Research Culture is Broken; Open Science can Fix It

After the increasingly toxic environment of modern research culture forced her to nearly abandon her career, astrophysicist Dr Rachael Ainsworth began to question why the subject she loved had become so inhospitable. Identifying some of the pressures placed on her peers that encouraged aggressive competitiveness, unfair benchmarking and shoddy research practices also helped her identify a compelling potential solution. Dr Rachael Ainsworth is a Research Associate and Open Science Champion at the Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics at the University of Manchester. She has a PhD in Astrophysics, a BSc in Physics and was an intern at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. She is an expert in the interpretation of radio emissions from protostellar systems in nearby star-forming regions and her research involves observing jets from young stars with next-generation radio telescopes to investigate the physical processes that assemble stars like our Sun. She is passionate about openness, transparency, reproducibility and inclusion in research, and organises a women-in-data meetup group in Manchester called HER+Data MCR. Originally from Hampton, New Hampshire, USA, Dr Ainsworth is now based in Manchester.