Category Archives: Open Research at Cambridge Conference

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 in the Arts and Humanities – beyond Open Access

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. 

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.

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.

Open Data Sharing and reuse

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. 

The session described here was on ‘Open data sharing and reuse’ and is summarised by the session chairs, Dominic Dixon (Research Librarian) and Dr Sacha Jones (Research Data Manager) at the Office of Scholarly Communication, Cambridge University Libraries.

The recording of the event can be found here:

Have you wondered how research data is used after it has been shared publicly as open data? What are some of the impacts of sharing data and of its subsequent reuse by others? Are there ethical factors to consider? Does the researcher or research group who shared their data openly benefit in any way from its reuse? What are the essential properties of a reusable dataset? This session on ‘Open data sharing and reuse’ explored these questions and more via presentations delivered by a panel of University of Cambridge researchers from various fields. They included: Professor Richard (Rik) Henson, Deputy Director of the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at the Department of Psychiatry and President of the British Neuroscience Association; Professor John Suckling, Director of Research in Psychiatric Neuroimaging in the Department of Psychiatry and chair of the University of Cambridge Research Ethics Committee; Dr Mihály Fazekas, Assistant Professor at the Department of Public Policy, Central European University, and scientific director of an innovative think-tank at the Government Transparency Institute; and Professor Simon Deakin, Professor of Law in the Faculty of Law and Director of the Centre for Business Research.

All speakers discussed challenges and concerns around data sharing, including how and when to share. Rik asks, “Why wait until publication?” to share research data, and perhaps consider publishing a data paper where a dataset is celebrated in its own right, without the narrative of a traditional article. Researchers are often concerned about scooping but there’s little evidence of this and it may be a “paper tiger”. There’s an additional fear that data sharing will expose errors in work but as Rik noted, “I think we just need to get over our egos and accept that everyone makes errors”. One particular challenge can be to control what people (or bots) do with your data, but researchers have a choice over where to share (e.g., which repository to choose) and how to license their data. Something that was implicit in all talks, and stated explicitly by Simon, is that the benefits of sharing data openly vastly outweigh the costs.

Sharing data deriving from research involving human participants is understandably complex due to data protection regulations (e.g., GDPR), obtaining informed consent, and the challenge of anonymising datasets, particularly those containing qualitative data. Participants need to be informed about how their data will be used, so the message is that data sharing needs to be planned far in advance, even at the gestation of the project idea. It is important to be aware of the repository options; for example, if managed/controlled access to data is required then hear about the set-up at MRC CBU discussed by Rik, or the UK Data Service for sensitive qualitative data, as highlighted by Simon. John discusses the import and export of datasets from an ethical perspective, giving two examples from the biomedical and social sciences with a focus on secondary data use. He says that these examples illustrate just how far in the future you might need to think when considering how your data might be reused by others: it is “a lot better to ask for permission from all the stakeholders in these studies than it is to ask for their forgiveness”.

Data must be shared well for both researchers and society to reap the benefits. To do this, select an appropriate repository, adhere to any ethical/legal requirements, follow discipline-specific standards and make your data FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable). A key element of the latter is data documentation, an issue raised repeatedly during this session. Sharing the data alongside any associated code and detailed information about the data will enable it to be reused effectively and mitigate against misuse. Mihály discusses sharing the Digiwhist project data, which has been reused by academia, policy, civil society and the media, and emphasises this: “Every time I put out bits and pieces of my data and code that was not clear, I just kept on receiving the same question over and over again. So actually, it’s in your own best interests to document your work fully because then it is a lot more efficient for you”. Providing data about data is part of being completely transparent about the research process and results, enabling others to understand exactly what was done and to build on it. In some fields, this is an essential part of research reproducibility and replicability. As another example, Simon describes sharing the CBR Leximetric datasets – currently, the 2nd most downloaded dataset in Apollo and 8th of all UK institutional repositories – where not only the data were shared but also the methodology and an extensive codebook.

In both examples, being transparent in this way has led to wider reuse of these data and many citations of the data and associated publications. The benefits of FAIR data sharing and data reuse certainly do not rest solely in the number of resulting citations. Ethical and transparent research leads to credible research and researchers, enhancing reputations and quality of outputs. These are elements that all speakers highlighted in their talks. To end on a quote from Simon about the outcome of sharing data and of its subsequent reuse: “It’s been a very very positive experience for us”.  

We’re always happy to receive any questions or comments you may have about data sharing and reuse. You can contact us at info@data.cam.ac.uk and see our Research Data website for more information.

Additional resources

University of Cambridge School of Clinical Medicine guidance on secondary data use and related ethical considerations, discussed by Professor John Suckling.

The Digiwhist project website discussed by Dr Mihály Fazekas. The Digiwhist project is also one of the University’s research projects highlighted on the University of Cambridge global impact map.

Video of a previous talk by Professor Simon Deakin for OpenConCam 2016 talk on ‘Open Access and Knowledge Production 0 “Leximetric” Data Coding’.

The FAIR principles are outlined by Wilkinson et al. (2016) in Scientific Data – “The FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship”. There is also a useful guide for researchers on how to make your data FAIR.

Visit the University of Cambridge Research Data website for information on research data management, data sharing and guidance on depositing data into Apollo, the institutional repository. The site also hosts the University of Cambridge Research Data Management Policy framework, which is relevant to all research staff and students.