Open Research 101

Open Research at Cambridge Conference, , ,

Dr. Sacha Jones and Dr. Samuel Moore, Office of Scholarly Communication, Cambridge University Libraries

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. 

As part of the Cambridge Open Research conference, the Office of Scholarly Communication hosted a ‘101’ session on open research, covering the basics and answering queries for the audience on all aspects of open access publication and open data. With over 80 participants, we were thrilled with the response and wanted to recap some of the topics we covered in this post.

Firstly, as we discussed in the session, it is easy to assume that open research is simply an issue for the sciences rather than all academic disciplines. Practices such as open access and open data have been taken up widely in the sciences, although in different ways, and there is a common association with science and openness. This is compounded by the fact that in many European countries Open Science is inclusive of arts and humanities scholarship and so is functionally equivalent to open research. At the OSC, we are keen to support open practices across all disciplines while being sensitive to different ways of working. We are guided by the university’s Open Research Position Statement that requires work to be ‘as open as possible, as closed as necessary’.

After an introduction to open research, Sam then outlined the key issues in open access, including the different licences for making your research open access, the differences between green and gold open access, and the many and various reasons for making your work open access. Open access allows us to reach new audiences, improve the economics of research access, and reassess knowledge production and dissemination in a digital world. We also learned about open access monographs, the complex policy landscape and the various ways in which you can make your research open access through repositories and journals. The OSC’s Open Access webpages are an excellent set of resources for learning more.

We then moved onto open data – research data shared publicly – and how this fits into open research (see the University’s policy framework on research data). After highlighting that all research regardless of discipline generates or uses data of one kind or another (e.g. text, audio-visual, numerical, etc.), Sacha posed a series of questions with answers, anticipating what the audience might want to know more about. Do I have to share my data? What data do I share – is it meant to be everything from my research? My data contains sensitive information so I can’t share my data, or can I? How do I share my data? I don’t want to be criticised after making my data open, so how can I prevent this? How can I stop someone else from taking my data, using it, and getting all the credit? The OSC’s Research Data website contain information about data management and data sharing, and check out our list of Cambridge Data Champion experts to see if there’s anyone who’s volunteered to be a local source of data-related advice in your department or discipline.

We are always available as a source of support and guidance in all matters relating to open research and encourage you to contact us if you have any questions. The OSC has webpages on open research and sites dedicated to both open access and research data. For general open research enquires, we can be emailed at info@osc.cam.ac.uk, for open access at info@openaccess.cam.ac.uk and for data at info@data.cam.ac.uk. There are also a number of training sessions provided throughout the year and online that relate to the topics covered in this session. If you think that those in your department or institute at Cambridge would like to know more about the topics covered here then please do get in touch as we’d be happy to speak to these and answer any questions you may have.

Panel summary: open access monographs without author payments?

Open Research at Cambridge Conference,

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. 

As part of the 2021 Open Research Conference at Cambridge, we hosted a panel discussion on the future of open access monographs, specifically those that do not require author payment in the form of book processing charges. This is especially timely given the fact that UK Research and Innovation recently announced a books component to its open access policy. In the humanities, where funding is limited, book processing charges have the potential to make open access a preserve of only those that can afford to pay, potentially excluding junior scholars, unfunded researchers and colleagues from universities outside the Global North. This panel therefore explored the alternatives to author payments that exist and the ways in which the research community can prevent processing charges from becoming the standard model for open access book publishing.

The panel was moderated by Samuel Moore, Scholarly Communication Specialist at the Office of Scholarly Communication, and featured three expert speakers from publishing and policymaking. Kicking off was Rachel Bruce, Head of Research at UK Research and Innovation, to discuss their open access books policy that was recently announced. We learned more of the details of the policy but also how much of the detail relating to funding is yet to be announced. Following Rachel’s presentation were talks by Ben Denne of Cambridge University Press and Rupert Gatti of Open Book Publishers. Ben described the Flip it Open model devised by Cambridge University Press that makes a book openly accessible when it reaches a certain revenue threshold. Rupert described the overall approach of Open Book Publishers to make books available without the need for author payment, through a combination of print sales, grant income and other sources.

The ensuing discussion covered important topics such as the sustainability of such approaches, the technologies that underpin them and the importance of green open access for open access book publishing. We learned that funding needs to be equitably distributed to enable a diverse ecosystem of OA presses and that there is no one-sized model for open access book publishing. The work for this is at once the responsibility of policymakers, publishers, librarians and researchers alike.

Additional resources

Open Book Publishers

UKRI Open Access Policy

University of Cambridge Monographs guidance

Cambridge University Press ‘Flip it Open’ pilot

Can Narrative CVs drive change in OR practice

Open Research at Cambridge Conference

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.