Open Science Conversations: An Interview With Matt McDowell, Georgia Institute of Technology

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. Matt McDowell, Carter N. Paden Jr. Distinguished Chair in the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and the School of Materials Science and Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and an Associate Editor for ACS Nano.

Hello, Dr. McDowell—could you tell us about your research group's current focus?

I run a research group at Georgia Tech in Atlanta, where we focus on understanding battery materials and technologies. In particular, we develop new materials for batteries, and we also work on characterizing and understanding how these materials change and transform during charge and discharge of battery systems.

Could you describe the work covered in your recent publication, for someone who isn't familiar with the area?

This is a paper that's focused on new findings in the area of solid-state batteries. Solid state batteries are a battery technology that could have higher energy density and improved safety compared to lithium-Ion batteries—and as more and more applications emerge, there's a lot of interest in solid state batteries.

A solid-state battery is an evolution of a traditional lithium-ion battery. The liquid electrolyte inside the battery cell is replaced with a solid material that conducts ions. But it turns out when you do this there are a number of scientific and engineering challenges—it's not quite as simple as it sounds. One of these challenges is that when you're moving ions back and forth through solid materials during charge and discharge, these materials can lose contact with each other at interfaces. This can cause the batteries to fail or lose capacity.

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!

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