Open Research and its power to influence staff wellbeing
Introduction
Taking a broader approach to Open Research than we have in the last couple of decades is growing increasingly important in higher education. From the Open Access movement in the early 1990s promoting the concept of greater openness in research, a growing number of research institutions are now looking at ways to expand their approach to openness at all stages of the research lifecycle, not just the end point of publication.
Whilst there are many benefits to Open Research, from increased transparency and efficiency to collaboration and innovation, this drive to being more open is a significant change in research culture which has the potential to significantly impact on staff wellbeing. Universities are currently facing a staff wellbeing crisis, with mental health issues among UK academics on the rise and many institutions responding by initiating various staff wellbeing strategies and initiatives over the past few years. The link between these two concurrent higher education strategies — Open Research and staff wellbeing — has up till now received little attention. In this post I aim to explore whether the drive for a broader approach to Open Research has the potential to contribute to the observed staff wellbeing crisis, working against institutional attempts to address it, or whether Open Research could actually be harnessed to positively influence researcher culture and wellbeing going forward.
The Open Research movement
The Open Research movement is all about making research open and accessible to a variety of audiences, so that it can have the greatest possible impact. Originally, Open Access enabled research publications to be shared free of charge, and free of most licensing and copyright restrictions. This enabled outputs of research to be available for researchers, practitioners and those in education regardless of their ability to pay for it. This openness of final publications showcases a number of the advantages of Open Research highlighted by Weller. It is altruistic, allowing research findings to be shared with others — something which arguably should be at the heart of academia. Publications are able to reach a wider audience (including those from Widening Participation backgrounds), and often achieve higher citations and impact as a result. It also increases efficiency in research by reducing the amount of ‘reinventing the wheel’, if otherwise findings were to be kept behind paywalls.
With significant issues of reproducibility recognised in research, the Open Research movement has recently broadened to not only include this sharing of publications, but also other important aspects of the research lifecycle such as data, methodologies, code and metadata. Jess in her OKHE2 post argues that the open sharing of these may be enough to help combat ‘the reproducibility crisis’ in academia, which can be easily exemplified with the case of eminent dutch academic Diederik Stapel who falsified data over a number of years. This concern is reflected in a Nature survey of 1500 researchers where 90% believed there was a slight to significant reproducibility crisis in academia. Improved transparency at every stage would allow greater scrutiny, reproducibility and integrity in research, as well as enable research to be built upon by others, resulting in greater citations for the researcher, and greater efficiency for others.
There are also issues of selective reporting and publication bias in research. The majority of experimental data and research is never publicly reported, due to the results being ‘negative’ where the expected outcome was not observed, or found to be inconclusive. This leads to an over-representation of ‘successful’ research and experiments being published, leading to issues where researchers combine the results of published studies, and raising questions around research integrity and whether efficacy has been overestimated, risks down-played or data manipulated. Open Research would mean that all data and findings would be shared openly, reducing this ‘file-drawer effect’ (so-called since the unpublished results are imagined to be tucked away in researchers’ file cabinets).
Open Research can also include an open approach to conducting the research itself, for example collaborative science. Here you might foster relationships with researchers from other disciplines, take approaches such as openly posing research questions online, or actively involve the public in the process of research such as in citizen science. Sharing research, ideas and experiment progress openly as you go along in the likes of blogs or social networks is a form of open scholarship, made easy today by digital networking and researchers increasingly developing online identities. ResearchGate has a dedicated Projects feature which allows users to upload and track experiments as they are happening, and enables them to pose questions and get feedback on their work. This discussion and collaboration is important for achieving ‘open innovation’, and facilitating Communities of Practice where a group of people who share a passion for something learn how to do it better through regular interaction.
Could Open Research negatively impact on staff wellbeing?
There is no arguing that the principles of Open Research bring new opportunities and a host of benefits to researchers, and overall research integrity. But there are also potential new tensions that come with these. The suggested change in research culture and practice comes at a time when researchers are already facing a substantial wellbeing and mental health crisis.
There are considerably higher levels of psychological distress in academics than in the general population, with pressures of job insecurity, constant demand for results and publications, a long working hours culture and an increasingly marketised Higher Education system. They are often battling anxiety, poor work-life balance and isolation, with many struggling to access the support they need. External pressures are increasingly moving academic culture away from one of camaraderie and collegiality, to one of cut-throat competition. Aspects of the drive for Open Research have the potential to add to these pressures, and negatively impact upon staff wellbeing.
Time pressure is a significant barrier to the successful adoption of open practice. Whilst many researchers may be on board with the principles of Open Research, they are caught between wanting access to its benefits, and the context of the job environment they work in. Academics often face extremely high workloads, a typical post requiring them to publish several times a year in high impact journals, develop and teach courses, and complete other administrative or management tasks associated with the role. Although being open in your research may increase efficiency for the research community, it inevitably takes more of your time to make your data open, write blogs, or maintain an online presence. With researchers’ existing workload expectations, it is difficult to see how they could be expected to add additional responsibilities without risking negative impacts on their wellbeing.
If Open Research is not made compulsory in academia, researchers will likely prioritise their ‘traditional’ academic work. Time is a researcher’s most precious commodity and they will almost always follow the path of least resistance and not take on any work that diverts them from their core research if they don’t have to. Proctor et al. in 2010 noted that some academics were frustrated by the idea of Open Research, and viewed maintaining blogs and using social media as a waste of time, frivolous or irrelevant in a landscape where ‘traditional’ scholarship such as publishing in high impact journals is still the most important thing for career progression.
Weller also identified unpredictability as a barrier to persuading researchers to practice Open Research. The value of the time invested in these practices is completely unknown in advance — they simply won’t know whether the intended dissemination or collaboration will arise from their efforts. Researchers also have questions around the value of publishing negative findings, versus the time it takes them to do so. If however research institutions or funders were to make broader Open Research practices compulsory, similar to the way that Open Access publications are part of the criteria for submission to the Research Excellence Framework, then academics are likely to be stuck juggling even higher workloads than before.
Open Research practices such as developing an online identity may risk a blurring of boundaries, and offer researchers the significant challenge of managing multiple identities. They have autonomy and considerable freedom over their online identity, but because of this it can easily result in some blending of the professional with the personal, running the risk of encroaching on personal boundaries and making it more difficult to differentiate between the researcher’s work and private life. Juggling multiple different identities at the same time, for example in their department, their wider discipline, online and in their personal lives, could also be a source of stress as each identity would have their own competing demands and values. For example a researcher may become conflicted between a purely academic drive to openly share their work-in-progress with the research community, and the more academic ‘norm’ of publishing larger considered pieces of research which play into university metrics and promotion criteria.
Putting yourself ‘out there’, and sharing your identity and work more openly can also be a huge cause of worry and anxiety for researchers, something which Padma explores in her OKHE1 post about how the open agenda might affect those in academia who suffer from Imposter Syndrome. Researchers may worry about how to effectively manage other’s perceptions of themselves online, be afraid of receiving negative comments, or worry about embarrassment if mistakes (inevitable in research, but up till now mostly private) are shared with the world. We know that a lot of staff in academia suffer from Imposter Syndrome, convinced that they don’t have the necessary skills and knowledge for their position, and constantly fearing that they will be found out as a fraud. Sharing ideas and unfinished ‘work in progress’ as part of open scholarship, as opposed to a neatly polished article, is likely to prove extremely difficult for them as it is deliberately opening themselves up to critique and debate about their work. Whilst the majority of discussion and interaction of academic research is supportive, it does put researchers at risk of receiving poor behaviour, aggression and abuse from internet trolls, which can add to the anxiety that researchers may feel as a result of engaging in Open Research.
Researchers can also feel wary and unsure ‘how’ to be open in their research, and that they need more training on the tools required and to address significant concerns about copyright and intellectual property of both published and unpublished work. There can also be significant fears about unfairness, where if researchers share their data before they have necessarily finished publishing everything they plan to from it, they may be ‘scooped’ by other researchers who would use this data or similar ideas, and publish on it before they get the chance.
There are concerns too about the challenges of collaborative research and the impact that managing this collaborative relationship might have on wellbeing. Difficulties might include differences in investigator style — one may be more laid back leading to frustration, or there may be disagreement over how formal agreements or documentation need to be. There could be differences in the style of research, such as different ideas over what should be published, who should be named authors, and different languages (literally, or just discipline jargon). If the collaboration is between academia and industry, there could be conflicts to manage over how data and results should be shared — in academia information and knowledge is shared quite freely however in commercial businesses sharing can be a lot more limited, making managing this relationship quite stressful.
How a change in culture towards Open Research could have a positive influence on wellbeing
Although it appears that a move towards being more open in research could negatively impact staff wellbeing in a number of ways, it is useful to consider whether certain aspects of it could have the opposite effect, and actually be used as a tool in the university’s efforts to improve wellbeing. Open Research practices such as digital networking and developing an online presence, could positively influence wellbeing by helping researchers to nurture and develop their academic identities, and by providing a sense of belonging and community which we know is vital to overcoming some of the major wellbeing challenges faced.
The majority of researchers have control and autonomy over their online presence. We know that autonomy in the workplace is important for staff wellbeing, and that for researchers the ability to work autonomously, flexibly and creatively is something that helps them to live with the negatives associated with the job. These core values can be challenged by the general march of academic capitalism and the drive for ever increasing publications. The traditional publication landscape does not necessarily allow researchers to share their authentic research journey, and so developing an online identity could provide them with a route to re-establishing some of those core academic values which support their wellbeing.
Actively engaging and connecting with other researchers, requesting help and helping others in return, demonstrates the potential for open scholarship and digital networking to make a researcher feel more supported, less isolated, and a sense of belonging to a particular community. Identity and belonging are described by Snow as a shared sense of ‘we-ness’ anchored in shared experience, and this sense of community is demonstrated to be effective in combating well-recognised problems such as Imposter Syndrome. For many researchers, particularly those early in their careers, the fixed-term nature of their role means that they can often move job locations frequently, leaving their university community and close friend networks behind when they move. By encouraging the growth of digital networks and online communities, open research has the power to provide that much needed peer support, and would also encourage supportive Communities of Practice.
A move towards being more open with sharing work-in-progress, failed experiments and negative results could also go a long way to boosting researcher confidence and addressing Imposter Syndrome by enabling researchers to develop a more realistic understanding of the ups and downs of research. As mentioned earlier, published research is awash with researchers’ ‘best work’, the positive findings with the most significant results. Failures and setbacks in research are inevitable, yet these are often hidden from view which contributes to some researchers feeling like they do not belong or are a failure if they encounter an issue themselves. Even our most esteemed researchers hit setbacks, and so this misrepresentation of the state of research in the published literature not only risks the lessons learned from recent failures not being picked up by the research community, but it also has a negative impact on researchers’ self esteem. If more platforms such as Research Gate’s Projects encourage the open sharing of negative results and failures, this would have the power to begin to change the way that researchers think, about not only their research field but also themselves as researchers. It would help to build confidence and resilience, and reduce ‘fear of failure’ which so often hinders creativeness and innovation in research.
The power of Open Research to influence research culture and staff wellbeing
The move towards a broader approach to Open Research in Higher Education has the potential to have both a positive and negative impact upon staff wellbeing. There will be difficulties embedding its practices without negatively impacting on wellbeing if it simply adds to researchers’ already over-stretched workloads. If they are ever to feel motivated to divert their precious time and energy from the traditional ‘publish or perish’ academic treadmill towards these new practices, we need universities to provide support in terms of training, and along with funders recognise and reward open scholarship as a valuable practice in funding and promotion criteria.
If steps were taken to minimise some of the potential negative impacts it could have on our researchers’ wellbeing, Open Research could hold the key to a much needed culture change in academia. One that includes a move towards academic collegiality rather than competition; towards being more open about the real process of research helping to boost our researchers’ self-esteem; and towards more freedom and autonomy over academic identities. All of these things could undoubtedly play an important role in helping to address some of the key wellbeing challenges facing our researchers right now.
