How can I practice Open Research?

In this post, Judith Hegenbarth, Head of Research Skills in Libraries and Learning Resources, looks at the ways in which PGRs can participate in the ever-expanding open research culture.

You may have heard about a world-wide move to ‘open’ research, where the outputs of research projects are made as accessible and reusable as possible.  Outputs are often understood to be publications, but can also include datasets, code and software, and records of methodologies that have been used. The University of Birmingham has made its own statement and commitment on open research; but how can PGRs contribute?

Photo by Amina Filkins on Pexels.com

In the most tangible way, your thesis will be the output of all the work you have done on your research programme.  At the end of your programme, you will submit an electronic version of your thesis to the University’s eTheses repository and this will make your work more discoverable and give your research wider reach.  Over the past 4 years where the library holds theses in hard copy and electronic format, there have been less than 160 individual hard copy consultations across the entire collection, while electronic theses have been downloaded almost three million times.

Of course, there may be conditions under which you have to apply an embargo to your work (such as complying with commercial funder requirements, or not releasing mentions of patient data), and there is a process for applying for one of these.  One of the key tenets of the open research movement is to make your work ‘as open as possible, as closed as necessary’.

Aside from your thesis, there are other ways that you can practice openness in your work:

• By creating an ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID), you can tell people what you’re researching and point them to your work. If you have a slide deck from a conference you spoke at, you can deposit it on a repository such as Zenodo, which will ‘mint’ a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) to add to your profile.
• If you have a manuscript that is ready to be submitted to a peer reviewed journal, you can deposit it on a preprint server (most journal publishers are happy for this to happen but check their webpage for their policy on this). This gives you the chance to get informal feedback on your work and for others to see it sooner than they otherwise would. There are disciplinary repositories that you can use, and the University has its own ‘ePapers’ repository. 
• You may also be able to publish open access via one of the publisher agreements that Library has paid for upfront to cover publishing fees for corresponding authors with a University email address. Our SciFree tool is the starting point for identifying those journals.
• Think about whether the data underpinning your research can be shared (which you hopefully considered and discussed with your supervisor when you wrote your Data Management Plan). You can deposit your data in our eData repository once your research is complete so you are prepared should a publisher or funder require you to provide a data access statement.
• If you write code to analyse data, consider sharing this using tools such as GitHub or GitLab which allow you to make software publicly available whilst under active development using versioning.
• As well as sharing your own work, you can benefit from the openness of others.  Take a look at Re3Data to see datasets that you could interrogate in your own discipline area.

Open Research is an initiative that continues to develop, and over time you will undoubtedly come across more and more ways to work ‘openly’. There is ongoing support from the Research Skills Team and the Scholarly Communications Team. Our Research Data Librarian holds drop-ins, and you can ask us more by having Tea with a Research Librarian. In the meantime, you can find more detail on our self-enrol canvas course. 

The changing Open Access landscape

In this post, Mike Dainton, Head of Scholarly Communications Services, brings us up-to-date on the Open Access landscape – an essential area of knowledge for anyone hoping to publish their research. For a basic introduction to Open Access, see the Library Services webpages.

The announcement of Plan S in 2018 heightened discussion about Open Access (OA) amongst research communities.  A key tenet of Plan S is to cease using public money to publish OA in journals that also charge a subscription fee to libraries (so called ‘hybrid journals’).

It is acknowledged that flipping to Fully OA will take time, so an interim option for publishers is the ‘Transformative Agreement’ (TA). These should allow libraries to move spending from subscriptions to OA. Typically, an upfront fee provides read access and covers the cost of OA publishing, across a publisher’s complete journal portfolio. We’ve entered into many such agreements over the past year, significantly expanding options for all researchers, including PGRs, to publish OA. You can find further details here.  Currently, Wellcome funded authors must abide by a Plan S aligned OA policy and a new UKRI (UK Research and Innovation) policy will come into force in April 2022.

How to measure the quality of research: who is DORA and why does it matter for PGRs?

In this post, Judith Hegenbarth, Head of Research Skills in Library Services, introduces the responsible use of research metrics and UoB’s Commitment to Responsible Research Assessment.

Any government minister will tell you that performing research costs money, and that public spending on it has to be justified.  The allocation of research funding is based on a perception of ‘quality’, and part of the equation is whether an individual, research group or institution has performed ‘quality’ research in the past.

Metrics

Measuring quality is a contentious issue, particularly when it concerns the ‘performance’ of an individual researcher or scholar.  In the past, the number of times a publication has been cited by other researchers has been used as a proxy for influence and thereby quality.  The h-index became a shorthand for author excellence.  This kind of metric has been shown to privilege certain fast publishing disciplines which produce multi-authored papers.  For those researchers who take career breaks to raise families, or lone scholars who publish larger works less frequently, a single measure isn’t helpful or fair.  There’s more discussion of this on our Influential Researcher intranet page (including Canvas course). 

ReproducibiliTea at the University of Birmingham: Embracing Open Science in Lockdown!

In this post, Catherine Laverty, a PGR from the School of Psychology, tells us about her experiences of open research and the ReproducibliTea initiative.

Back in early 2020 I was approaching the midpoint of my PhD (and as it turned out the start of a global pandemic!) and found myself in a place where I was questioning how to make sure my research was as rigorous and open as possible. I had heard of the open science movement and seen various bits of advice on twitter about how to be a better scientist but in all honesty had no idea where to start. I knew the replication crisis was on the horizon and wanted to make sure I was doing my upmost to make positive steps towards good scientific practices but was admittedly a little lost.

Around the same time, I began to speak to two other early career researchers (ECRs) that were in exactly the same position – Mahmoud Elsherif & Sonia Rishi. Together, we decided to navigate the landscape of open science and establish the University of Birmingham’s ReproducibiliTea Journal Club as a place where others could join and learn alongside us.

Spotlight on the RDF: “Attribution and co-authorship”

In this series of “Spotlight on…” posts, we’ll be delving into the detail of the descriptors in Vitae‘s Researcher Development Framework (RDF).  Each one of the sixty-three descriptors is a characteristic of an excellent researcher, and we’ll be looking at how UoB PGRs can develop these characteristics.

Recently, a question from a PGR found its way to my e-mail inbox, and it got me thinking about the various influences on attribution and co-authorship that can be tricky to navigate for those new to publishing their work.

Listing the authors tells readers who did the work and should ensure that the right people get the credit, and take responsibility, for the research. 

Committee on Publication Ethics, https://doi.org/10.24318/cope.2018.1.1

While it may seem initially obvious, authorship is in fact an area which is influenced by factors including disciplinary culture. There may be some hidden expectations in your department or discipline, and it’s an area of research culture that all researchers new to publishing should be familiar with, and influencing positively.

De-colonizing: emphasizing the universality of the university

Reading the workshop title “De-colonizing: past and present”, I am sure that several participants had a rough guess that it was centered around discussing historical realities of colonized nations. But I am also certain that many, like me, were amazed at the understanding that beyond the initial idea is a whole new perspective that exports the concept of de-colonization and applies it to academic endeavors such as impactful research and development of academic curricula, giving an opportunity to rethink research and taught patterns of university courses. This workshop underlined two very important aspects: de-colonizing research and de-colonizing curricula.

De-colonizing asks us to examine assumptions regarding racial and civilizational hierarchy which in the past informed a lot of thinking about how the world worked, what was worth studying in it, and how it should be studied.  SOAS blog

Sending your research out into the world

On Wednesday 19 June 2019, there is a deadline for PGRs hoping to graduate in July to complete all the requirements for the award of their research degree.  Among a few other things, this includes submitting an electronic copy of your thesis to the University of Birmingham eTheses repository.

International Open Access Week is coming up!

Once per year, open access advocates (such as myself) get excited about International Open Access Week (this year running from 22 – 28 October).  This event highlights the movement working to make research outputs freely available for re-use, to raise awareness for issues around making outputs available and answer questions that you might have.  If you’re not sure why you should care about this, Suzanne Atkins summarised the benefits of Open Access to PGRs in her blogpost back in October 2016.

The One and Only – ORCID for researchers

In today’s research climate, the scope for information about you and your work to be displayed and connected is huge.  Historically, publishers and libraries took ownership for distributing and curating works, but roles are blurring in today’s world, where indexing and curation of online content is largely done algorithmically.  The picture is further complicated by:

• the range of research output types (“online-only” articles, blog posts, slide decks and datasets) and other research activity;
• difficulties in author disambiguation, exacerbated where people have common names, perhaps change names after marriage, move institutions, or are affiliated with more than one institution.

Vicky would like to make it clear that she is not a fan of Chesney (despite knowing all the words).

How can we ensure that researchers’ profiles are correct, full and up to date? 

Planning to manage your data

We’ve talked a bit about Research Data Management (RDM) on this blog before, with a post from our Research Repository Advisor in Library Services and another from a current PGR.   However, now that there is a requirement for all PGRs who started their research programmes in or after September 2017 to produce a Data Management Plan (DMP) in advance of their first annual review, it seems a good time to revisit this topic, with a focus on DMPs.

A DMP is a living document that outlines how data are to be handled during and after a research project.  A good DMP will protect you against data loss and ensure you have well-documented data to assist with writing up and possible future data sharing.