Each month, the open access team of the University of Groningen Library (UB) puts a recent open access article by UG authors in the spotlight. This publication is highlighted via social media and the library’s newsletter and website.

The article in the spotlight for the month of December 2020 is titled Gold, silver or bronze: circadian variation strongly affects performance in Olympic athletes , written by Renske Lok, Marijke Gordijn, Domien Beersma and Roelof Hut (from the Chronobiology Unit at the Groningen Institute for Evolutionary Life Sciences, Faculty of Science & Engineering) together with Giulia Zerbini (University of Augsburg).

Abstract

The circadian system affects physiological, psychological, and molecular mechanisms in the body, resulting in varying physical performance over the day. The timing and relative size of these effects are important for optimizing sport performance. In this study, Olympic swim times (from 2004 to 2016) were used to determine time-of-day and circadian effects under maximal motivational conditions. Data of athletes who made it to the finals (N = 144, 72 female) were included and normalized on individual levels based on the average swim times over race types (heat, semifinal, and final) per individual for each stroke, distance and Olympic venue. Normalized swim times were analyzed with a linear mixed model and a sine fitted model. Swim performance was better during finals as compared to semi-finals and heats. Performance was strongly affected by time-of-day, showing fastest swim times in the late afternoon around 17:12 h, indicating 0.32% improved performance relative to 08:00 h. This study reveals clear effects of time-of-day on physical performance in Olympic athletes. The time-of-day effect is large, and exceeds the time difference between gold and silver medal in 40%, silver and bronze medal in 64%, and bronze or no medal in 61% of the finals.

We asked the corresponding author, Renske Lok, a few questions about the article:

This article was published open access, was open access a deliberate choice?

Yes it was. We always try to publish in journals that are open access. A lot of work goes into projects like these, and if articles don't get read because they aren't open access, it is just a waste of time altogether.

The article was published in Scientific Reports, a journal from the Nature Publishing Group. After acceptance of the article you had to pay an article processing charge of 1570 euros. How did you pay for this, what kind of funding did you use? What do you think about paying such a fee to make the article open access?

We paid this fee from grant money that also financed my PhD project. Paying such a fee is worth the exposure the article gets. Once an article is published, the number of citations is extremely important. If more individuals can access the article, it increases your chance for citations.

This article was written as part of your PhD research at the Faculty of Science and Engineering, but recently you moved to Stanford University (USA) to work as a postdoctoral researcher. How does Stanford University look at the open access movement? Is publishing open access important there as well? 

Stanford University has a similar outlook as the University of Groningen, in which open access publishing is preferred over any other types of publishing.

Is Stanford University promoting and facilitating open access? If so, how? For example, the University of Groningen has agreements with most of the big publishers that enable UG-authors to publish open access at a discount (mostly 100%, so for free) in their journals. Does Stanford have similar arrangements?

It is not exactly the same as the UG, but recently there was a development: As of November 19th, there is an Open Access Policy for the university. The policy gives Stanford nonexclusive rights over future scholarly articles, authorizing Stanford to make those deposited articles open access.

Could you reflect on your experiences with open access and open science in general?

My experience with open access is very good - when writing an article or review paper, there is nothing more annoying than wanting to read an article, but not being able to because of accessibility issues. Open access is important because anybody, within or outside of your field of expertise, can choose to read the article. Similarly, I believe that open science is very important. Transparency will circumvent integrity problems, and on top of that: everybody, scientist or not, deserves to be aware of what scientists investigate and publish.

Useful links:

Funder policies: most funders allow article processing charges to be paid from grant money, although conditions apply. See this support page for more information about funder policies. 

Journal browser: search engine that can be used to check if an APC discount is available for a specific journal

An earlier press release by the University of Groningen about the article by Renske Lok and colleagues.

Citation:

Lok, R., Zerbini, G., Gordijn, M.C.M., Beersma, D.G.M., & Hut, R.A. (2020). Gold, silver or bronze: circadian variation strongly affects performance in Olympic athletes. Scientific Reports, 10(1). doi:10.1038/s41598-020-72573-8

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