Edinburgh Open Research is an Open Access journal of conference proceedings from the Edinburgh Open Research Conference, which is run annually by the University of Edinburgh Library Research Support Team and grassroots organisation Edinburgh ReproducibiliTea.
Session Four Panel Discussion: Open Research Knowledge, Skills, and Training
Join Louise Saul, Milena Dobreva, Tapas Kumar Mohanty, and Camilla Elphick, along with panel chair Simon Smith to discuss their talks and to think about the impacts of Knowledge, Training, and Skills on the challenges of open research.
Copyright (c) 2025 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
The Development of an Open Access Open Research Course and Interactive Decision Tree for Researchers Across Disciplines
The development of an open access Open Research course and interactive decision tree for researchers across disciplines. Open Research encourages interdisciplinary collaboration, enabling researchers from diverse fields to interact with and build upon each other’s work, providing opportunities for underrepresented groups in academia to contribute and gain recognition, and accelerating innovation and advancements in various scientific fields. As such, it is essential for addressing global challenges such as climate change, health crises, and technological advancements. However, the shift to Open Research faces challenges, including concerns about intellectual property, funding models, and the infrastructure required for data sharing. We have sought to mitigate some of the challenges of Open Research and promote its use in academia with the creation of an open access online course “Open Research for Researchers” and accompanying decision tree interactive that were developed with critical input from cross-disciplinary academics and open research advisors from the university library. The course introduces researchers from across disciplines and methodologies to three principles of open research (transparency, integrity, and accessibility) and why these are important. It also provides practical steps they can take to make their own research open, and to identify transparency, integrity, and accessibility in the research of others. The interactive decision tree allows researchers to apply open research practices to their own research, at any stage of a project.
Copyright (c) 2025 Camilla Elphick, Lydia Devenney, Sarah Laurence, Ailsa Strathie https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Open Science, Data, and Methodologies: Lessons learned from the NIHR-RESPIRE Network in Asia
NIHR-RESPIRE, a Global Health Research Unit funded by NIHR, is committed to advancing respiratory health research in Asia. We prioritise Open Science, Data, and Methodologies to maximise research data utility securely, sharing the lessons encountered across seven LMIC partner countries (Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka). Our strategic shift from traditional data sharing to LMIC-tailored Open Science practices ensures data privacy and security. This includes refining Data Management Plans, metadata standards, and mandating FAIR Data sharing, providing methodological support, and developing Open Science Policy Guidelines. We advocate for the adoption of open science principles to maximise secure data use and value with a focus on FAIR data. We also provide aid to partners in enhancing their data-related skills, hosting regular meetings, and establishing internal data monitoring structures to bolster cross-cutting activities within RESPIRE. Through capacity building, we have enabled high-quality respiratory health research using Open Science principles, enhancing data sharing efficiency, research visibility, and ultimately respiratory health outcomes in Asia and beyond. Our experience underscores the following lessons: Flexibility in data sharing, tailored to LMIC researchers' needs, is essential; Training and support to enhance knowledge of methodologies and dispel misconceptions are key to successful data stewardship; Appointing a focal person for structured anonymised data sharing and supporting the internal Data Monitoring Committee are critical. We recognise Open Science's potential to foster innovation, collaboration, and knowledge sharing in respiratory health research.
Copyright (c) 2025 Tapas Kumar Mohanty, Simon Smith https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Is Knowledge Exchange the Silver Bullet for Fostering Open and Responsible Research and Innovation? A Case Study on Bulgaria
Bulgaria is one of the European countries with a very uneven Open and Responsible Research and Innovation (ORRI) landscape. On one hand, in terms of legal framework, the latest national law on scientific research from May 2024[1] places open research at the core of the scientific enquiry. It is supported by the Implementation Plan for the National Strategy for the Development of Scientific Research 2017–2030. However, the national and institutional ORRI infrastructures in the country are not fully developed. There are only 11 institutional repositories from Bulgaria listed in the Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR). With 52 Universities and 42 academic institutes only within the Academy of Sciences, this evidence shows that the majority of institutions do not have visible digital repositories. Paradoxically, the major national repository BPOS (Bulgarian Portal for Open Science) is not listed in ROAR. In January 2025, 73,759 open-access (OA) publications were deposited in BPOS. There are 4292 registered users of this platform, while there are some 14,000 researchers in Bulgaria.[2] There is no information on any repositories in Bulgaria that support the deposit of research data, methodologies, or reuse tools, such as Jupyter Notebooks. These data demonstrate that the majority of Bulgarian researchers are not users of the national OA infrastructure, and the datasets deposit is still underdeveloped. Furthermore, a recent study among researchers in Bulgaria found that only about one-third of recently surveyed academics are familiar with the EU's OA goals.[3] The authors’ primary is to offer more OA training to researchers. In line with this recommendation, we present an ongoing project which contributes to capacity building with a particular focus on early-stage and experienced researchers. This paper analyses the quadruple helix of ORRI in Bulgaria, exploring the role of government, academia, businesses and citizens. It draws from the experiences of the ORBIT[4] (Open Research Bulgarian Incubator) project funded by a cascading grant of the REINFORCING (https://openresearch.bg/). The University of Strathclyde in Glasgow contributed to the design and delivery of the knowledge exchange (KE) programme implemented by ORBIT. This effort started with a co-creation phase involving local stakeholders (academics, citizens & businesses, and research managers & policy makers). This informed the design of workshops for experienced researchers and a Knowledge Exchange (KE) programme for PhD students. While stand-alone training programmes have a positive role in raising awareness, it is common that participants often lack sufficient support to implement what they have learned in real life. To provide additional support to the participants, ORBIT designed its own pedagogical approach which combines a stage of active knowledge acquisition (an intensive winter school), a stage for experimenting with a specific ORRI instrument with the support of a mentor (a mentorship programme), and an opportunity to present this experience to the wider community (dissemination during a final conference). To measure the progress of participants, ORBIT also developed a self-assessment tool that captures researchers’ ORRI knowledge and skills. While various institutional self-assessment tools exist, the individual one is an innovative outcome and will help to measure the impact of ORRI KE. Collaboration in designing training programmes helps to offer new programmes addressing specific needs. There are two major takeaways from the work of ORBIT. First, aligning knowledge exchange activities to specific local challenges and addressing the capabilities of the local researchers is a necessary preparatory step to offer a programme fine-tuned to the local needs. However, it is not always trivial, as for many countries, there is insufficient information on the local attitudes and needs in the domain of open research. To fill this gap, ORBIT organised a series of focus groups with different stakeholders. Second, for countries where researchers are not incentivised to contribute to open research through the existing research assessment processes, it remains vital to offer training that reinforces the skills and the usefulness of their efforts. This is why ORBIT opted for a mentoring programme. The future will show if this was a productive way forward. I would like to conclude with a personal note of thanks to the organisers of the Edinburgh Open Research Conference. When I attended the conference in 2024, I was impressed by the diversity of institutional approaches to open research. This was a great personal inspiration for me in contributing to the design of the ORBIT activities. Seeing how many institutions offer different flavours and combinations of activities was really helpful and I think we will arrive at a deeper analysis on the usefulness of the various intervention as a community in the future. Beyond the number of attendees onsite and online and those who would check the digital presence, the Edinburgh Open Research series of conferences leads to a wider international impact in improving the open research practices. In this particular case it led to activities which directly impacted over 150 researchers and other stakeholders in Bulgaria, the first case studies of best practices from the country, and inspired the first national award. [1] Law on the promotion of scientific research and innovation. Published in the State Gazette, No. 39, May 1, 2024 (in Bulgarian). https://lex.bg/bg/laws/ldoc/2137242579 [2] Deloitte (2013) Researchers’ Report 2013. Country Profile: Bulgaria. https://www.euraxess.lt/sites/default/files/policy_library/bulgaria_country_profile_rr2013_final.pdf [3] Boock, M. et al. (2020), "Bulgarian authors’ open access awareness and preferences", Library Management, Vol. 41 No. 2/3, pp. 91-102. https://doi.org/10.1108/LM-08-2019-0059. [4] ORBIT: “Open Research Bulgarian IncubaTor” is financed by REINFORCING Project funded by the EU (REINFORCING-I1_4).
fostering open and responsible research and innovation
Copyright (c) 2025 Milena Dobreva https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Delivering OR Training: Creating Development Opportunities for Research Enabling Staff
Librarians and research support staff play an essential role in promoting engagement with Open Research Practices at UK Higher Education Institutions (UK HEIs), through providing training and academic engagement. However, individuals in these roles may not often gain the opportunity to contextualise the content of their teaching within the wider field, or to receive recognition for their work in driving academic standards. We describe the development of a pedagogical wrapper at the University of Bristol by Dr Kirsty Merrett. The aim of the wrapper is to support research enablers, such as librarians, in disseminating their areas of expertise to research support staff at other UK HEIs who are then supported to deliver the content in a form that is tailored to their institution. We evaluate how this has been implemented via the UK Reproducibility Network’s ‘Train-the-Trainer’ programme. We also describe how this has led to career development incentives for librarians that are aligned with the UK Professional Standards Framework. The importance of retaining the specialist knowledge of research enabling individuals, by providing defined career pathways and opportunities, is acknowledged for roles such as technicians however remains undefined for research support staff such as librarians. We hope that by sharing our experiences in this, we will provide a case study to support other research enablers.
Copyright (c) 2025 Louise Saul, Nicki Clarkson, Neil Jacobs, Kirsty Merrett https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Session Three Panel Discussion: Open Research Systems and Infrastructure
Join Sayeed Choudhury, Mahesh Karnani, Simon Bowie, and Evangeline Gowie along with panel chair Theo Andrew to discuss their talks and to think about the impacts of systems and infrastructure on the challenges of open research.
43 Actions to Overcome Eight Barriers to Qualitative Data Sharing
We present the preliminary findings of a scoping study on the actions a researcher can take to overcome common barriers to sharing interview transcripts. In preparing our own transcripts for deposit, we struggled to identify guidance addressing the practical issues we were facing at a detailed enough level to be helpful to us. As we searched through the extensive literature on the subject, we reasoned that it may be beneficial for other researchers to have access to the results of this exercise. We therefore began a formal scoping review, focusing specifically on the practical steps that researchers can take towards opening their transcripts. From the extracted concerns, we constructed eight themes: confidentiality, consent, misappropriation of data, context, copyright, IRB approval, researcher distress and time and money. We have presented the preliminary findings in the form of a table based ‘tool’, organised via these themes, which we used to develop our own data management plan. This talk gives an overview of this tool, with the hope that it will save time for people who, like us, are new to the practice of open qualitative data.
Copyright (c) 2025 Evangeline Gowie https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
small changes: taking back control of research through open software
The academic research process in the UK is hindered by the corporate software ecosystems imposed by universities. For all the advancement of open research practices, the use and distribution of open source software in academic research has been neglected in favour of the proprietary software defaults provided top-down by our institutions. Despite progress on open access publishing and open data sharing, academic researchers still use closed software like Microsoft Word for writing, Microsoft SharePoint for document management, and Microsoft Teams or Zoom for communication and conferencing. In this talk, I discuss the failures of proprietary software in UK Higher Education and advocate for open researchers to take back control of their research process using open source software. In particular, I focus on small software changes that academic researchers can make to their research practices. This includes using Zotero for reference management, using kMeet for videoconferencing, and using Zettlr for note-taking and academic writing. I argue that these small acts lay the groundwork for larger cultural change in open research such as divesting from proprietary software platforms like Elsevier's Pure or the Ex Libris suite of academic library systems. By embedding open source software in open research practices, we can divest from expensive and unreliable corporate software and take back control of the research process.
Copyright (c) 2025 Simon Bowie https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Peer Community in Neuroscience: Making Publishing Inclusive and Efficient Through Free Preprint Peer-Review
Incentives to have work peer-reviewed by traditional journals are problematic for a globally inclusive research community. The process of years-long delays in sharing new results, on ultimately paywalled venues, builds walls within research communities and is very costly. Many research fields could achieve much more with less through rapid, limitless sharing. In this talk, I discuss an operational solution to the peer-review component, Peer Community In (PCI) (https://peercommunityin.org/) which is a community of active researchers peer-reviewing and acting as editors to recommend publicly accessible preprints. This low-cost system is operated from core funding of the PCI organization, allowing cost of use to authors and readers to remain completely free. The resulting diamond open access, journal-independent, refereed, and recommended preprints can be submitted to journals along with the review reports, thus constituting a preprint-review-curate model. PCI currently includes 19 subject specific platforms [https://peercommunityin.org/current-pcis/], has the support of over 200 institutions/universities, and has won several open science awards. New PCIs can be launched in fields that are not represented yet, and to give insight into this process, I discuss our experience launching PCI Neuroscience. Our usage statistics show that the use of PCI is increasing in several fields in the sciences and humanities, demonstrating the usefulness and need for grass-roots-up communities within open research.
Copyright (c) 2025 Mahesh Karnani https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Our university has launched the first academic, large-scale automated science facility in the US. This facility will include shared data, compute, protocols, AI/ML, etc. that will empower open research. By emphasizing open data, open source software, and open source AI, this automated science facility represents a major opportunity for developing and sharing open research practices. This talk describes our university's approach and platform, along with potential opportunities and challenges related to reproducibility, defining openness for AI, and examining changes in research practice. Early examples include the benefits of audit trails or provenance with automated tools, balanced out by challenges associated with the opaqueness of AI. Additionally, there is early evidence that training of students might change as automated tools are used for tasks previously implemented by people. One of our university professors has developed an AI "co-scientist" to manage laboratory tasks. We are partnering with a researcher at another university, who is conducting an ethnographic study of how research and education practices are changing. Regarding AI, our university is leading a multi-institution program focused on defining openness in AI, and outlining the various benefits and possible risks. This work builds upon the early work and initial version of the Open Source AI Definition, which was designed through a community process led by the Open Source Initiative. This concept of openness in AI has been noted in various AI forums, including the Paris AI Action Summit. This talk relates to the conference topic of how technology, including AI, is helping or hindering open research good practice, particularly as it relates to automated science, across a range of scientific disciplines and lab practices for both research and education.
Copyright (c) 2025 Sayeed Choudhury https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Session Two Panel Discussion: Open Research Policy and Procedures
Join Sara Sharp, Varina Jones-Reid, Damon Querry, Ali Kay, Crispin Jordan, and Will Cawthorn along with panel chair Dominic Tate to discuss their talks and to think about the impacts of policy and procedures on the challenges of open research.
Open Research and the Research Culture Action Plan at the University of Edinburgh
Open Research improves research quality by increasing transparency and opens resources to society generally. Universities across the UK are adapting to incorporate and encourage open research by academics. In this talk, we describe how an Open Research theme is being incorporated in the next iteration of Research Culture Action Plan (RCAP), which reflects work with the Library Team's Open Research roadmap. For example, the RCAP includes Open Research in Reward and Recognition for the promotion process. These initiatives dovetail with work being done by the UK Reproducibility Network (UKRN) through its Open Research Programme. We then ask for audience feedback to gain cross-university and international suggestions on how to promote Open Research through the RCAP, and to identify potential barriers, which may vary across Schools and Colleges.
Copyright (c) 2025 Crispin Jordan, Will Cawthorn, Alex Peden https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Do Mandates Work? Investigating the Impact of the REF 2021 Open Access Policy at the University of Leeds
This talk investigates the effects of the REF 2021 OA policy at the University of Leeds, both analysing the data on institutional deposit patterns, and drawing on interviews conducted in summer 2021 with School and Faculty staff from across the University who were involved in administering the Open Access policy. These administrators were responsible for explaining the policy requirements to research staff, encouraging deposit and monitoring compliance rates, and in some cases depositing manuscripts on behalf of authors. As such they engaged directly with a wide range of researchers from many different disciplines, and the interviews paint a nuanced picture of the contested open access landscape. Thematic analysis of the interviews suggests that, though there were some barriers to deposit in the early days of the policy, by the end of the policy period institutional deposit had become embedded in researchers’ practice; however, this had not led to increased understanding of or enthusiasm for open access, and deposit continued to be motivated by the need for REF compliance rather than any broader benefits. Participants also related variance in researchers’ attitudes towards open access to differences of discipline, seniority, and investment in “traditional” research practices such as publishing in high impact journals. The research suggests that whilst mandates for institutional deposit can be a useful tool in increasing open access rates rapidly, other – potentially more transformative – approaches are needed to genuinely engage researchers and create lasting change.
Copyright (c) 2025 Ali Kay https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
An Examination of the Application of FAIR Data Principles to Institutional Research Management Data
Defined by Wilkinson, M D, et al. 2016 in “The FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data mmanagement and stewardship” the FAIR data principles propose a framework to enable the findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability of scholarly data. But are there lessons which could be learned from this and applied to data arising from institutional research administrative processes? Institutional data suffers from the same sorts of problems the FAIR principles were designed to overcome. In a large institution it can be difficult to know what data exists and how to locate it, difficult to access it and have it in a form which means it can interact with other data without needing a great deal of manual intervention, which leads to barriers when wanting to reuse it. This lightning talk examines some of the issues we might experience when applying FAIR data principles to institutional data, with an emphasis on research management data, who’s currently applying these principles and what we may need to do to adopt them within the University of Edinburgh.
Copyright (c) 2025 Damon Querry https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Supporting Early Career Researchers through Diamond Open Access publishing: The story of the Journal of Irish and Scottish Studies ‘New Voices’ special issue
The simple answer to the question ‘What’s stopping you (publishing open access)’ for many scholars is very simple: money. The dominant open access publishing model at the present moment is one built around APCs and BPCs. This biases OA publishing in favour of established researchers capable of pulling grant funding, and it biases it in favour of the sciences, with Humanities researchers struggling the most to access publication funds. This model brings into question whether ‘open access’ is actually accessible, or even truly open. We launched Aberdeen University Press in 2022 as an open access press with the aim of supporting inclusive, fair and sustainable publishing practices . Our aspiration is to become a fully diamond open access publisher – ensuring high-quality academic research is open to all. This is not without financial challenges but through meaningful partnerships, support from the University and Scholarly Institutes that we hope to achieve our mission. We are committed to not charging mandatory fees to authors, and not basing publishing decisions on author’s access to funding. Our talk showcases how our partnerships support bibliodiversity and allows a wider range of authors to publish, including early career researchers and unaffiliated authors. We do this by looking at the forthcoming issue of our Journal of Irish and Scottish Studies, a special issue titled ‘New Voices’ and featuring early career researchers in History. This issue grows out of workshops focused on mentoring new researchers through the process of preparing their work for publication. By removing the financial commitment for researchers, we have been able to include a broader range of voices and share their research openly to increase readership and reach.
Copyright (c) 2025 Varina Jones-Reid, Sarah Sharp https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Session One Panel Discussion: Open Research Communities
Join Judith Fathallah, Kevin Sanders, Ailsa Niven, Zuzanna Zagrodzka, and Fiona Ramage along with their chair Simon Smith (he/him) to discuss their talks from Session One of the Open Research Conference 2025.
Discovering and Confronting Bias Head on in Behavioural Neuroscience – My PhD Experience
In 2017, I began a PhD in nutritional neuroscience aiming to investigate how high-fat diets impaired cognition, using dietary and behaviour experiments in mice. During the first few months of my PhD, I was aiming to replicate the finding that high-fat diets do in fact impair some types of memory in mice, which should have been an easy task. At first, my results looked ideal, but I had performed them unblinded to dietary group, and I had an inkling this was a problem. Despite this being perceived as a waste of time, I measured and plotted blinded scores – and my ideal results vanished. When considering possible next steps, it was suggested that the best thing for my PhD would be to repeat the experiment until I successfully replicated it, and could proceed from there. This was not the approach I took. This talk discusses how I confronted an issue in my own research, and used it to shape my future research trajectory. I discuss my experiences learning about reproducibility in research, how I tried to use my own experience and my learnings to inform and guide other researchers, and why I ultimately transitioned into a career in meta-research, leaving behind bench research for good.
Copyright (c) 2025 Fiona Ramage https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Characteristics of Professionals Involved in Open Science in Ecology and Evolution
Understanding how different demographics and professional groups support or engage with open science, as well as identifying those less involved, can help institutions, organisations, and policymakers create tailored recommendations, training resources, and support to increase engagement across these groups in open science practices. This can also help to normalise the collaborative and open process of knowledge mobilisation. In this study, we surveyed ecological and evolutionary professionals to evaluate the influence of familiarity, attitudes, and factors such as experience and gender on engagement with open science. To achieve this, we conducted an online survey targeting a diverse group of stakeholders, including knowledge creators (working within research institutions), knowledge mobilisers within academia (e.g., journals, repositories, learned societies), and those outside academia (e.g., governments, industry, and charity organisations). Our study revealed that familiarity with open science increases with years of experience but remains consistently high across professional groups. Participants identified positive aspects of open science, such as increased visibility, trust, collaboration, satisfaction, and efficiency. However, they also highlighted concerns, including financial and time costs, as well as a lack of personal or organisational rewards. Notably, while familiarity with open science grows with experience, researchers (knowledge creators) tend to perceive open science less positively as their experience increases
Copyright (c) 2025 Zuzanna Zagrodzka https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Using Behavioural Science to Support Open Research Behaviour Change
Changing open research behaviour is hard! Drawing from behavioural science provides an approach that is evidence-based to guide efforts to change behaviour. Specifically, the Behaviour Change Wheel (BCW; Michie et al., 2014) was developed to support the design and implementation of behaviour change interventions, and has been applied to a wide range of behaviours. Central to the BCW, is the COM-B model, which outlines how Behaviour is influenced by three broad factors: Capability, Opportunity, and Motivation. The first step in implementing the BCW, is to use the COM-B model to undertake a ‘behavioural diagnosis’ of the target behaviour. By doing this behavioural diagnosis, the prominent influences on behaviour can be identified and strategically targeted for change. Researchers in health psychology have advocated for the use of mthe BCW to inform interventions to support increased engagement in open research behaviour (Norris & O’Connor, 2019). The Directorate of Research Engagement and Impact in Moray House School of Education and Sport at the University of Edinburgh are aiming to support researchers to engage in open research practices, in line with the University Open Research Roadmap, and emerging REF PCE guidance. In this talk, we outline how we have used behavioural science to inform this approach through data collection and analysis to identify priority areas for focus and implementation
Copyright (c) 2025 Ailsa Niven https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Choosing Open Access for Books: Author Agency and the Open Book Collective
The Open Book Collective (OBC) brings together libraries and small-to-medium OA scholarly books publishers from across the world via a unique consortial funding model to enable the publication of OA books with no fee. Judith Fathallah is the Research Lead for the OBC and an academic author who decided in 2023 to publish her third monograph Open Access with a small, scholar-led, innovative press whose director is an expert in the field of media studies. In the first part of this talk Judith explains how she came to this decision, leaving behind the cachet of traditional publishing names, and why she would urge other academics to do the same. Academics cannot be asked to bear all of the risk of transition to a sustainable open access landscape for scholarly books – but, as we stand to benefit from this transition as educators, readers, authors and human beings, she contends that even precariously employed scholars such as myself we must bear some. Open Access Engagement Lead Kevin Sanders then briefly introduces the Open Book Collective's funding model, and the range of small-to-medium scholarly publishers who are currently members of the OBC. We encourage authors, librarians and educators to explore these high quality publishers as options to work with and support. The OBC supports presses to move away from inequitable, unsustainable Book Processing Charges, towards an OA fairer, more inclusive and more diverse landscape for OA books. The options are available to us: now the time has come for authors and scholars to take up a more active role as key stakeholders in this change. See www.openbookcollective.org and www.openbookcollective.pubpub.org
Copyright (c) 2025 Judith Fathallah, Kevin Sanders https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Open research practices, which seek to foster research collaboration, transparency, and accessibility, are an integral part of research culture change. Policies are being introduced, particularly at the level of research funding and publishing, to make open research the ‘new normal’. However, the support currently available to help researchers adopt open research practices varies by institution; college, school, or department; and research discipline and methods. Our primary aim in this report was to identify the open research support available to University of Edinburgh research students and staff at various levels including central, local, and grassroots initiatives. As a secondary aim, we sought to understand post graduate researchers’ (PGRs) experiences with open research, including PGRs own personal knowledge and adoption of open research, their experiences accessing support, and what kinds of support they think would benefit them most. This report presents a summary of open research support available at the University of Edinburgh between October 2023 and February 2024, alongside key findings and action items related to open research support for PGRs from semi-structured discussions with seven researchers across the University’s three colleges.
Copyright (c) 2024 Emma Wilson https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Making Open Science the “New Normal” – The Road So Far
How do we make Open Research the "new normal" in a large and complex organisation? What can lead us to positive culture change?
Copyright (c) 2024 Kerry Miller, Simon Smith http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Inclusive research practise in junior professionals
Open research is a paradigm shift in research culture processes and behaviours which has revolutionized research accuracy, trust and transparency through standardized scientific communications and publications. Open research is a universal common good. The COVID-19 pandemic has shown us how open research can be beneficial to the society. It gave equal access to scientific data with collaboration on vaccines design and biotechnology to rapidly halt the pandemic. There are still rising lack of inclusion in open research with increasing innovation gaps. These research culture has erode the core values of open science. This poster aims to achieve the objectives of open research in transparency, reliability and trusts which embody the whole research processes of research pre-registration, research design, methods, critical reviews and the dissemination of open research results by published work. The European Bioinformatics Institute maintains up-to-date and comprehensive open research resources for trainees.
Copyright (c) 2024 Oladele Olajide Onada http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
DMPOnline – Machine-actionable Plans
Copyright (c) 2024 Diana Sisu http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
The crossroads of Digital Research Facilitation and Open Research
Digital Research Services cover all the data and computing services available to researchers at the University of Edinburgh throughout the research lifecycle. Research Facilitators help researchers navigate this complex landscape, and pick the best tools tailored to the researchers’ needs. Within this work, there are several crossroads with open research and opportunities to improve research culture. First, our resources involve several tools to support open research, such as DataShare, OSF and GitLab. By facilitating access to these open research tools, Digital Research Services also promote best practices in research planning, data management, research integrity. For example, the recently developed interactive Resource Finder on our website enables users to build their personalised toolkit whilst encouraging better research planning and collaboration between researchers within University of Edinburgh and beyond. Second, by advertising the potential outcomes of tool use rather than the tools themselves, Digital Research Services engage researchers that would otherwise not identify as potential tool users. For example, there is a growing number of case studies on the Digital Research Services website demonstrating how researchers use open research tools across disciplines and domains. Among those, one can find insights into learning Git and using OSF and researchers’ perspective on data sharing and archiving their research data. What sort of activities help promote digital research tools, whilst also supporting a shift in research culture? Is it even possible to measure this culture change? The poster will attempt to answer these questions, as well as highlight upcoming challenges and future avenues for involvement for Digital Research Services. It will particularly examine the work of the Research Facilitation Team, who keep a catalogue of digital research tools, but organise a breadth of engagement, outreach and educational events alongside this.
Copyright (c) 2024 Eleni Kotuala http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Communicating the values and benefits of Open Research can be extremely resource intensive for small teams, especially when seeking to undertake it systematically. This project, led by Edinburgh Open Research and the UKRI Future Leaders Fellows project, with the support of Liverpool John Moore and the University of Bradford's Library Teams seeks to streamline this process by producing a toolkit composed of a training and guidance hub along with a resource library.
Copyright (c) 2024 Nel Coleman http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Open Research Training: What, Who, When, Where, How, and Why
As open research (OR) becomes the norm in both research practice and policy we must ensure that postgraduate researchers (PGRs) are equipped with the skills to become Open Researchers. Currently, OR support is uneven with the focus on specific fields or even research groups. As a result, PGRs face disparities and a ‘postcode lottery’ in quantity and quality of training. We asked 7 PGRs from across all 3 of University of Edinburgh’s colleges to tell us about their OR experiences and help us formulate recommendations for how we can best support them and the fellow students in the future.
Copyright (c) 2024 Emma Wilson http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Biomed News – a biomedical literature expertise sharing system based on machine learning and expert curation
Approximately 30,000 biomedical research abstracts are published each week on PubMed. This provides an enormous resource for new information that needs to be retrieved by individuals who desire access to it – researchers, industry, funders, policy makers, clinicians, patients, and the public. This enormous amount of information is conventionally retrieved using searches or tables of contents. However, these methods can be overwhelming, broad and irrelevant. Biomed News is a free platform that provides a ranked abstract list on a weekly basis. Topic experts select abstracts relevant to their area of expertise. These selections are used by supervised machine learning to identify relevant papers in subsequent weekly issues. This reduces the amount of time required to identify new abstracts. Biomed News also provides an opportunity for selectors to share their weekly topic issues with other interested parties. Biomed News currently has around 90 experts from countries all over the world who are at different stages of their career. We aim for Biomed News to be a user-friendly platform covering all areas of biomedical research that allows new abstracts to be discovered rapidly, shared with interested parties, recorded permanently and available openly. Currently, Biomed News has many reports specific to many different diseases and contributes to the dissemination and discovery of new knowledge that can be accessed openly and providing recognition of selectors.
Copyright (c) 2024 Gavin P. McStay, Thomas Kritchel http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Graduate Engagement Leads for Open Research at the University of York
This poster will provide insight into a variety of exciting culture change activities undertaken by our Graduate Engagement Leads for Open Research. Last year the Library-based Open Research team recruited three postgraduate researchers to promote engagement within each of our academic faculties (Arts and Humanities, Sciences, and Social Sciences). This was made possible through an allocation of Research England Enhancing Research Culture funding, and supports the University’s strategic commitments towards developing an open research community of practice across all our disciplines. The objectives our Engagement Leads have been working towards include: Proactive collaboration with Library colleagues, members of our University Strategy and Operations Groups, research staff and students at all levels; Coordinating actions, refining guiding principles and driving engagement amongst our burgeoning Open Research Advocates network; Developing accessible and thought-provoking open research in practice case studies to use for education and advocacy; Addressing requirements for skills training in individual departments and schools based on the results of a University-wide survey; Publishing and promoting a new Open Research newsletter, launching an Instagram account and exploring how we can use other communication channels to get our messages across; Planning a series of coordinated events and celebratory initiatives including our Open Research Awards scheme at the end of the academic year. This talk will address each of these in turn, identifying achievements made and challenges encountered over the course of the year. We will use this opportunity to provide personal perspectives from our Engagement Leads on their open research journeys and the work they have been involved with so far. We hope this will be a useful poster for attendees, offering recommendations for anyone who may be interested in pursuing similar culture change initiatives at their own institutions.
Copyright (c) 2024 Ben Catt, Kirralise Hansford, Melissa Kays, Luqman Muraina http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Beyond Open Research: Understanding What Matters for Quality and Reliability
What really matters in research? What practices and behaviours lead to the highest quality? How can we recognise and incentivise those practices? These are some of the questions we hope to answer at Imperial College London in a pioneering research culture project entitled ‘Beyond Open Research: Understanding What Matters for Quality and Reliability.’ Our vision is a research culture that: recognises the public interest in high-quality, reliable research, and incentivises the behaviours that lead to it. Activities to support a positive research culture are distributed across many functional areas of the university, some exhibiting best practice, some unaware and most unrecognised. Moreover, it’s not clear what practices engender quality/reliability. In this phase, we unpick these challenges in data science, research data management and research software engineering. There are two ways the project goes Beyond Open Research. Firstly, recognising that openness doesn’t by itself imbue research with quality, we address gaps in scrutiny of data, software and AI. Secondly, we examine the inputs, practices and outputs that matter – to researchers, staff and the public – to refocus recognition towards quality and reliability. Through a participatory approach engaging research, academic, clinical and professional staff and the public, we’re: identifying the status of Open Research within Imperial exploring the challenges, questions and concerns of researchers and staff in engaging with responsible research practices around research data, software and AI co-creating practical, stakeholder-led recommendations to embed transparency, reliability and trustworthiness. Semi-structured interviews with experts will enrich the workshop findings, and a network of postgraduate Research Software Champions is raising the profile of software and development best practice among researchers. To the best of our knowledge, this ambitious approach has never been attempted before at a British university. We have a rare opportunity to try to break free from the culture of publish-or-perish, in the interests of researchers and society. We present the context and ambition of our vision, explore the value of meaningful engagement and share interim findings.
Copyright (c) 2024 Hamid Khan http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0