Topic 2: Open Research (2022/3)
A session outline for PG Cert HE participants on the Open Knowledge in Higher Education unit
PG Cert HE participants: This topic relates to the session on Wednesday 1st March. You can use this page to prepare/catch up/review. The topic will be updated after the session has taken place to include any recorded content from guest speakers or tutors and any shared resources we create during the sessions.
You can find interviews with past participants of the unit here
What is Open Research?
In this topic, we encourage you to consider what open research is within Higher Education.
In the scheduled session, we were joined by guest speaker Steve Carlton from the Research Services team. You can watch the recording of the talk here.
The slides for this can be accessed here.
The talk covered:
- Open research — what do we mean by it?
- How do we support it?
- How do we make research as open and reusable as possible?
- The benefits and challenges of Open Access
Steve started by asking the group to discuss in breakout rooms:
Why do we share research?
A theme that arose from the discussion was that if we are not sharing, we are not doing research. The group agreed that sharing research was a contribution to public knowledge with both social and monetary value.
Benefits of Open Research
Steve highlighted that Open Research is a movement to make the research process more transparent. Benefits of open research include:
- Greater visibility and reach
- Increasing efficiency
- Attaining funding
- Collaboration and networking
- Increased public understanding
- Evidence-informed governmental policy
Here are some of the ways that open research aims to increase integrity and transparency:
- Open Lab Notebooks — real-time sharing of experimental data. Reduces duplication of work and increases transparency
- Open Research Data — using a repository like Figshare or subject specific repository — makes data widely available for use
- Open Licensing — underpins open content to specify how materials can be used and are more permissive than standard copyright
Steve also highlighted the work of the Office for Open Research. You can find a video of Robert Haines talking about Open Software here.
A further reading list is available here.
Scholarly publishing and ‘hopping the barriers’
Steve provided an overview of how traditional scholarly publishing works and the barriers to access it can create.
There has been a call for the removal of publisher subscription paywalls which can block advancement of knowledge. Some have argued that as research funding comes from the public, we should have free access to the results of that research.
Illegal sharing/pirating of scholarly research aims to help audiences get around paywalls e.g. shared Google Drive, Twitter hashtag #ICanHazPDF, SciHub. However, these are not reliable or sustainable routes to open access.
The benefits and challenges of Open Access
Open Access aims to remove price and permission barriers to scholarly research. The benefits of Open Access include:
- More exposure
- Practitioners can apply your findings e.g. teachers, NHS
- Higher citation rates
- Public can access findings
- Compliance with grant rules
Gold OA involves the payment of an article processing charge (APC) or agreement between publisher and university. Gold OA content is made available via the journal website. In this case, the University is paying to publish rather than paying for access. However, some publishers may still charge subscriptions in conjunction with APCs (known as ‘double dipping’ or may only make part of their holdings available openly.
Green OA is made open access via a repository such as Pure. This is usually an earlier version of the paper that the publisher has permitted to be shared possibly after an embargo period.
The Rights Retention Policy means that we now have the right to retain these earlier versions and make these available without adhering to the embargoes.
There are still some challenges facing Open Research. For example, researchers in the Global South may be less able to participate in Open Access due to the cost of APCs and agreements that their institutions cannot afford.
Reading and thinking about openness
You may want to engage with this suggested reading and contribute your thoughts. If you don’t have time to look at this prior to the session, you may want to return to this later in the unit:
Suggested reading: Changing the gender narrative with open access | Impact of Social Sciences by Katie Wilson and Lucy Montgomery, 2022. This post looks at the use of open access to develop more diverse and equitable forms of success for all researchers.
Game of Grants This submission from a past OKHE participant provides an interesting analysis of openness and transparency (or lack thereof) in the grant application process.
💬 Contribute
During the course, we will ask you to share ideas and experiences and hear from your peers through 💬 Contribute activities like this one. Read the following prompt then add your contribution in the box below. All comments are anonymous. Please be civil and don’t share personal identifying information.
What makes research ‘open’? And what may be the benefits and challenges of open research?
Reuse and Remix — Creative Commons Licensing
As we have seen, being able to build on the work of others is a fundamental part of higher education. This is true for both academic and professional services roles — we are constantly developing to improve student experience, further knowledge and achieve our social responsibility aims.
Creative Commons licenses work within the bounds of copyright to allow for greater sharing, reuse and adaptation of existing work. The licenses allow the creator of a piece of work to decide the parameters within which it can be distributed or developed whilst ensuring that any new works derived from it provide proper attribution.
This infographic provides an overview of Creative Commons (CC) Licenses and tools (accessible text version):
Next steps
After reading and thinking about this topic, please comment below to share an idea or response. You may find Creating a Medium account useful. Alternatively you can use the anonymous comment box on this page.
Any questions, you can contact the course leaders via Blackboard.
