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.
A conversation with Emma Gilby and Rachel Leow, chaired by Matthias Ammon
This session was based on the work of the University’s Working Group on Open Research in the Humanities. The main activity of the group, which was formed in summer 2021 and is chaired by Emma Gilby, Professor of Early Modern French Literature and Thought in the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics, has been to discuss ways to make some of the underlying principles of Open Research – which have often been based on scholarly communication in STEMM subjects (as for example defined by the League of European Research Universities as the ‘8 Pillars of Open Science’) – more applicable to humanities research. The conversation was also intended – as implied in the title – to explore issues around humanities research that went beyond the mechanisms of Open Access publishing, to consider the production of research as well as conditions of dissemination.
Some of the discussion about applying the concepts of Open Research to the humanities centred around differences between research in the sciences and the humanities. For example, the concept of ‘reproducibility’ may not necessary be a quality that’s applicable to humanities research, which does not aim to produce reproducible results via experiment, but builds on and recontextualises earlier discoveries, methods and debates. Research integrity here comes with a vital element of care – care to represent source material fairly but also awareness of the scholarly ecosystem, the processes behind scholarship and the networks of people involved. For instance, publishing in the humanities in particular relies on the labour of editors, copy editors and typesetters, among others, all of whom share (along with the author) care and responsibility for disciplinary values and standards, and whose work needs to be recognised and acknowledged.
The concepts of care and openness also appeared again in a discussion of what is often considered one of the major benefits of Open Research, namely that it makes scholarship more globally accessible. Careful consideration here needs to be given to the issue of appropriate and fair representation across a diversity of voices and communities. For instance, digital archives tend to reproduce English-speaking structures and skew towards information that is already easy to find.
These are a couple of specific examples which demonstrate that the underlying structures of the way research and scholarly communication are conducted in the humanities require a significant amount of rethinking of the concepts behind Open Research in a humanities context. The Working Group is currently producing a report which will discuss these and other aspects of Open Research in more detail and make suggestions for how institutions such as libraries can support researchers in this context.
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.
Much faith is being placed in narrative format CVs, like the Resume for Researchers, to bring about a shift in how we recognise and reward researchers, but is Cambridge, or indeed the wider academic sector, ready for the change?
Rewards and incentives are one of the eight pillars of open research, and so the open research festival was an ideal opportunity to look at how narrative CVs might help to drive change in open research practice, and improvements to the wider research culture. Our session focused on the Resume for Researchers format (R4R), which was developed by the Royal Society is being adopted by UKRI. The format provides space for researchers to write in detail about their contributions to the generation of knowledge, the development of others, the wider research community, and broader society. The hope is that selection panels will start to consider these broader contributions to research in their decisions, and that researchers in turn will be incentivised to contribute in ways that lead to an improved research culture.
The R4R was only formally launched in 2020, and so most of our workshop participants weren’t familiar with it. Given the momentum behind narrative CVs at the moment, it was interesting to get a sense of how our research community is likely to react to these changes, and what kind of support we might need to provide them with to make narrative CVs a success.
The session participants could see that the R4R format offered applicants the chance to highlight non-traditional career paths, something which they felt might support a more diverse applicant pool. They were also positive about the way the format gave profile to activities like public engagement, and could see how this might encourage more people contribute is such ways.
There were also a number of concerns raised. The participants expressed some scepticism about whether the new format would really change recruitment practice, particularly noting that a lot of the content contained within a narrative CV would be contained within a cover letter in many recruitment scenarios. There was also a concern that the format might drive new inequalities, favouring those who were good at crafting convincing narratives and those whose funders and/or PIs provided them with the support and opportunity to engage in the wide range of activity showcased in the R4R.
It’s clear that more work needs to be done to make this new format really work for the research community at Cambridge – and we hear these same concerns being voiced elsewhere in the sector. An academic in the audience called for the format to be ‘tested’ alongside a standard format, to iron out some of these concerns and encourage uptake. In 2022, the Research Culture team at Cambridge will be starting a project to do just that, to contributing a much needed evidence base on whether and how narrative CVs affect recruitment decisions and hence how they might contribute to culture change.
#ProtestingSewell at the Conservative Party Conference October 2021. All Rights Reserved.
For this post, Katherine Burchell talks to Dr Jacqui Stanford about the success of her open access doctoral thesis: Identities in Transition: theorising race and multicultural success in school contexts in Britain. The thesis is available to download from Apollo here: https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.58378
Thanks for agreeing to talk about your research. Could you please describe what your PhD thesis is about?
I am interested in how we build a harmonious society given the challenges of our past of chattel slavery and colonialism. As a Black educator of Caribbean heritage, I also have a particular professional interest in schools that are successful for Black children. However, I’ve never been interested in a ten-point list of ‘how to build successful schools’; there was a lot of that in the late 1990s when I turned to graduate studies. And that project seemed to be inconsistent with necessary, actual and sustainable outcomes in schools. Furthermore, that project did not access or address the complexities introduced by race. Yet, as a microcosm of society, schools necessarily had developed strategies that addressed race, especially if they were harmonious spaces, where everyone could be successful.
For my PhD, I was very much interested in writing process, ie, zeroing in and exploring the complexities of transitioning from one thing to another. For example, I was very interested in white teachers and how they imagined – perhaps actually practised – but particularly how they articulated – transition from a past beset by the challenges of race to a context that was considered successful for Black and minority ethnic young people – as well as themselves. I also wanted to see what Black and white identities looked like in these contexts.
Methodological and analytical approaches were paramount in my research enterprise. I was not content with taking up established ideas. I focused on building theories at every stage of the project: a theory for research, ie, for doing race research, and for doing race research in Britain; a theory for analysing data on race; a theory for teachers’ explanations that transformed their personal stories into universal ideas. In other words, I was focused on developing and delineating generic ideas for negotiating race and racial identities as well as philosophical ideas about actually doing race research, as much as I was on delineating ideas about success in the school contexts I researched.
Has open access helped promote your work?
To begin, I remember feeling such discontent back then, and actually writing it in my thesis, that all the tremendous effort would just end up on a shelf in the UL. For me, the award of a PhD was a bonus on top of the actual experience of learning, growing and fashioning another world through research. The PhD was not just the work needed for the award of a qualification; I was intentionally seeking to articulate the aforementioned theories and understanding of the world. I am glad I did. For following my PhD, lecturing and working internationally in policymaking, activism and community development took precedence over writing. Now, in the wake of George Floyd and Black Lives Matter, as we begin to seek ways to understand and address the racial past, I find myself instinctively returning to my PhD, revisiting theories on whiteness and blackness, how to negotiate challenges posed by race and create harmonious multicultural spaces.
I also note the irrepressible urgency, and opportunity, currently growing in society to grapple with the past. This encouraged me to make my thesis open access in Summer 2020, and I am pleased to see that it has attracted strong interest, from a range of countries, and especially from old colonial countries such as the USA, France, Belgium as well as the UK. And I am definitely interested to note that it has attracted attention from China.
Do you feel open access has helped you reach marginalised groups that your work discusses?
It would seem that my work is reaching marginalised groups, in addition to groups that, though arguably not marginalised, have urgent need for research insight. Here, for example, I would highlight white teachers faced with the responsibility of teaching Britain’s past in the wake of Black Lives Matter etc. The thesis has interest for various groups positioned in various ways in the present historical moment, both here in the UK, and in other countries with whom we share a colonial past, and with others simply seeking information on it.
How has the work been taken up in policy? (Do you feel open access has been helpful in policy?)
I have had opportunity to contribute to government policy here in the UK and internationally over the years, and it has been gratifying to see viewings of my thesis from countries where I have worked. While there has been good indication of interest from the UK, it is noticeable that viewings from the US in particular, is very strong. The ideas in my thesis underpinned international travel and work in the US lecturing, and activism as well as contributing to President Obama’s Race to the Top education policy as a reviewer. So, I am very pleased that open access has made my thesis accessible there, especially as it is also being accessed.
Here in the UK, my thesis was used to evidence arguments made in submission to the recent government consultation for the Sewell Report, aka Race Report published in March2021. Controversially, like other submissions, it was not listed in the acknowledgment; nevertheless, my PhD was offered and reviewed as an example of how we create successful multicultural schools and society. There was a significant uptick in viewings of my thesis following submission, dramatically so after publication of the report. Perhaps there is a link between the events.
It certainly feels as if the time has come to share my exploration of the UK’s history of race and schooling in relation to government policymaking, and specifically my thorough going examination of Tony Sewell’s seminal text which anticipated the Commission on Race and Ethnic and Disparities’ report. It is certainly the case that my PhD informs my current #ProtestingSewell campaign, which denounces the report as a source of legislation and policymaking on race in the UK today.
Additional Notes
On the strength of my PhD, I was the first person in my Cambridge Education department to be a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow having been the first person to be awarded the ESRC (Economic and Social Research Council) Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship. This followed the ESRC award for my PhD as well as other awards including the three-year Isaac Newton Award for young researchers, and the Barbadian High Commission award for Outstanding Students of Caribbean Heritage studying in Britain.
Bios
Jacqui Stanford: Having suffered life-changing injuries while working as a professor in the US, I am presently in rehabilitation, focusing on opportunities to make ideas and theories generated in my thesis widely available.
Katherine Burchell is Scholarly Communication Support at the Office of Scholarly Communication at Cambridge University Libraries
