A new Open Research Policy (and associated sub-policies) was approved by URC in June this year. Marcus Munafò – Associate Pro Vice-Chancellor – Research Culture explains the importance of Open Research as part of the wider Research Culture Vision and Strategy for the institution.
Open research is the process of making as much of the research process as possible available to others. The most well-known example is perhaps open access publishing where journal articles (and increasingly other outputs such as monographs) are published under a Creative Commons license, meaning they are free to read and (depending on the specific license) can be re-used in a variety of ways. Most funded research in now published open access, and the REF (Research Excellence Framework) requires work to be published open access, either through the publisher making the article available through a Creative Commons licence for a fee or the author making a copy of the accepted manuscript available (in our case via the Pure repository) to be eligible as for REF. Our recent Scholarly Works Policy is the latest effort to increase the extent to which our published work is available to as wide an audience as possible.
But the final output of a research process – the journal article or the monograph, say – is only a small part of what is produced during that process. Study plans and protocols, data sets (which can include anything from numerical data on spreadsheets through to qualitative transcripts or digitized images), code used to analyse those data and so on are all produced in the vast majority of our research activity. And these intermediate research outputs can also be made more widely available – either open or (if they are published on our institutional data repository – data.bris) under more restrictive conditions. This might be necessary if, for example, there are ethical or legal reasons for doing so (e.g., qualitative data may allow re-identification of participants, which would preclude open publication).
The University has always been at the forefront of open research – our repository was one of the first, and continues to have sector-leading functionality (such as the ability to publish under different levels of access). Anything published on data.bris (or on other third party repositories such as Github, Figshare, or the Open Science Framework) is assigned a digital object identified (DOI) and is, in itself, a publication (albeit typically not a peer reviewed one). This is great for those who contributed to the research process; it allows for the early assignation of priority (i.e., publishing our results first!), and – perhaps more importantly – more granular recognition of individual contributions. A researcher may be third author on a paper, but solely responsible for one element.
In other words, there are a range of reasons to engage in open research. There are practical reasons, such as the ability to demonstrate a greater variety of contributions in a more granular way. The transparency afforded by open research allows for greater scrutiny, and for others to interrogate in more detail what you did, what assumptions and choices you made throughout the process, and so on. And it also allows others to use your outputs in a way that can generate new insights. Indeed, methods to use published genetic data to understand cause-and-effect relationships in epidemiology – known as Mendelian randomisation – were developed at the University of Bristol and are now widely used in biomedical research.
There are also moral reasons to make our research as open as possible (but also as closed as necessary!). Around 80% of the University’s funding – from research and teaching – comes from public money, so it’s only right that we make as much of what we do as possible available to those who ultimately fund our work. And we never know how those intermediate research outputs might be used. We know, for example, that secondary schools have downloaded study protocols, information sheets and consent forms, and data sets to use in classroom demonstrations. This all helps with our efforts to be a civic university supporting our local community.
For this reason, we have updated and strengthened our Open Research Policy, with a single overarching policy that supports a range of sub-policies that cover different open research practices. . The new Open Research Policy and sub-policies, in particular, have been designed to be short and accessible – partly a “how-to” guide for those new to the practice. These were developed by the Open Research Working Group of Research Culture Committee, led by Library Services, and with input from a range of voices across the University through an extensive consultation process. The policies were approved by University Research Committee and signed off by Senate, and are now live. Please take the time to look at them if you can!
Of course, open research will look very different across different disciplines, and not all of us will be familiar with different aspects or practices. For this reason, through the UKRN Open Research Programme, we are offering places on a number of open research train-the-trainer courses. These are available to anyone at the University, at any career stage and on any pathway (including professional services and technical staff). After attending a train-the-trainer workshop, trainers will then deliver workshops on these practices that will be open to anyone (we will hopefully be able to offer tailored versions of these across, for example, Faculties and Schools). If you are interested in finding out more about these courses, or the planned workshops, please contact Lavinia Gambelli, our Open Research Coordinator.
Open research is part of our wider ambition – through our Research Culture Vision and Strategy – to be as transparent as possible in how we work, individually and as an institution. The hope is that that transparency will help to foster a trustworthy research ecosystem and institution. We recognise that this is a journey, and our Open Research Policy is an important step on that journey, but just a step. We need to support that with training, incentives (open research is included in the Academic Promotions Framework, and we run a regular Open Research Prize), and – perhaps most importantly – a listening stance that means we continue to develop and improve our policies so that they work for everyone, regardless of discipline, career stage, or pathway.