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The case for opening up collaboration: speed, recognition and impact

January 21, 2022Open Research at Cambridge ConferenceCambridge Open Engage, Cambridge University Press, collaborationadmin

The Open Research at Cambridge conference took place between 22–26 November 2021. In a series of talks, panel discussions and interactive Q&A sessions, researchers, publishers, and other stakeholders explored how Cambridge can make the most of the opportunities offered by open research. This blog is part of a series summarising each event.

Supporting collaboration in early research and research communications via open research tools has the potential to bring real benefits: from speeding up discovery in research by making more aspects of the production of research available to other researchers; to providing recognition for more component parts of the research process; to helping to disrupt and improve the article publishing model; to making interdisciplinary work less challenging and more impactful. But what are the barriers to doing this, and how can the research community overcome them in partnership with publishers and other stakeholders?

The session “The case for opening up collaboration: speed, recognition, and impact” started that conversation through a workshop in 3 parts. The recording of the session is available here:

The first section shared an update on 2 areas where Cambridge University Press is working to encourage collaboration. The first is Cambridge Open Engage, which offers rapid dissemination of early and open research outputs including working papers, preprints, research reports, conference posters and presentations. In response to COVID-19, Engage also began to offer a service for sharing event outputs, as more events became virtual. We saw that there were opportunities to bring benefits to conferences by hosting their outputs with solid scholarly communications infrastructure and speed – meaning that those who cannot attend the conference itself can access outputs and provide feedback to authors, authors can version their research after the event based on that feedback, and the research is citeable and able to accrue impact and metrics outside of the constraints of the conference itself.

Work is planned to boost Engage’s collaborative utility by adding new spaces called “Communities”. These will bring together broad communities of researchers working in interdisciplinary fields and will augment informal collaboration tools with a fit-for-purpose area where researchers can share their work, discuss their ideas and practices, and find collaborators.

We will be starting with a community for Climate Change & Sustainability, where we will draw together researchers from across disciplines from the humanities to atmospheric science, on a free-to-use platform that offers infrastructure for collaborative work of all kinds.

This area will include:

Curated & moderated discussion threads
Communities of practice-i.e. areas to share resources & learning on topics of importance to their professional competencies and/or research skills
Content alerts and invitations
Ability to invite commenters
Ability to find and follow contributors

The second example where we are supporting collaboration in research at Cambridge University Press was the innovative journal project Research Directions. These journals will publish high quality, high-impact open access research with global reach in interdisciplinary subject areas, with the author responding to field-specific curated research questions or hypotheses.

Unlike traditional journals, however, which are structured around a descriptive scope, authors publishing in Research Directions will be invited to publish research that takes incremental steps to answering a set of distinct research questions, intended to be definitive to a specific field. The resulting published outputs will be broken down into discrete parts- results, analysis, impact- each of which will be indexed, receive a DOI and be considered a published and citable research item. This approach, of breaking down research into its constituent parts, will allow greater collaboration at every stage of the research lifecycle. The published research outputs will be complemented by items on Engage (our preprint server) which would not usually be included in formal, peer-reviewed journal outputs. This might include items such as preprints, data sets, software descriptions, research posters and community briefs, giving visibility to the entire research journey as it progresses.

After these examples were shared, workshop attendees then spent some time identifying barriers to collaboration , logging the discussion in a Miro board. We focused on the following categories of scholarly collaboration, as defined by our Engage project team:

Network collaboration: the way that researchers discover and share new ideas, meet one another and become familiar with one another’s work.
Project collaboration: an example of this would be sharing documents across a large international research project where you have specific laboratory equipment in different places but need to share data with colleagues working on the same project.
Impact collaboration: in this category we think of activities that synthesize research and aim to communicate it more effectively, which is often an effort undertaken by groups of researchers coming from disparate projects. In some cases, it might also involve collaborators and audiences outside of research entirely: for example, the public, policymakers or practitioners in industry.

Research completed by Cambridge University Press has shown that many scholars use informal tools around collaboration. A lot of this growth in tool use was fairly organic, dependent on existing networks, resulting in frequent use of largely basic tools like email. The pressure to find a complement to the conference model has been building for years, partly because access to conference travel budgets vary widely depending on access to funds and/or where a researcher is based in the world. The pandemic has only made it more critical that we find new ways to provide feedback, build networks, and workshop research findings in advance of publication.

Public Engagement at Cambridge: why, who and why again!

January 21, 2022Open Research at Cambridge Conferencepublic engagementadmin

Public engagement is increasingly seen as an important part of any research career. It can inform and inspire and, when done in collaboration with others, it can improve research and make it more relevant. As part of the Open Research Conference, we looked at what public engagement is and outlined how we support it across the University.

No one researcher journey is the same and public engagement professionals in the central team and across the University are here to support the public engagement priorities of everyone, whatever these might be. We do this in a number of ways but the most important first step is yours!

Step one is the ‘Why’ and the ‘Who’ of public engagement! So we ask you to consider why you want to engage, who you want to engage with and why should they want to engage with you? It is only once you have considered these questions, can we help you meet these aims.

Step two involves getting started and building your confidence. The best and most useful public engagement happens when you plan and have the skills and experience to engage well. Our Engaged Researcher training courses provide introductory level courses and masterclasses concentrating on stakeholders and formats to help. We’re here to advise, to act as a sounding board for ideas and to signpost you to others with relevant experience so you can determine what would work for you and for the people you want to engage with.

Step three is about trying it out! We provide platforms and resources to increase your skills and so you can test out new ideas and activities. Our Public Engagement starter grant provides small amounts of funding to kick-start projects and we can help with grant and fellowship applications. You might consider also taking in our interdisciplinary Cambridge Festival through departmental activities or as an individual researcher and gain the experience and skills you need to engage.

Step four, if appropriate, involves moving into more consultative and co-produced public engagement with individuals, community groups or stakeholder partners whose own expertise are directly relevant to your research. We provide training, including how to work with external partners and how you might address any barriers for engagement that exist.

Step five is about embedding public engagement and moving to engaged research that has the potential to have economic, cultural and societal impact locally and globally. We can provide further support and broker contacts with other professional services staff to support your work. The best engaged research is recognised through our Vice Chancellor’s Awards for Research Impact and Engagement.

We hoped that this short talk proved a useful introduction to public engagement and, importantly catalyses the start of much more in-depth conversations. If you are interested in finding out more about doing, or supporting public engagement, or would like to take part in the Cambridge Festival, please get in touch. We love to talk (lots!).

Dr Lucinda Spokes

Head of Public Engagement, Office of External Affairs and Communications,

University of Cambridge.

Additional resources

University of Cambridge Public Engagement

The Cambridge Festival

Web: www.festival.cam.ac.uk
Email: cambridgefestival@admin.cam.ac.uk
Twitter: @Cambridge_Fest
Instagram: CamUniFestivals

National Coordinating Centre for Public Engagement

Web: www.publicengagement.ac.uk

Practical steps toward more reproducible research

January 21, 2022Open Research at Cambridge ConferenceOpen Research, reproducibilityadmin

On 26 November 2021 the University’s Reproducibility Working Group hosted a workshop for researchers from across Cambridge to explore approaches to supporting more reproducible research. Talks were provided by Professor Alexander Bird (Faculty of Philosophy), Dr Florian Markowetz (Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute) and Dr Maria Tsapali (Faculty of Education) exploring approaches to reproducible research and reasons to work reproducibility across qualitative and quantitative research.

The recording of the session can be found below:

Talks were followed by interdisciplinary discussion sessions designed to identify the obstacles to reproducible research across Cambridge and how these might be tackled. The key findings from the discussions included:

Training on reproducibility, including statistical training, reproducible methods and use of key tools exist in departments across the University, but more needs to be done to share provision and create synergies and central provision where possible.
Training should begin at undergraduate or Masters level to build key skills early.
Awareness of training, and the importance of reproducibility training, needs to be enhanced.
The need for University guidance on how to make research reproducible, particularly to overcome key challenges to reproducibility such as balancing reproducibility with the need to protect sensitive or confidential data.
That the University can help by making the production of open and reproducible research as painless as possible, for example by facilitating peer review of codes and providing easy access to data storage and expertise in best practice.
That reproducibility looks very different across the disciplines and that in some areas transparency and methods reproducibility will be the focus, rather than reproducible outcomes.

The Reproducibility Working Group will draw on the ideas raised at this workshop to help shape proposals for future University approaches to supporting reproducible research. The group plans to host a number of further events to map, consolidate, and extend existing resources for reproducibility across Cambridge with the aim of boosting grassroots activities and magnifying their impact across all levels of the institution.

For more information and resources on reproducible research see: UK Reproducibility Network: https://www.ukrn.org/