In this interview, Dr. Vaněček discusses his newest research published in an ACS journal, as well as what the process was like to publish under a read and publish agreement.
As part of a new 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 spoke with Vojtěch Vaněček, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute of Physics, Czech Academy of Sciences.
...the [ACS publishing] process was very clear, and very fast.
Hello, Vojtěch—could you tell us a little about yourself and your current research focus?
I work on the development of new scintillators. These are materials that are used to detect ionizing radiation—X-rays, gamma rays, all that fun stuff. Scintillator crystals are able to absorb this radiation, which is invisible, and emit light in a visible spectrum, or in the ultraviolet. They're used in luggage check-in at airports, in medical imaging, that kind of application. My research focus is on the development of novel materials for scintillators.
You recently published an artcle, "Growth and Spectroscopic Properties of Pr3+ Doped Lu2S3 Single Crystals." How would you summarize that for someone unfamiliar with the area?
In our lab, we work on mostly two groups of materials: halides and oxides. These materials have very different properties. Oxides have very high melting points, but they are stable in air. It's easier to work with them than halides, but because of the high melting points you have to use special, pricey crucible materials like iridium. With halides, you can use graphite and they melt at much lower temperatures, but they are not stable in air so you need to use a protective atmosphere. And between these are sulphides. Not many people work with them because they, let's say, have the worst of both worlds: high melting points and they can be hydroscopic and unstable in air, plus they are quite reactive so you cannot use the same precious metals that you use to work with oxides. But they have some interesting properties which are prospective for scintillator applications. That's why we decided to invest our time to grow crystals of these materials. After a few years of experiments, we managed to successfully grow a crystal of Lu2S3 and decided that Crystal Growth & Design would be a nice journal to publish these first results in. That paper was accepted and published in May 2024.
Your article was published in Crystal Growth & Design. How was the experience?
It was very pleasant overall. The system felt like it was very user-friendly, and all the steps were clear. The responses from the editor and the reviewers were actually quite fast. So overall, it was a very pleasant experience, even compared to other journals that I'm used to publishing with.
What kind of impact do you think your paper has had so far?
I had feedback from a colleague who read the article and found it interesting. I can see from the journal site that several hundred people have viewed it already, so there is some interest in the community. But it's still quite new and may take some time before the impact is fully known.
The article was published under your institution's read and publish agreement with ACS—how did you find out that this was available?
The read and publish agreement was actually one of the reasons why we chose Crystal Growth & Design. Publishing in an open access journal can sometimes be quite expensive, but my former lab in Czechia—where this research originated—has a new program where all research must be published in open access, and follow other open science protocols. The institute very often informed us that we had access to an agreement for basically unlimited open access publishing in ACS journals. With some publishers, the institute has a limited number of publications they can make open through agreements, and sometimes we only had the option to publish in hybrid journals. But with ACS there were no such restrictions, which was also a big part of our choice because we were looking for journal that is open access and is also a good fit for topic and scope. That's why we chose Crystal Growth & Design.
From a corresponding author's point of view, the publishing process was no problem at all. The ACS submission system identified that based on my affiliation, I had access to the agreement. I just needed to confirm that I wanted to publish in open access, and then one day later I got an email confirming that the publishing fees were paid - the process was very clear, and very fast.
The only complicated part was on our program's side, because we also have to now make all the data from the paper available online. That's a quite new thing for me, and it wasn't clear where or how I should do it. It took me some time to work it out, but in the end everything was okay.
What are your thoughts on open access as a concept?
Overall, open access is of course great, because for many smaller institutes it was very expensive to pay for subscriptions, and people were not able to get access to some journals which is really important for scientists: you have to keep in touch with the literature! The only problem was at the beginning, with predatory journals. I think that this is much better now, at least in physics and materials science I feel it's no longer a problem.
And of course, at the beginning there was this phase where some of the institutions, or grant agencies, started to push us to publish in open access. Our old funding model was not prepared for it, and publishing open access was very expensive. Now, it's okay because when you're applying for a new grant you will allocate money for publishing in open access - but before, there was this period where you were supposed to publish in open access, but didn't really have money for it. At the time we were still submitting our papers to subscription journals because we just didn't have the money to publish open access.
What are your thoughts on open science more generally?
Right now in in Czechia there is a huge pressure, especially if you want to get some funding, that everything you publish has to be open access, and that you follow open science workflows. As I mentioned, I had my first experience with publishing open data; I had to make all the data available in a readable form and write a document about how the data were collected, and how can people who aren't familiar with the data can import them into an application. That took some time, but that was worth it—and if you know there is this expectation then you can prepare your data in advance to make the process easier. I feel that open science is really good, because it will add an additional pressure to prevent any fraud or data manipulation. It means that if you read an article, and you feel that there is reason to doubt the results, you can download the data and investigate it yourself. If you get the same results then everything is okay; if not then it could suggest that there is a problem. So I think it's overall good for the community, but of course it's a new thing.
One thing that we don't currently have to do, but have the possibility to if we choose, is to make our research logs available which will help reproducibility. But I think that a lot of labs still find this difficult as they contain a lot of 'institutional knowledge' and know how, and so they may not want to publish it. I think that achieving this will be much harder than just open data.
Where do you see the open science movement in 10 years' time?
I think that open access is the future of publishing. Most of the journals are open access or hybrid right now, and in Czechia open access is becoming the new standard. Right now I'm on a fellowship in Japan, and here they are also trying to publish open access more and more, if possible. So I think that the trend will take over and non-open access journals will basically be pushed out.
The lab where I'm on my fellowship seems very well funded, so funding for open access may not be a problem for them, but they are very much focused on applied science. That means there's a lot of collaboration with industry, so of course there are some things that just cannot be made open access. It's always a hard choice; you, as a scientist, need to publish, but in most countries I feel that the cooperation of science and industry is heavily incentivized and this means that publishing certain materials open access isn't always possible, but it can be done.
Finally—what do you think you'd be doing if you weren't a researcher?
I don't think I ever thought about a different career! I actually do quite enjoy manual labor, but I think that might be because in my career I do a lot of 'mind' work, so I enjoy the relaxation of manual labor by comparison. But I don't think I would enjoy it if it was my daily bread and butter.
When I was in high school I was choosing between chemistry and physics, and also psychology. I think that if I chose psychology, my career would be very different!
Check out the other interviews in this series:
Professor Ian Cousins, Stockholm University
Dr. Hongxia Duan, TU Eindhoven
Louise Otting, TU Delft