Open Research Week 2024 is a collaboration between University of Liverpool, Liverpool John Moores University, Edge Hill University, and the University of Essex. A week that celebrates and promotes open research for researchers and colleagues who support open research. Whilst some sessions are UK-focused, others will be of interest to colleagues around the world.
This year’s programme included sessions on citizen science, research culture and open research in Europe. The recordings of all the sessions have been made available below and in our data repository
The week was open by Professor Chris Greer, Pro-Vice Chancellor Research and Professor of Sociology, University of Essex.
Monday 26th February
Keynote: Activating ‘Anecdotes’: the power of open practices in changing Research Culture – Dr Rachel Herries, University of Glasgow and Dr Kay Guccione, University of Glasgow
Kay and Rachel were introduced by Professor Chris Greer. Setting the scene Rachel and Kay talked about the key priorities for research culture at Glasgow: Career development, collegiality, research recognition, open research and research integrity. Kay and Rachel talked about 4 case studies from their institution, the data collected from these case studies, how to activate the data generated and what opportunities that then provided. Their talk was very inciteful and raised lots of questions from the audience, from both small and large institutions. Rachel and Kay are happy for people to get in touch if they want to know more about any of the case studies, which you can do via their Research Culture webpages. At the end of their talk they asked us to consider these questions – What data do you already have that you need time with? How can you activate it – cause change to happen? How can you create data flow through setting up collaborative processes with other university functions? Lots for us to think about.
You can watch the full presentation and Q&A here: Activating Anecdotes: the power of open practices in changing Research Culture recording
Tuesday 27th February
Citizen science: unleashing the possibilities of research for and with everyone
This session featured two presentations
The Essex BioBlitz: Photographing the fingerprints of climate change in Essex – Dr David Clark, University of Essex
David talked about the Essex BioBlitz project which encourages citizens of Essex (and those visiting) to take photographs of wildflowers in Essex to contribute to their important climate change research. David talked about why they are engaging in citizen science in this way and how people could get involved in the next round of data collection. He emphasised the importance of the openness of the project, that includes the data collected but any other outputs that will arise from the project. The aim is to gather 5 years worth of data to make comparisions and map trends over time.
Looking up: Astronomy and young citizens – Professor Andy Newsam, Liverpool John Moores University
Andy talked about the work of the Schools’ Observatory. Using the Liverpool Telescope it brings astronomy to the classroom in an attempt to engage young citizens with science. Andy talked about the importance of relating the work to the curriculum when working in schools and how they create strong links with research. He talked about how the model of citizen science they used differs from others, often citizen science projects engage lots of people in something simple whereas this approach is a small group of people doing something hard. They want to do more and are currently working on their new strategy.
You can watch the full presentations and Q&A here: Citizen science recording
Once more, with feeling. Replications in history – Dr Pim Huijnen, Utrecht University and Dr Pieter Huistra, Utrecht University
This session was hosted by Dr Lisa Smith from the University of Essex. Pieter and Pim talked about their work looking at replication in history. They ran a project experimenting with replication in historical research to determine how to do replications in this field and also what we can learn from them. They looked at three areas of historical research, cultural history, economic history and digital history and tried to use good examples of historical scholarship. They found that they needed to start with the conclusions of research and work backwards through analysis and interpretation, sources and methods and then look at the research question rather than the other way around which might work in other disciplines. To learn more about their work you can read their white paper, listen to this podcast or watch the recording of this session (below).
You can watch the full presentation and Q&A here: Once more, with feeling, replications in history recording
Wednesday 28th February
How is the Open Research landscape evolving in Europe? – Professor Hugh Shanahan, Royal Holloway, University of London and Helen Clare, JISC
This session took the form of a discussion between Hugh and Helen on what European open research initiatives mean for UK reseachers and orgnisations that support researchers and open research. Helen and Hugh looked at three areas in relation to open research. Firstly they reflected on the drivers for open research across Europe including the shift from open research being outputs focus to looking at process and quality, so integrity, transparency and reproducibility, the shift in culture. The second area they looked at was people and skills, in particular the staff and skills needed to support researchers, so those research adjacent staff like data stewards, research software engineers etc. They also talked about the need to pull training and resources together from the various initiatives. The final area was about technical infrastructure in particular the need to ensure sustainability and less reliance on project funding but move to more a service model of funding for the infrastructure that supports open research. Helen and Hugh provided a Google doc with some useful resource links which can be found here: European open research landscape document
You can watch the full session here: How is the open research landscape evolving in Europe? recording
Why choose open?: Four perspectives on open journals – Katrine Sundsbø, DOAJ, Cath Dishman, Liverpool John Moores University, Dr Craig Hammond, Liverpool John Moores University and Lucy Harding, University of Central Lancashire
This session had four short presentations from four different actors in the open journals sphere.
The session started with Katrine talking about her experiences with open access publishing, moving from University of Essex to DOAJ. Katrine feels she fell into the world of open access infrastructure with the move to DOAJ and it widened her perspective to be more global. She talked about some of the challenges of being involved in open access publishing as well as the reasons people stay involved despite those challenges. She believes it is about values, those involved in open access publishing believe research should be open, that it is for the greater good and that change requires people who care.
Cath spoke next from the perspective of the publisher/hosting service. Cath manages the LJMU Open Journals Service and talked about the reasons why she felt it was important to offer this kind of service. Cath acknowledged there are challenges but maintained that the positives outweigh them and that providing that space for a wider range of voices is a key role for Diamond open access journals. The Open Journals Services offers a space not just for the traditional article but for other types of output as well, for example conference papers and dissertation abstracts.
Craig is one of the Managing Editors on PRISM one of the journals which is hosted on the LJMU Open Journals Service. Craig talked about the value of open access publishing on an institutional platform in terms of it’s flexibility and freedom, it directly involves academics and cuts out costly publishing. The team on PRISM facilitate and nuture a culture of creativity and experimentation which is not always available to authors in other publishing avenues. The team offer a mentoring approach for new authors which allows to author to still feel in control of their own work but benefit from help and guidance of more experienced colleagues.
Lucy was one such author that benefitted from the mentoring approach at PRISM. Lucy talked about her experience of publishing and after being discouraged about publishing her article she approached PRISM and found their approach to be a positive experience. Her article has been read widely and other early career researchers have found it useful, so she has found lots of benefits to getting her work out there. Lucy wanted to publish somewhere that met her criteria from a moral and ethical perspective and for it to be an affirmative experience. Publishing with PRISM was that and felt more like a coaching experience, so much so it has opened up a space for her to trust publishing again boosted her confidence in her own abilities.
You can watch the full presentations and Q&A here: Why choose open?: four perspectives on open journals recording
Thursday 29th February
Open Research Practices and Skills – Organised and supported by the UKRN – Will Gawned and Dr Diane Hird, UKRN with the local UKRN leads: Dr Alexis Makin, University of Liverpool, Dr Michel Belyk, Edge Hill University, Dr Andrew Jones, Liverpool John Moores University, Dr Osama Mahmoud, University of Essex and Dr Krzysztof Cipora, University of Loughborough
This session had four short presentations and was followed by a panel discussion. First up was Alexis who talked about the issues with publishing lots of papers with not enough participants. He argued this leads to underpowered research which has the consquence of potentially undermining the research.
Next up was Krzysztof who talked about synthetic data. He argued that synthetic data offers a way to share your mathematical models without sharing the actual data where that is problematic (sensitive data for example). It can demonstrate the analytical code works and allows other researchers to test different hypothese using the synthetic data.
Andy took a different approach to Alexis and argued that we should publish “everything”. He argued that science should self-correct over time but that publication bias (only pubilshing positive outcomes) means that this doesn’t happen. Andy felt that the emergence of pre-prints can help with some of this as it speeds up scientific dissemination and stops journals being the gatekeepers of knowledge. Andy also recommended a site called FIDDLE (file drawer data liberation effort) which can help you with where and how to publish null or neutral results.
Diane shared slides on behalf of Osama Mahmoud and talked courses that Osama offers to support researchers with statistics and data science. You can find out more from his webpages and he was keen to promote the dsEssex course with is for beginners to teach techniques in data science.
Following these presentations, there was a panel discussion with the presenters and Michel, where discussion on the themes of reproducibility continued.
You can watch the presentations and discussion here: Open research practices and skills recording
Friday 1st March
Closing Keynote Talk: Is open science REALLY open for everyone? – facilitated by Dr Reshanne Reeder and Dr Loukia Tzavella, University of Liverpool
Dr Komang Ralebitso Senior, Associate Dean (Diversity and Inclusion) for the Faculty of Science and Seniror Lecturer Microbial Ecology, Liverpool John Moores University officially closed Open Research Week and introduced our final session. Komang talked about the reasons why openness is good particularly in terms of inclusion and diversity. She outlined ways open science could do better before handing over to Reshanne to introduce the speakers.
How to be an inclusive and inspiring supervisor/principal investigator – Dr Andrew Jones, Liverpool John Moores University
Andy talked about his role as supervisor for PhD students and principal investigator potentially working with early career researchers. He feels his role should be the education and training of junior staff/students in ensuring quality and integrity of research. He “does” open science by default and tries to instill this as a norm with the people he supervises. He feels as more experienced researchers you should be passing on the more positives parts of science and use your influence to lift others around you. Andy acknowledged that there are barriers to engaging in open research in particular for early career researchers in terms of worries around being scooped, or fear of retribution or embarrassment as well as a lack of support. There is a need to include different voices within open research and that you shouldn’t feel like you have to do everything, but pick from the “buffet” of open research. Lots of people taking small steps can have a big influence and exact change.
How to make science more open for underrepresented scholars – Dr Madeleine Pownall, University of Leeds
Maddy compared open research to feminist psychology (or scholarship) as they share similarities, they both advocate for a concern for reappraising, rethinking and reconstruction norms of knowledge, power and scientific enquiry. Maddy argued that open research needs to be practiced with kindness and inclusivity as one of the barriers to people engaging is the worry of being “called out” for making a mistake. We are human and should acknowledge that and be compassionate and collaborative. Maddy talked about other barriers to engagement like power imbalances, abrasive online debate, hostility and academic bullying. Also sometimes the tools of open research are more appropriate for particular disciplines. Maddy took the open research “buffet” metaphor mentioned by Andy further and said if you look at the buffet and there is nothing that appeals to you grab a sandwich on the way home, (ie. look for something that does).
How to ensure diverse voices are heard when English is a second language for a significant number of researchers – Dr. Tatsuya Amano, University of Queensland
Tatsuya talked about the reasons language matters in open science. He talked about the fact that language plays a part in barriers to evidence generation, evidence synthesis and evidence applications. These all have a detrimental effect on science and lead to biases in synthesised evidence. Tatsuya demonstrated that non-native English speakers have a harder time both getting published but also presenting at conference not in their native language. There is a lot more time and effort needed. He argued that there needs to be an acknowledgement of the issues faced by non-native speakers of English and more support given that doesn’t come with an extra cost.
The presentations were followed by a discussion and you watch the full presentations and discussion here: Is open science really open for everyone? recording
The Open Research Week team would like to thank all our presenters for sharing their time and expertise with us. Thank you also to all the attendees who joined us for the various sessions. Thank you for your great questions and for joining in the conversation about open research. We hope to see you again next year and if you have any suggestions for things you’d like to be included please get in touch
Researcher Engagement 
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