My First Publication and My Thoughts on Academia

Few years ago I was someone was not interested in academia, I felt as if people are rehashing the same scientific topic in different ways, or publishing every minute thing just to add up to their pile of publications. I never thought I'd be able to write a publication under 200 words, the very idea of expressing something meaningful in such a short number of words was something that I could not agree with.

Fast forward to 10 months, I have written more than 6 abstracts, 1 poster presentation, and today I was lucky to get my first publication indexed by PubMed. I was able to publish part of my MSc thesis as a publication in the Studies in health technology and informatics journal, a big W for me.

If you like to read my paper, you can read it here :
From Fragmentation to Open Access: Building an Open Data Portal for Health Data Dissemination - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39320212/

Why did I to went to academia?

• It's a way to share your work with others, and scientific community so what you did never gets end up in a computer or in an office. It's just another medium to share your world, with an audience
• It's a challenge, I like taking on new challenges. Submitting your abstract or paper to a conference, and competing with different participants to get selected to present is a challenge. A new challenge is something I always enjoy.
• Because I thought maybe if I decide to do a PhD one day and it's something that one should have or universities will consider are publications, publications where you are usually the first author of that publication.

Is academia broken?

Yes, at times I feel that academia is broken. Journals acting as gatekeepers for knowledge, thriving on academics who submit content to their journals, and not only charging for publication, they also charge potential academics who want to read articles on their journals.

It's an unfair system where journals be the gatekeepers of knowledge and profit from both ends just by being a middleman.

I really like the fact that journals like Arxiv acting as an open platform, and MIT also investing in open access content. I really hope Arvix will expand to other domains, especially healthcare, and people will outside of computer science field will trust Arxiv and know more about Arsic in the future. I have hard time selling Arxiv to my collegues in healthcare as they are still not familiar with Arxiv.

But still I love academia and what I am doing, and hopefully help my colleagues and progress of acadmeia by publishing my content on open access journals and portals.