Tag Archives: Open Research

Reflections from the Edinburgh Open Research Conference

Dr Mandy Wigdorowitz holds the position of Open Research Community Manager for Cambridge University Libraries where she is developing an open research community across Cambridge. She has a PhD in Theoretical and Applied Linguistics from the University of Cambridge and is a registered Research Psychologist with the Health Professions Council of South Africa. She also holds the position of Associate Editor for the Journal of Open Humanities Data.

The Edinburgh Open Research Conference 2023, offered by the University of Edinburgh Library Research Support Team and grassroots group Edinburgh ReproducibiliTea, provided a platform for the exchange of ideas and discussions about open research under the theme ‘Open Research as a Tool for Addressing Global Challenges’. Living up to its theme, the conference held numerous presentations focussing on the various ways in which open research practices can positively support efforts to address various challenges centring around open initiatives. The conference provided an opportunity for people from across the world to come together in a hybrid format to discuss how adopting the open research principles of open access, participation in research, transparency, and open data can ensure that the efforts of research are set up to help address global challenges, including in education, climate action, and global pandemics.

As a presenter and attendee, I reflect on the main take-homes from this event.  

With any conscientious and inclusive movement, clarification of terminology is important. The open research movement is no exception. Throughout the conference, many speakers acknowledged ‘open science’ as being an inclusive term, encompassing all areas of ‘openness’ or ‘open scholarship’, and one which extends beyond the ‘sciences’ to include all disciplines where knowledge synthesis and open research is considered. It was proposed that the phrase ‘open science’ is about intent and the larger goal of open research, and it should not be reduced to disciplines that fall under the ‘sciences’ umbrella per se. While the sentiment of this stance is reassuring and inclusive in intent, it is undeniable that there is weight behind the words we use. Instead, I would argue that it would be more inclusive to replace ‘science’ with ‘research’ when referring to the broad ‘open research’ movement. Doing so would safeguard against unintended misinterpretations about who may partake in and benefit from this movement.

A highlight from the conference was its celebration and acknowledgement of the growing impact of public engagement and citizen-led research. Case studies offered insight into how involving the public in data collection, analysis, and decision-making processes can enhance the relevance and societal impact of open research endeavours. For instance, UCL’s Institute for Global Prosperity aims to understand what prosperity means for people as informed by members of their respective communities. In addition, the Extreme Citizen Science: Analysis and Visualisation project employs the use of culturally appropriate geographical analyses and visualisation tools that can be used by varying communities with differing degrees of literacy to formulate research questions and collect relevant data. Attendees were encouraged to explore innovative ways of collaborating with non-academic communities to foster a culture of inclusivity, knowledge sharing, and insights that are driven from the communities under investigation, and to think about the value of smaller, local-scale projects in addition to large-scale projects.

Much attention was afforded to the dissemination avenues that prioritise FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) and open practices, as well as who the contributors and accessors of such research outputs are. These efforts have largely been attributed to the increased availability of digital collections, the development of new data-intensive methods, increased pressure from funders, the requirement of data management plans for preservation purposes, the involvement and collaboration of research libraries, and the rollout of rights retention policies. Discussions centred around digital objects and data, including how these are produced, how and where they are openly and transparently shared, how they can be accessed and preserved, and what the potential of their reuse is. Such questions lead to the need for reputable sharing outlets that service people from all parts of the world and across all disciplines. Significant outlets that were mentioned included repositories, data dashboards, and data papers.

Data dashboards provide an overview of the various aspects associated with a research project, which allows for clear access to data insights when conducting large projects. An effective use of a data dashboard comes from DecodeME, the world’s largest study of ME/CFS (myalgic encephalomyelitis). Data papers are peer-reviewed publications that describe curated datasets. Data papers can be shared in traditional research journals as one subtype of article publication, or in data journals which are dedicated to the publication of data papers. This avenue of dissemination has been active in the STEM and Health disciplines, but it is being increasingly recognised and promoted within the Humanities and Social Sciences, largely driven by data journals in these areas, such as the Journal of Open Humanities Data. Overall, these discussions shed light on the challenges and potential solutions to ensure the quality and accessibility of open outputs derived from various research projects.

In addition to the many discussions about open software, which are ubiquitous in open research, open hardware was recognised as an emerging area in this arena. Open hardware can include, for instance, computing devices, scientific instrumentation, and remote sensing satellites that contribute to the conduction of research and discovery of knowledge. Typically, legal restrictions prohibit the investigation and modification of closed source hardware, resulting in a lack of reproducibility, duplication of effort, obsolescence, and financial burdens which ultimately reinforce global inequities. There have been recent efforts, however, to develop open-source hardware tools and devices to address global challenges particularly in under-resourced communities. Real-world case studies were presented that explore where and how open hardware has been used to address global challenges (e.g., in microscopy, space exploration, environmental monitoring) and make a difference in the lives of everyday people. The Gathering for Open Science Hardware was identified as a community whose mission is to promote open hardware and the practices ensuring its success. Open hardware presents an exciting opportunity for progress as its potential for solving global problems is far-reaching and scalable.

Education also emerged as key to the open research movement. The conference presented best practices in research data management and open educational resources for postgraduate students and educators from the perspective of a university lecturer. Training and mentoring programmes about open practices were mentioned, where people interested in applying open principles in their work and becoming ambassadors in their communities could sign up to Open Life Science to participate in an open research training course, and to Open Hardware Makers to support open hardware projects.

In sum, the Edinburgh Open Research Conference was successful in showcasing the advancement of open research with a focus on addressing global challenges. Open research is a fundamentally iterative process where we can all learn and build upon the accumulated work and knowledge that has been done before us. In this way, the event illustrated the remarkable progress that has been made in various domains and throughout the research lifecycle. By bringing together individuals from diverse backgrounds and contexts, this conference provided a platform for knowledge sharing and community-building at the forefront of open research.

You can find all the talks and slides from the conference here.

Open access: where next? – event round-up

Dr. Samuel Moore, Scholarly Communication Specialist, Cambridge University Libraries

On Friday 18th November, participants from across Cambridge and beyond gathered for a hybrid meeting on the future of open access publishing. Hosted by Homerton College, ‘Open Access: Where Next?’ explored issues relating to article-processing charges, research assessment and innovation in scientific publishing. 65 in-person attendees and 78 online attendees participated in the day-long event consisting of four panels and a keynote from Professor Gina Neff of the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy.

Prof. Neff kicked off the event with a timely and insightful talk titled ‘Further than the academy: the stakes for open research’. Covering themes such as misinformation, preservation and widening participation in knowledge, Prof. Neff explored the importance of democratic and responsible approaches to our digital present and future, looking especially to libraries as key to supporting these issues.

The first panel of the day, ‘Further than privileged universities’, was introduced by Dr. Matthias Ammon and featured Dr. Juliet Vickery, Chief Executive of the British Trust for Ornithology, Dr. Tabitha Mwangi, Cambridge-Africa Programme Manager, and Dr. Stuart Pracy, Lecturer in Medieval History at the University of Exeter. Each panellist spoke on the challenges of open access that arise from either being outside privileged university spaces or without secure employment within them. Despite representing quite different communities, there were a number of commonalities between the experiences of each speaker, most notably the fact that moving from paying to access scholarly material to paying to publish it added a new exclusionary dimension to their ability to communicate research.

In the second panel, we heard from three speakers who are working against the move toward paying to publish. ‘Further than APCs and BPCs’ featured speakers working on publishing projects that do not require authors to pay processing charges to publish their work – so-called Diamond open access. Cambridge librarians Dr Meg Westbury (Academic Services Librarian, Human and Social Sciences) and Dr Yvonne Nobis (Head of Physical Sciences libraries) described their respective publishing projects, The Journal of Information Literacy and Discrete Analysis. The audience learned about both the challenges around running a journal on a shoestring, but also the advantages of a DIY approach to publishing without recourse to expensive publishing networks. In addition, Dr. Joe Deville of Lancaster University explained the work of the soon-to-launch Open Book Collective to collaboratively fund the publication of open access books in the humanities and social sciences.

After lunch, Niamh Tumelty chaired a roundtable with Cambridge researchers on research assessment and its relationship with publishing. Prof. Steve Russell, Head of Department of Genetics, described his work as Chair of DORA (the Declaration on Research Assessment) alongside the work needed for the university to fulfil its commitment to ensuring researchers are no longer judged by the venues in which they publish. Following this, Liz Simmonds – the University’s Head of Research Culture – described the pros and cons of alternative approaches to assessment such as narrative CVs. Finally, Prof. Emma Gilby of the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics explained the view from the humanities, particularly how declarations such as DORA are designed and implemented with the sciences in mind.

The final panel of the day was on innovations in scholarly publishing. Chaired by Dr. Samuel Moore, three panellists described their publishing approaches to moving beyond the traditional journal article. Dr. Mónica Moniz of Cambridge University Press & Assessment presented Research Directions – the press’ approach to publishing the research lifecycle across a variety of disciplinary questions. Following this, F1000’s Head of Data and Software Publishing, Dr. Beck Grant, described the publisher’s approach to automated data publishing in partnership with the Wellcome Sanger Institute. Finally, Dr. Damian Pattinson discussed eLife’s new approach to removing accept/reject decisions from its publishing process – and an invigorating discussion ensued!

At the end of the day, Niamh Tumelty summarised the event and reminded participants to fill out the postcards they were given at the start of the day to document what actions they will take in response to the issues covered in the conference. We will be posting these postcards to participants in January as a reminder of what you planned to do (with vouchers to three lucky recipients). Special thanks to all participants, attendees and organisers, but especially to Bea Gini for all her help with this, her last, event as part of the Office of Scholarly Communication. Thanks also to Clare Trowell for designing our postcards.

Open Research in the Humanities

Authors: Emma Gilby, Matthias Ammon, Rachel Leow and Sam Moore

This is the first in a series of blog posts, presenting the reflections of the Working Group on Open Research in the Humanities. The working group aimed to reframe open research in a way that was more meaningful to humanities disciplines, and their work will inform the University of Cambridge approach to open research. This post introduces the working group and provides a top level overview of the issues the group discussed between July and December 2021.

The Working Group on Open Research in the Humanities was chaired by Prof. Emma Gilby (MMLL) with Dr. Rachel Leow (History), Dr. Amelie Roper (UL), Dr. Matthias Ammon (MMLL and OSC), Dr. Sam Moore (UL), Prof. Alexander Bird (Philosophy), and Prof. Ingo Gildenhard (Classics). We met for four meetings in July, September, October and December 2021, with a view to steering and developing services in support of Open Research in the Humanities. We aimed notably to offer input on how to define Open Research in the Humanities, how to communicate effectively with colleagues in the Arts and Humanities (A&H), and how to reinforce the prestige around Open Research. We hope to add our perspective to the debate on Open Science by providing a view ‘from the ground’ and from the perspective of a select group of humanities researchers. These disciplinary considerations inevitably overlap, in some measure, with the social sciences and indeed some aspects of STEM, and we hope that they will therefore have a broad audience and applicability.

Academics in A&H are, in the main, deeply committed to sharing their research. They consider their main professional contribution to be the instigation and furthering of diverse cultural conversations. They also consider open public access to their work to be a valuable goal, alongside other equally prominent ambitions: aiming at research quality and diversity, and offering support to early career scholars in a challenging and often precarious employment landscape.  

Although A&H cover a diverse range of disciplines, it is possible to discern certain common elements which guide their profile and impact. These common elements also guide the discussion that follows.  

  • A&H colleagues tend to produce longer and more intensively edited books and articles. The in-depth study of 80,000 words+ is still considered to be a particularly useful and therefore prestigious research output. This work is deeply reliant upon the additional work of librarians, translators, copy editors, managing editors, general editors, etc., all of whom are highly skilled professionals in their own right. 
  • A&H scholars would often go further than our STEM colleagues in wanting the open access version of our work to correspond to the final version of record, as opposed to an unformatted (and therefore unfinished) ‘accepted manuscript’ or ‘preprint’. This is because, as just mentioned, editorial activity (the work as process) is a vital part of the end result (the work as product). Moreover, in A&H, citations often refer to individual pages rather than to an article as a whole, so having access to versions with differing pagination is unhelpful for authors and readers. 
  • A&H work can be vastly commercially profitable, especially in the entertainment industries, but often has an indirect commercial use value, and one does not get the sense that profiteering is a discipline-wide issue. Far fewer A&H journals would be owned by for-profit multinational businesses. They tend instead to be closely connected to scholarly societies, who themselves plough their profits back into running conferences and supporting communities and early career scholars, while maintaining a diverse set of publishing arrangements with university or smaller scholarly presses. The complaint from colleagues in STEM that profit-oriented journals ‘take our work and then sell it back to us’ is less frequently heard in A&H contexts; A&H researchers would perhaps tend to have a less antagonistic relationship to publishers than in STEM.  
  • A&H scholars do not tend to produce data from scratch via experiment. The material that we work with would often be available in the form of printed texts or images, or generated via discussion in the case of, say, oral histories or interview pieces. However, we also often deal with data that we do not own. In these cases, we pay to publish from private archives or collections or from other resources that are under copyright.   
  • A much smaller percentage of A&H research is funded by the research councils than is the case in the STEM subjects.  To an extent, this follows from the fact that (notwithstanding the copyright payments mentioned above) A&H research is often less expensive to carry out than STEM research, requiring less equipment, space etc. Even so, there is a significant funding gap in the A&H, often partially filled by registered charities such as the Leverhulme Trust, the British Academy, etc. Department and faculty research budgets are vanishingly small.  
  • Many A&H researchers (often in fields such as music, art history, drama and so on) are located outside the higher education system altogether, working for instance in museums, galleries, private houses or collections, theatres, or charities.  
  • It is less the case in the A&H than in the sciences that English is the international language of communication. Indeed, publication in foreign-language journals or the translation of one’s books into languages other than English would be a particular mark of prestige in the A&H, demonstrating international reach, irrespective of the size of the publics reached.  

The Five Pillars of Open Research in the Arts and Humanities: Opportunities for Cultural Change 

The Working Group set itself the task of revisiting a document produced in 2018 by the League of European Research Universities (LERU): Open Science and its Role in Universities: A Roadmap for Cultural Change. LERU’s ‘eight dimensions of open science’, often referred to as the ‘eight pillars’, are as follows: 

  1. The Future of Scholarly Publishing 
  1. FAIR data (findable, accessible, interoperable and reproducible) 
  1. The European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) 
  1. Education and Skills 
  1. Rewards and Incentives 
  1. Next-generation Metrics 
  1. Research Integrity 
  1. Citizen Science  

The outline and detailed descriptions of the ‘eight pillars’ are often explicitly or implicitly science-based, and reflect assumptions about knowledge production in the STEM disciplines. We have now rewritten these to give the ‘five pillars of open research in the arts and humanities’. A more detailed examination of each pillar follows, as a way to structure our recommendations for the ways in which our institution, and HE institutions in general, can support open research in the A&H. In each of the five sections, detailed in the next five blog posts, opportunities are noted and recommendations for institutional support, development and training are given.

  1. The Future of Scholarly Communication
  2. CORE Data
  3. Research Integrity and Care 
  4. Public Engagement
  5. Research Evaluation

The full, citable report is available in Apollo: https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.86734
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