Topic 3: Open research (2020/1)
What are the implications of ‘open’ for research?
PG Cert HE participants: This topic relates the session on 19 Mar 2021. You can use this page to prepare/catch up/review. Please access the Prepare and Reflect tool in Blackboard before and after the session to track your progress.
💬 New: we have published a write-up of the session.
In our final topic, we will cover the relationship between research in higher education and openness. Research will mean different things to different people; from your perspective, you may or may not feel that you: ‘do’ research (scholarly or otherwise); or that you publish, build upon, consume or benefit from research. The core concepts do not rely on this; but you may relate to what we learn differently, depending on your role.
We are glad to be joined by Steve Carlton (bio), a Research Services Librarian in The University of Manchester Library. Steve’s role involves helping staff to share research outputs openly, and for the world to find, understand and access this research freely.
Steve will take us on a journey via some important concepts such as how scholarly publishing works, what the issues may be, why this matters, and what can be done about this. Whether you’re a researcher or not, we hope it is an enlightening topic.
We will also be joined by Simone from the Library Student Team, who will share thoughts on open access research from a student perspective.
Finally, we will spend some time at the end of the session wrapping up the three topics we have covered, and looking at the assessment on this unit.
Essential preparation
All we ask is that before the session, if you are able, you read one blog post, and comment with your response to one question.
- Post: ‘Understanding the value of academic research to business and how that is balanced with openness’ by Rachel Kenyon (OKHE 2018/9)
- Question: “Where does my role exist/intersect within open research practices at the University? Where could my role intersect within open research practices at the University?” — please comment on this post, or anonymously via the box below.
Further reading
- Webpage: Understanding Open Access — from the University of Manchester Library.
- Book: Open Access and the Humanities by Martin Eve.
- Book: Open Access — an introduction to the topic by Peter Suber.
- Paper: Untangling academic publishing: A history of the relationship between commercial interests, academic prestige and the circulation of research — an overview of the history of scholarly publishing by Fyfe et al.
- Paper: The academic, economic and societal impacts of open access: An evidence-based review — by Tennant et al.
What do you think?
Consider your response to this question:
Where does my role exist/intersect within open research practices at the University? Where could my role intersect within open research practices at the University?
Leave a comment
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 above.
Any questions, you can contact the course leaders via Blackboard.
- Has the element of social justice disappeared from the conversations around Open Education since 2002? asks Sarah Roslyn Lambert in this review of texts over time that also draws on the 3 principles of social justice: redistributive, recognitive and representational.
- Find your own reading: explore OKHE graduates’ responses to the assessment briefs via the OKHE1 and OKHE2 tags; general contributions to this publication on the OKHE tag; posts in the Open Research Forum — or look further afield for openly available writing, comment and media.
