Category Archives: oa.ukrn

DB Prize 2023 shortlisted nominees

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“We are pleased to announce our shortlisted nominees for the UKRN Dorothy Bishop Prize 2023.

The Dorothy Bishop Prize was created in 2021 to recognise and celebrate early career researchers working to promote open research. The inaugural Dorothy Bishop Prize was awarded in 2022.

The prize winners will be announced at the UKRN Annual Meeting on 10 March 2023. This year we are awarding three prizes, each consisting of a £500 Amazon voucher and a Lego minifig “Doscar.”

The shortlisted nominees are frontrunners in responsible research practice in their field, affecting real change by raising awareness, providing training and doing important advocacy work to foster a healthy research culture….”

UKRN Open Research Programme workshop

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“The workshop will outline where the Open Research Programme has got to, what its plans are for the next year, and will invite participants to offer their thoughts on how the programme might best meet its aim….

The UKRN Open Research Programme aims to accelerate the uptake of high quality open research practices by:

 

Providing training in a range of priority open research practices, especially via a train-the-trainer model
Enabling institutions to share and learn from each other about relevant policies, guidance, support and procedures
Enabling institutions responsibly to reform their recruitment, promotion and appraisal procedures, to recognise and reward open research
Providing insight on what open research practices are important and how they are adopted
Evaluating each of the interventions and adapting throughout the programme…”

Open research is a tough nut to crack. Here’s how

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“Investment, training and incentives are required if the sector is going to rise to the challenge of truly embracing open research…

But despite enthusiasm from funders, appropriate support for researchers is often lacking, perhaps because of the incentives that act against institutions finding shared solutions. Open research requires digital infrastructure combined with appropriate training. This is a team challenge – researchers, technicians and professional services staff (such as those working in library teams but also in staff development) need to work together to deliver this effectively….

The solution, in our view, is collaboration.

 

Training in open research practices, for example, can (and should) be coordinated. To a degree it can even be centralised, in a similar way to how digital infrastructure can be centralised where that is appropriate (such as with Jisc). For example, train-the-trainer courses allow institutions to send trainers (perhaps drawn from both academic and professional services staff, and across career stages) to work together to develop individual workshops that are tailored to the local audience but share common elements that maximise interoperability. This, of course, will require institutions to contribute to a common effort – a very different approach to the local approach to training that is typical, but one that is ultimately likely to be both more effective and more cost-effective.

 

Similarly, incentives such as promotion criteria, open research prizes and so on can also be harmonised across institutions. Aligned promotion criteria will also serve to promote researcher mobility, if what is good for a researcher’s career (and for research) at one institution will also benefit them when they move to another. Offering open research prizes across multiple institutions – perhaps taking advantage of existing regional clusters – will reduce costs for individual institutions and also foster the sharing of effective and innovative approaches to open research across institutions, to mutual benefit. Plus, the impact of this training and these incentives can be monitored through targeted evaluation across all participating institutions, allowing for ongoing evaluation and benchmarking….”

1Future Leadership Fellows discuss open research with UKRI and UKRN

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“On 12 October, UKRI convened several hundred Future Leaders Fellows in Birmingham. The UKRI open research team and the UK Reproducibility Network brought together some of those Fellows in two special interest session s to discuss open and transparent research . H ere we summarise the perspectives a nd ideas that we heard from the Fellows, who work in a range of disciplines and have engaged with open research in a variety of ways . Where we are aware of related work, we note this [in square brackets]….”

Future Leadership Fellows discuss open research

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“On 12 October, UK Research and Innovation convened several hundred Future Leaders Fellows in Birmingham for their annual conference.

These research fellowships aim to develop the next wave of world-class research and innovation leaders in academia and business, so the UK Reproducibility Network were delighted to host events for Fellows to discuss open and transparent research.

In two special interest sessions, co-hosted by UKRN and the UKRI open research team, future research leaders discussed the benefits and challenges of topics such as sharing open and FAIR data, research software code and open access publishing.

Participants noted that transparency in research data is important, but not easy. They agreed that data should be open where possible, with documentation and related code. Community norms will accelerate this, as will journal and funder policies moving beyond ‘the data behind the publication’.

A full report of the discussions can be found here : Future Leadership Fellows discuss open reasearch …”

Job: UK Reproducibility Network (Open Research) Project Officer. End of play: Sept 26, 2022 | University of Oxford

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The UKRN (Open Research) Project Officer will support a programme of activity to advance research and innovation culture at Oxford. The post-holder will work in close coordination with the UKRN Institutional Lead for Oxford, the Research Practice team in Research Services, and with the UKRN.

We are looking for an organised and confident communicator who will provide support across a range of projects. You will be responsible for the coordination of UKRN activities at the University of Oxford, for collaboration with other project officers and UKRN institutional leads across other linked institutions. You will manage, organise, and support the delivery and evaluation of training and other events, design and prepare a range of communication material, as well as undertake other tasks required of a project officer.

You will be based in the Open Scholarship Support team in the Bodleian Libraries, and you will work closely with the new Research Practice team in Research Services as well as with units within Divisions, Departments/Faculties, the Researcher Hub, and IT Services.

This post is fixed term for 3 years, and is available at 60% FTE (22.5 hours per week), with some flexibility about how this is achieved. The team is currently working in a hybrid manner.

You will be required to upload a CV and a supporting statement as part of your online application. Your supporting statement should list each of the essential and desirable selection criteria, as listed in the job description, and explain how you meet each one. CVs alone will not be considered.

Our staff and students come from all over the world, and we proudly promote a friendly and inclusive culture. Diversity is positively encouraged, through diverse groups and champions, as well as a number of family-friendly policies, such as the right to apply for flexible working and support for staff returning from periods of extended absence, for example shared parental leave.

 

Project Officer at University of Surrey

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This is an exciting opportunity to make a significant contribution to the University’s research strategy by communicating the benefits of, and enabling, open research practices across the range of disciplines at the University of Surrey. You will work across the University, and nationally with the UK Reproducibility Network (UKRN), to accelerate the uptake of Open Research practices. Open Research refers to research which is practiced in a way that is suitably transparent for others to contribute and collaborate, and that enables research to be reproduced. It engenders research improvement and ensures public trust in research.

UKRN position on academic publishing | UK Reproducibility Network

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The UK higher education sector has invested approximately £1bn in academic publishing over the last decade (i). In our view, the principles guiding interactions between UK institutions and academic publishers should be:

Value for money.
Availability of output to all readers without subscription (e.g., open licensing).
Transparency in agreements (e.g., making costs openly available).
Support for and implementation of initiatives such as DORA.
Support for transparent research practices (e.g., around data and code).
Support for text and data mining (at no extra cost).
Active and transparent engagement with expressions of concern.

The UK higher education sector should take these factors into account in discussions with academic publishers, on the understanding that our continuing support of those who do not meet an acceptable standard is not in the long-term interests of the sector.

New Resource: Checklist for an Open Research Action Plan

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An Open Research Action Plan is a funded, medium-term programme of cultural change within a research organisation to promote and embed more accessible, transparent and reproducible ways of conducting and communicating research.

The Checklist for an Open Research Action Plan is a practical guide for stakeholders seeking to develop such a programme. It is based on the experience of creating and implementing an Open Research Action Plan at the University of Reading, but it also draws on a range of resources and activities undertaken to promote the growth of Open Research culture in higher education institutions. While its main frame of reference is the UK university sector, the Checklist can be adapted to any local context.

Octopus. Built for Scientists.

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“Scientific knowledge should not be locked behind paywalls, or only available to those who can read and write in English.

Scientific ideas and findings should be shared as quickly as possible.

Scientific work should be judged on its merits, and not on how good a “story” it tells: and so should scientific researchers.

These principles underlie the design of Octopus: a new way to share scientific work that recognises and rewards good practice, and serves the needs of both scientists and science itself….

In Octopus you publish work in units smaller than a “paper”.

You can write and share one of 8 kinds of publication (though we support custom types for different fields and research types):

Problem – a neatly defined scientific problem
Hypothesis/Theoretical Rationale – an original hypothesis relating to an existing published Problem or the rationale for how you think the Problem could be addressed
Method/Protocol – a practical method of testing an existing published Hypothesis
Data/Results – raw data or summarised results collected according to an existing published Method (can be linked to a data repository)
Analysis – a statistical or thematic analysis of existing published Data or Results
Interpretation – a discussion around an existing published Analysis
Translation/Application – “real world” applications arising from an existing published Interpretation
Review – a considered, detailed review of any of the above kinds of publication …”

Data Management UKRN workshop

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“We are offering a one-day short course on data management skills for Open Research online in November 2020. It is open to researchers at all career stages, and across all quantitative disciplines in the biomedical sciences (broadly defined). The workshop is free, supported by Cancer Research UK. We especially encourage researchers funded by CRUK to apply. The course aims to teach researchers how to make their work more reproducible, open and robust through the use of data management tools such as R and Git. Attendees will come away with an overview of how open/reproducible data pipelines work, and why they are important, as well as hands-on experience delving into specific tools. The workshop will include four main components:…”