Are Research Engagement and Openness at odds?

Philippa Walker
5 min readMay 30, 2017

--

As the manager of a large University of Manchester research institute (The Cathie Marsh Institute for Social Research) I am involved with, on average, 40 research grants and initiatives at any one time, collaborating with around 60 academic staff to deliver on their objectives. It is my job to problem-solve whatever comes across my desk, so, when first thinking about how my role is engaged in the ‘Open Knowledge’ debate I couldn’t see a distinct set of responsibilities that I have in this area. On reflection, however, it became clear that I have joint responsibility for opening up the doors of the Institute and cultivating an open forum for engagement in many ways. I dabble in whether and how to turn our training courses in quantitative methods into MOOCs and get them CPD accredited; I liaise about physical and electronic resources required for managing and using restricted access confidential data; I facilitate researchers in delivering creative new ways to make their research accessible outside the walls of academia by working with graphic artists and filmmakers to reach broader audiences. It is this area of engagement in and dissemination of research that I want to make the focus of my first OKHE blog.

Research dissemination is, at its core, about opening up research to engagement and criticism, and is a central requirement of any grant funding. Traditionally this has been done in the closed environment of a circle of academic peers by publishing scholarly articles. With the adoption of ‘open access’ the circle of peers has become wider but also more restricted to some researchers. The REF now requires a paper to have been quickly submitted to an open access repository in order for it to be REF-returnable and this often means paying high article processing fees that Early Career Researchers may find difficult to fund (see Kate Holmes’ OKHE1 blog for an in-depth argument). Further, the rise of social media has enabled a much wider circle of dissemination and engagement from those who are interested in the research, but this has brought with it an encroachment of work into the personal space, in part because social media doesn’t respect working hours and also because the style of engagement is more relaxed and encourages personal reflection (see Sara Smith’s OKHE1 blog for an in-depth argument). Advantages and disadvantages of open practice abound, but what is clear that we now must be ‘open’ — we are required to be by funders, the REF and career progression — so what does being ‘open’ entail and how do we ensure that we are in fact ‘opening up’ our research to a broader audience and breaking down the walls of our ‘ivory towers’?

Martin Weller talks about the positives and negatives of openness and it is clear that we, as a research institute, are more likely to generate the much sought after ‘Impact’ of our research if we engage in open practice, as it brings with it opportunities for participation, collaboration and innovation. One way I participate in doing this is to organise events, seminars, public lectures and courses that aim to draw in a diverse audience. However, it could be argued that these events are not truly open as we target specific audiences that we would like to engage — so is there a dichotomy between openness and targeted marketing for research engagement?

Weller argues that openness has become synonymous with free, but that this only engages those who are already engaged “the ‘build it and they will come’ philosophy only applies to people for whom the route is already easy.” Since we are a social research institute, much of the research we do is framed around discussions of inequality and disadvantage, so the last thing we want to do is to engage only those who are already engaged. They, Weller argues, tend to be from privileged and well educated backgrounds, so “Simply making something ‘open’ itself does not lead to equality or democratisation, and in fact may increase inequality.” If we allow self selection of the audience for our engagement activities by just making an event ‘open’ then we are likely to limit the people attending to people like us — this is not only at cross-purposes with our inequality research but also stymies the potential for wider interaction and collaboration that could help to generate impact and frame future research. It is also not clear how this approach is actually ‘open’ since to find out about an event participants would have to know where to look, and this again limits the audience. Therefore we target the groups we want to attend.

Marketing a research event to groups we would like to engage means that we must identify those groups. In identifying groups we inevitably close off access to other groups. Events are expensive to host, both in the cost of provision and also in the person time it takes to make it work. This means that we cannot invite everyone we want to. So, we ask older people from Chorlton, Whally Range and Hulme to come to discuss how to make Manchester an age friendly city, but we don’t engage those from Crumpsall or Prestwich. This is usually about proximity and previous engagement with groups in the area surrounding campus, a strategy justified because it is more likely to get representatives of the desired demographic to attend, and limited engagement is better than no engagement. But does this mean that we are not truly embracing ‘open practice’?

I am not sure I have an answer to this issue. I think, encouraged by Weller, that it is about striking a balance between being fully open and opening up. One thing I am certain of, we wouldn’t have a new bus route through Whally Range and public seating spaced according to the average distance an elderly person can walk if we didn’t target a group of older people in the area. However, we also know that this need is more widespread and so we have to hope that by engaging other organisations in our research, like the city council, that our efforts to engage the older people of Chorlton will have a snowball effect on the lives of those in Prestwich from the application of research findings — thus potentially making our research more open and impactful than ever before.

--

--