Open Science Conversations: An Interview With Martin Pumera, CIETEC, Czech Republic

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 Martin Pumera, Chief Investigator of the Future Energy and Innovation Lab at CIETEC (Central European Institute of Technology), Czech Republic, about his views on open science.

Could you tell us about your team’s current research focus?

My group is quite large—about 40 people—so we have three main technologies we focus on. The first is nanorobotics, which involves very tiny particles in the nano or micro scale, which move and do tasks; the second is 3D printing and technology; the third is single-atom engineering.

For each of those technologies, we have three application areas: biomedicine, environmental remediation, and energy (such as batteries). It's basically a matrix of 9 research areas, which keeps our team busy. This particular article, "Magnetic Microrobot Swarms with Polymeric Hands Catching Bacteria and Microplastics in Water," is about using nanorobotics for environmental remediation—in particular the cleanup of microplastic and bacteria pollution.

My group is based in the Czech Republic, but it's completely international. When I was a postdoc in the US, there was only one American student in the group I was in, and the rest were from all over the world. I liked that model and have aimed to replicate this in my own country.

How would you describe the work covered in your article for an audience that isn’t familiar with the subject?

When you're filtering pollutants like plastics from water, you move it through filters which are appropriately sized to capture whatever pollutant you're targeting. But there are some limitations with this approach—they contain very small molecules like hormones and drug residues which you cannot remove by filtration, and also biofilm grows on the filters and can block the filtration system. We want to approach this from a different perspective: actively capturing particles that are floating in the water, like bacteria, nanoplastics and microplastics, and so on.

Our approach is to engineer simple microrobots, which are basically iron oxide particles with a method to induce motion (like a magnetic field) so we can move them where they're needed, and a way to capture your target molecules. As a result, instead of a passive filter that has water pumped through it, you now have active “filter” particles that sweep through a body of water like a fleet of small ships, capturing any pollutants they touch.

When we're actively designing the microrobots, it's a bit like Lego: building different configurations based on what you want to target and how you want to move them. First, we look at the motor—do we want to use light to power them, or magnetic fields? It depends on the application and the environment you want to work in. Then we look at how to capture the target and how specific we want to be. In this case, we used a magnetic field because it allows more precision when moving swarms, and we swept them through a solution to capture bacteria and microplastics and then deliver them to a point where the microrobots can be recycled.

How was the experience of publishing in ACS Nano?

I love ACS journals. I think that they're among the most "professional" publications and I really like the fact that the editors are all active scientists, so they have a deep understanding of their subject areas. I also like the quick turnaround from acceptance to approval, and the visual aspect of the articles is also done very well. They're very easy to read and nice to look at.

What kind of impact do you think your article has had since its publication?

I think it's been well received so far, as I've seen reactions from other scientists, even from different areas, who are interested in our findings. ACS often issues press releases about articles, like they did for ours. It has helped us reach people in different areas, and I've been interviewed by the media like CNN and the BBC about our work as a result. I've also been invited to talk to groups in different regions, like a call I was on with people from Materials Australia just a few days ago.

In terms of research impact, it's not about the impact factor of the journal you publish in. As a scientist, you want to spend your time working on things that will have an impact on society—and I want to make sure that every paper has something that will benefit people and give back to society.

(Note: Prof. Pumera's article was also covered here on Axial—visit the blog post to learn more.)

The article was published open access under your institution’s open access agreement with ACS—how did you discover this was available?

This was actually organized automatically for me when I published in an ACS journal, which is wonderful. Whenever a paper is accepted, you get a notification telling you that your institution or government is paying for the open access charges and asks if you want to publish as open access—and who wouldn't?

I like this approach, because open access can be expensive if you have to pay for it from your research grant. If I had to pay for this myself, it would be one less postdoc I could have in my group, which would impede the research. And ideally the research agency will, or should, pay for the open access charges, because they're the ones asking for it.

I'm very happy that open access has progressed to the point where it's not often being paid directly by the researchers, because it's very useful for dissemination but too costly for many individuals to pay.

What are your thoughts on the concept of open access?

I wasn't sure when I first heard of it, because it felt like more was being put onto the researcher: you do the work, you type it up, you format it, and then you have to pay to publish it. That meant that the university didn't have to spend as much on the library.

I'm much happier now that the costs of publishing have moved back to the place where the money needs to be spent, and it's being covered by the institution or the funder. As an individual professor you wouldn't subscribe to a particular journal unless it is a general one like Nature or Science, you would expect your institution to provide access to the journals you need to do your job. And now they can do that as well as help make sure that your paper is open access too.

What are your thoughts on open science workflows more generally (e.g. preprints, open data, transparent peer review)?

My group does make our data open. It can be time-consuming, because you have to prepare everything in an organized way, because otherwise there's no point—people won't be able to understand the data—so my group has made a system to help us organize data for each project in a unified way. Our funder now requires open data, which is good, because previously it was only done if a journal required it.

I think in general, it's a good direction for sure, and it helps with preservation. I've seen that some open access online-only publications have disappeared completely, including all the articles they published. It's one reason why I only publish with reputable publishers like ACS and RSC, because they've been around for decades and in some cases centuries, so the probability of this happening to them is very small.

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

If you're in a big institution that can purchase access to all the journals you need, you don't really think about open access all that much. But if you're working somewhere that has a much more limited budget, for example universities that focus more on the technical or teaching side of things, they can't subscribe to every journal, and you get a much bigger appreciation for the idea of open access. So in general, I like the move to more open access, especially where it's through a contract with institutions so that the government funding or the institution is paying for open access charges, rather than the individual author. In fact, I avoid publishing in open access journals that my institution doesn't have an agreement with.

The second big change is around open data. I think it's a good move and even though it's time consuming, as I said before. We have standardized the process of preparing our data in my group, but there's no clear guidance from funders on how they want the data prepared in a lot of cases. We've decided on what is the best fit for us, and we have a small internal committee to check data and make sure it's fit for our standards, so there's a level of consistency. This is important because in any group like mine, people come and go—they don't stay in a position for 20 years or anything like that, so we're always needing to educate new people, and having stablished data standards really helps with that.

But if I was to have one wish, it would be that funders or publishers do some more promotion around open data and say from their standpoint about how the collection, formatting, and submission of data could be streamlined—something public so that I could just send a link to my students and say, "please watch this video, this is how it's supposed to be done." Some kind of resources like this that we could share, so that it's not all put on the professors, would be appreciated.

Where do you see open science in 10 years' time?

Maybe it could be more standardized in some ways, particularly open data. When I look at the data other labs have collected, it takes some time for me to get oriented because they've made their own system—it's completely transparent and everything is clear, but it's not the same as the system I use, so I need to learn how to interpret it. It would be good if publishers or funders could produce guidelines to standardize certain types of data. That would be really useful for chemistry, and I think ACS is really well positioned to do this—and I always say that if you want something to happen, you have to take the lead so that it happens according to your standards and not anyone else's. That would be the kind of thing I would like to see in future.

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

If I were not a chemist, I think I would be an astronomer, which is another love of mine but is technically still a research job! So if not that, I think I would be teaching computer classes, which is something I did during my PhD. My passion is to educate people so you can help them with their work to a high level, and I like this subject because you can see the immediate impact in people's confidence and competence in a lot of different areas.

Personally, I feel that you need to learn something new every year, and even when I was teaching, I was getting new professional certifications from Microsoft and so on, and when you learn something new yourself you can pass it on to people. This is how society keeps running: people help each other to reach their goals and learn new things along the way, a kind of cycle of competence.