Tag Archives: Open Research

Open Research at Cambridge Conference – Opening session

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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. 

The opening session, chaired by Dr Jessica Gardner (University Librarian and Director of Library Services) included talks by Professor Anne Ferguson-Smith (Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research), Professor Steve Russell (Acting Head of Department of Genetics and Chair of Open Research Steering Committee), Mandy Hill (Managing Director of Academic Publishing at Cambridge University Press) and Dr Neal Spencer (Deputy Director for Collections and Research at the Fitzwilliam Museum). All four speakers foresee an increasingly open future, with benefits for both institutions and researchers. They also considered some of the challenges that still need to be worked through to avoid potential problems.

What is working well?

In recent years, we have made great progress in the proportion of publications that are open access. Over three quarters of publications with Cambridge authors last year were openly available in some form.

The trend is continuing and it is not unique to our institution. CUP have set an ambitious goal for the vast majority of research articles they publish to be open access by 2025.

Other forms of publication are becoming common, meeting different dissemination needs. Preprints have been the star of the show during the pandemic, allowing rapid dissemination while formal peer review follows down the line.

Diagram from Mandy Hill’s slide: ‘Increasingly open platforms and formal publishing will meet different dissemination needs’

In the scholarly communication arena, open access articles benefit from more downloads and citations. Museum-based projects involving artisans, schools and artists all found enthusiastic responses.

What can we look forward to?

Research culture is coming under the spotlight across the sector, and Cambridge has committed to an ambitious action plan to create a thriving environment to do research. Key principles include openness, collaboration, inclusivity, and fair recognition of all contributions.

Diagram from Prof Steve Russell: ‘Going Forward’

Implementing the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) is part of this progress. We want to assess research on its own merits rather than on the basis of journal or publisher metrics. This also means recognising all research outputs and a broad range of impacts.

Reproducibility is increasingly recognised as critical in a number of disciplines. A developing UKRN group within the University aims to ‘take nobody’s word for it’ – but rather support reproducible workflows that underpin confidence in the conclusions of research. By sharing and rewarding best practice we can become world leaders in this area, and in open research more widely.

In the past, museum collections have tended to be documented in limited ways, with poor accessibility and interoperability, which made it hard to discover and use materials. Several exciting projects at the Fitzwilliam Museum and more broadly have started to change that. There are opportunities for a single discovery portal, tying together different collections. The Fitzwilliam Museum is also making its collection discovery process richer, by providing opportunities for deeper dives, and more connected, by linking with other collections and resources.

Deep zoom access to an image in the Fitzwilliam collection. Adapted from Dr Neal Spencer’s slide ‘Fitzwilliam Museum Collections Search’.

What problems should we be mindful of?

There are still barriers that hinder some open research aspirations. Historical constraints on the ways we find materials, conduct research, and publish results remain. Some systems may need to be reimagined, while not scrapping structures that are still serving us well.

Cambridge is a large and complex institution, where change takes time. Nevertheless, there is an established governance structures and an evolving set of policies that support open research.

Most importantly, researchers should be at the centre of the move towards open research. It is important that they benefit from open practices, rather than finding themselves torn between competing priorities. Conversations continued throughout the week to explore possible approaches in different disciplines, drawing from the rich diversity of experiences to shape the future of open research at Cambridge.

Practical steps toward more reproducible research

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. 

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/

Open Research 101

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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.