're not "prohibited" from engaging with important work just because of the subscription fee. If we want scientists worldwide to be on a level playing field, then we all need to have access to the same materials.
What are your thoughts on open science workflows (e.g. open methods, preprints, transparent peer review, open data) more generally?
So I think, especially within our field of thermodynamic modeling and applied thermodynamics, historically there's been a culture of research groups pouring so many hours into getting code up to a level where they can reproduce others' work, so there's always been a kind of hesitation to provide access to data beyond tabulated results.
It took us quite a while to build that capacity for ourselves, and then be able to reproduce other people's work to verify their findings—so personally, I'm a big advocate for platforms like Github, for code sharing, and for open access to articles and data in general to increase transparency. We've found a couple of times, actually, that because of those closed-door attitudes to data sharing you just find you're butting your head against the wall if you try to replicate, and then you find out it's due to something silly like the data in the paper had a decimal place in the wrong spot. That's incredibly frustrating, because that's just a reporting issue. So I'm definitely very much on board for open science and transparency, but I suppose at the same time I can appreciate why there was that that hesitation in the beginning, having invested heavily in both time and resources to build your own group’s capacity, only to “give it away.”
What do you think are the biggest recent developments in open science and open access?
Something that I've only recently become more familiar with as we broaden our scope is the idea of preprints, things like arXiv and getting your work out there before someone else does something unethical with it during the review process. I've never personally been subject to such kinds of behaviors, but I do know people who have. In the modeling and coding spheres, there's definitely been a stronger push towards exactly that kind of thing—simultaneously uploading your documents onto a preprint server when you're submitting to a publisher.
I mentioned earlier the whole idea of Github repos, and that's something I see a lot more now. I've also noticed that journals include data review in their peer review processes, and you're getting these cycles of, you know, "thank you for submitting your review comments, we'll keep you in the loop because the authors are fixing their Github repos." So there has been a noticeable change in the past couple of years, but it's an important one because even with open source and open access, it doesn't mean the work is going to be obviously reproducible.
Where do you see OA in 10 years' time?
That's an interesting one, just because of the rapidity with things which things are changing at the moment. I think that, philosophically, open access must be the way to go. If we're going to talk about making an equal playing field and the globalization of research, I think that open access has to be the approach.
I also think, though, that sustainability is always going to be difficult. Recently there have been calls for paid peer review, and similar ideas floating around which would surely increase the costs in the process.
My guess would be that that open access would be the standard in 10 years' time, but the most interesting question will be who pays for it. This is definitely going to be an interesting period.
What do you think you'd be doing if you weren't a researcher?
Growing up, I wanted to be a teacher—so now that I've ended up in academia, I suppose it's just, you know, "big school"? [Laughs]
That's probably what I would be doing otherwise—working in secondary education, although these days that has its own challenges. But I love the whole pursuit of knowledge, and interacting with people who have something to gain from just talking to you. I've always found that aspect of academia, and teaching too I guess, to be really insightful, valuable, and deeply rewarding.
Check out the other interviews in this series:
Ian Cousins, Stockholm University
Hongxia Duan, TU Eindhoven
Vojtěch Vaněček, Institute of Physics, Czech Academy of Sciences
Louise Otting, TU Delft
Kristine Horvat, University of New Haven
David W. McCamant, University of Rochester
Fernando Sartillo Piscil, Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla
Lillian Chong, University of Pittsburgh
Sue Cardinal, University of Rochester
Rubén Mendoza-Cruz, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
Alison Bradley, Partnership for Academic Library Collaboration and Innovation
Vesna Srot, Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research
Matt McDowell, Georgia Institute of Technology
In this paper, we investigated some materials that have been of high interest within the community for a number of years: silver-carbon composite materials. They've been shown to work very well in solid state batteries for controlling behavior and improving performance, and we delved into some of the reasons why they were behaving in that way at low stack pressure.
Stack pressure is the amount of pressure that's being applied to the battery during operation. Normally we don't apply much or any pressure to batteries while they're in use, but solid-state batteries like more pressure— they behave better when subject to greater pressure, but this limits their real-world application. So that's what this research was focused on—using a number of different techniques to investigate and understand how these materials are evolving, and in particular why they're good at the lower stack pressures needed for practical applications. We hope that it's a useful paper for the community to push our understanding forward.
What kind of an impact do you think this work has had?
I’ve presented our results at a number of conferences, and I've talked to some colleagues about the paper, and we've been pleased to see that people are excited about it. I think there's still some work to do in understanding some of the mechanisms associated with this silver-carbon composite material. The community has advanced in understanding of these materials, and others have built on it to improve our understanding, but we still don't know exactly all the reasons why it's behaving so well, and that's really needed so that we can implement it in real devices.
How was the experience of publishing in ACS Nano?
I thought the process was really good. It was an efficient review process—the reviewers had useful comments and constructive criticisms that helped us to improve the paper. In general, my experience with a lot of ACS journals has been that the review processes are fairly fast and efficient, as I mentioned, and when it comes to the open access part, that's a real benefit too. My institution has open access agreements with ACS and some other publishers; these have only been in place for a few years now but are a real advantage. I find it much better to know that the work is out there, and everyone can read it without paywalls. That's really an attractive thing to me as an author, and definitely affects our thinking about where to submit papers.
The article was published open access (OA) under your institution's read and publish agreement with ACS—how did you discover this was available?
I saw information about it in a faculty meeting at some point, and while it is advertised internally here at Georgia Tech, I don't think all faculty and researchers and students know about it. There are maybe five or six publishers now that have agreements with Georgia Tech and the University System of Georgia, which we're a part of. But I'm glad that I know about it, and I've been trying to spread the word to my colleagues, because it's really a great benefit. I appreciate that our university is taking a proactive role in ensuring that these agreements are in place and not just letting individual researchers have to figure it out.
What are your thoughts on open access more generally?
Something that's somewhat particular to the battery field I work in is that there are a lot of academics that are working on battery materials and technologies but there are also scientists at national labs and researchers in industry. A lot of companies pay to access papers, of course, but often the paywalls for subscription content can be a problem for people in industry or in smaller institutions. To make sure that everybody, regardless of what country or job they're working in, can have access to the new science is really important, especially in the battery field.
I also appreciate that the process with ACS is really easy. There's not a lot of extra forms to fill out, or detailed information that we have to compile to make it open access. It's just a single click once the article is accepted, which is nice. I appreciate that the logistics are good, and I think this is a good direction for the greater scientific enterprise to be moving in. I do appreciate that these agreements between institutions and publishers can be somewhat complicated, and a little bit above my pay grade, but I appreciate that it seems to be moving in the right direction.
What are your thoughts on open science workflows (e.g. open methods, preprints, transparent peer review, open data) more generally?
I think some of the big trends are really quite good for science, like preprinting. I think that gives more control to scientists and authors about how their results are being put out into the world, and it also allows for faster dissemination of ideas which I think is really important. We've engaged in this in my group; we don't preprint all of our papers, but a lot of them are posted to preprint servers.
More generally, I think that the trend in science towards greater reproducibility in terms of methods, and also open data and more data being published with papers or alongside papers and repositories, is really useful as well. It's become something that we now consider in advance before we submit a paper even: compiling all the data and ensuring that it's available. You can compare that to 10 years ago, where it wasn't really something we thought about much, if at all. Making all this information freely available allows people to analyze data on their own when they read the paper, which is really useful for science.
Speaking of trends, what are your thoughts about changing policies around open access?
I'm aware that we're required to have open access to papers depending on funding, and various Federal agencies are different in terms of their requirements—but I think this is a big part of pushing open science forwards, which is good.
It's a little bit complicated to keep track of all the different rules and regulations of the different Federal agencies, so I don't know all of them by heart, but I hope that our staff here at Georgia Tech and our interactions with journal editors will help us go in the right direction in terms of ensuring that all these regulations are met. As the PI of a of a project, though, if I wasn't sure about the requirements from a grant, I would contact the program manager or look into the details of the grant contract which would provide the basic information about what we need to do to comply.
Where do you see OA in 10 years' time?
I think things are moving pretty rapidly. I know that publishing is a relatively expensive process, so there's a lot of money involved, and it's hard for me to predict exactly what will happen in the context of the funding and the cost of publishing. Even so it's pretty clear that there's strong momentum towards more open access in the literature, so I expect that to continue. 10 years from now, I wouldn't be surprised if the vast majority of papers are freely available through agreements like the ones we've discussed. The funding models are changing as we speak, and the publishing models are also adapting, so I hope continued open access is what we'll see—I think that would be good for science and good for scientists.
What do you think you'd be doing if you weren't a researcher?
I don't know exactly what I would doing be doing. I might think about being a ski bum for a few years. It kind of goes against my fundamental ethos of working hard to advance science, but I think it would be pretty fun—even though I'm sure I'd end up back in the lab eventually!