The UK Reproducibility Network (UKRN) is a national peer-led consortium investigating the factors that contribute to robust research, promoting training activities, and disseminating best practice.
Under the leadership of Professor Daryl O’Connor and Dr Eike Rinke, the University of Leeds has formally joined UKRN as part of our commitment to open research.
At this online event, we will hear from Daryl about open and reproducible research, why it matters and how UKRN can help support our research community to ensure research outputs are transparent and robust across all academic disciplines, whether STEM, Social Sciences or Humanities.
We are also very pleased to welcome Neil Jacobs, Head of the UKRN Open Research Programme, who will provide an insight into the work of UKRN, plans for the future and how researchers at Leeds can contribute to the network.
The event is open to all colleagues from Leeds and beyond.
Daryl O’Connor is Professor of Psychology, University of Leeds. A registered health psychologist with strong research interests in psychobiology, Daryl currently leads the Health and Social Psychology Research Group in the School of Psychology at the University of Leeds and has been a strong advocate for open research nationally and internationally.
Neil Jacobs has over 30 years of experience in the UK research sector, having led national innovation programmes and overseen global open science services for Jisc, the UK Research Councils, and cOAlition S. More recently, he has taken a leading policy role in both Government and UKRI, covering open research and research integrity.
The most important thing otherwise so yeah we’ll start off very soon with darl um followed by AA who’s our ukn local network lead and then we’ll hear from Neil Jacobs who’s head of the ukn open research program uh I’ve realized AA if you can
Hear me as well that I did leave you I didn’t actually change the agenda after we discussed it so you don’t have to fill the 15 minutes TS fine as we discussed um and just to say really that we do welcome questions as we go so please do
Post any questions in the chat as you go um or answers in fact um Etc um so we’re just coming up to five past and we’re not doing two bag B numbers D so I’ll hand over to you if that’s right and stop my share right thanks uh very much for that
Nick so um I assume people can see my slides yep can see them fine D thank you great okay so welcome everyone to this event and really this event is about kind of marking leads his role as a part of the UK reproducibility Network so I’m absolutely thrilled that Neil Jacobs is
Going to be here is here today and Neil’s going to be updating a lot of the real details of what ukrn about and its objectives and the major open research program so what I’ve decided to do is do something slightly different today which is I gave one of these open lunch um
Presentations actually Nick alarmingly two years ago nearly um which was very much about setting the case for open science and open research more generally so what I’m going to do today in the next 15 minutes or so is just to try and um give us a s sense of where we are at
The moment and where we’ve come from and where we are and then touch upon some of the things that we as the University have are going to be doing in terms of uh our work with ukrn but really then we’ve got lots of the detail will really
Be expanded upon by Neil explaining the whole open research program so let’s begin with uh this whole notion that the scientific world has changed dramatically so this is a slide that I often like to um open with when I’m presenting uh work on open research and it’s particularly because was you know
We recall way back in 2015 there was a crucial publication of um a paper in science uh which clearly demonstrated that we look at psychological science specifically that this was the kind of landmark paper which indicated to many of us that replication was a problem within the discipline of psychological science
However as I’ve LED explained before and I’ve said in other talks is that I still see this paper is you know a major major development not just for psychology but for all of Science and the reason for that is is because psychology has been a Trailblazer and this particular paper
Which is published uh in 2015 demonstrated that only around 36% of studies could be replicated but that was the kind of Crisis Point um psychology performs much better than other Sciences in terms of replication and subsequent this there been many other um disciplines which have also engaged in
Similar projects so the key point is that psychologies played a crucial role here and myself as psychologist feel very proud of our discipline being able to do that but actually as a result over the last 10 years since the give or take that paper was published and I should
Say there were other papers prior to that which were equally as important but that particular science publication really was a landmark but as result there’s been so many Fantastic developments subsequently and I just want to touch upon a couple of these so one is I think the huge increase in
Pre-registration so I’m not going to into the details if we wanted a full open science talk um that’s for a different um day and a different agenda but basically we know that one of the key concerns we have is the use of questionable research practices but if we increase the use of pre-registration
This basically gets people to in upfront decide well which aspects of the work is confirmatory which aspects is exploratory so that’s been an amazing development and many psychologists and all not just in Psychology all areas of science has been really increasing use of pre-registration and indeed we’ve recently published this template where
We’re trying to reach consensus on what is required certain in Psychology but many other disciplines are doing this as well what is what do we really want to see in these pre-registrations so again this is a useful template so that’s been an amazing development the other thing
Which has been fantastic um has been this introduction of registered reports and for those who are not familiar with registered reports this is a relatively new phenomenon um where peer review happens before the results are known in fact peerreview should happen before you even start collecting data and this
Again has been an extraordinary advance in all of science but again led by uh Chris Chambers and ciff as a psychologist again making a huge difference um on the international stage in all areas of Science and actually if you look over the last um 10 years or so
The very first register report um was published way back in uh 2012 2013 time but if you can look here there’s huge exponential increase in the number of uh journals which offer registered reports as a format and again this is work that I’ve been involved in and many others um
And many would be possibly on this call as well so this is a really exciting Advance as well and again those who interested I urge you to read this paper by Chambers which gives us a real upto-date on what he calls the evolution of registered reports but actually if you want to see
Some justification for this new way of working I love this paper by an she and colleagues where they compared uh key psychological studies uh which used standard format with those which had used register reports and what you find here if you look at the left hand side
Of this bar which I think is extraordinary finding you see that in a standard report 95% of all first hypotheses are supported I mean that’s quite a finding I mean that suggests that we are so extraordinary at our science that virtually every time we conduct something we find it a significant
Effect which supports hypothesis clearly we’re not that good look what happens when we look at register reports where you do the peer review before the data collection happens and you can see here that it drops to nearly 40% and that’s been replicated in another study very
Recently so again this is just a real um eye opener to the importance of moving to these new approaches the other exciting thing which we all seen is the introduction of open science Badges and what you can see they were introduced way back in 2013 2014 2015 sort of time
And we can see the exponential increase again this is now quite an old study but it’s still one of the key in this domain where you can see this increase in sharing of data so lots of really excellent developments and I’m just touching upon some of them very briefly
Today but actually all isn’t as Rosie in the garden of open science and open research and I wanted to share with you a really important uh new study I sry I jumped ahead there which is currently under review and I may have been accepted and I see Aika our colleague
Here um was also one of the co-authors so this is a piece of work which was done by ukrn local um Network leads which was a survey in the United Kingdom of open research practices so what where are we at what’s the the state of of play in both the context of awareness
And also in the context of enabling and enacting open science um behaviors and practices and what’s quite interesting here if we just look at this slide here it’s it’s somewhat busy but if you look at the left hand side here we can see this is a range of different open
Research practices from Open Access publication right down to registered report and then these orangey type bars are indications of the percentage of participants in this study of over a thousand people in the United Kingdom across all disciplines whether or not they’re aware of that and then the green
Indicates whether or not they’ve enabled in it they’ve actually enacted and practiced any of these aspects and what’s concerning to me is that well first of all what’s good is that there’s increases in Awareness but if some of the key real Innovations if you look at registered reports this is less than 40%
So that’s pretty concerning to me we could arrange even study pre-registration has only got a percentage of 51% that’s concerning to me so even though we’ve I’ve been certainly talking about this for many many years I’ve been an advocate of open science for about nearly 10 years now but the point that’s
Is crazy to me and time and time again it comes back to the same issue is we don’t have the awareness levels that we would imagine even all the stuff that’s going on and if you look at the right in the green we can see here equally there
Is I suspect relatively low levels of an act again look at register reports less than 10% replication studies 16% pre-registration only 25% so that’s concerning to me so there’s a lot of work we still need to do and in fact we just had completed another similar survey in psychological science as a
Registered report this time and we pretty much mirror the findings of the Norris at our paper again hopefully this will be published pretty soon but the thing that concerns me equally um is this whole idea of the architect Ure of Science and the reward structure and this is the idea of what
About these important things which are in that landscape that we all working and again I wrote about this a couple of years ago um and again if you’re interested you can read this particular paper but myself and many others have been talking about how we need to move
To more open and transparent culture for quite some time and it is clear that science remains broken in terms of culture and in terms of reward and if we look at this these two nice slides coming up what from Brian noac um who obviously is one of the world leaders in
This area and Brian was talking about this earlier in the year he he describes this idea of this dysfunctional research structure that we that exists the idea that we could incentives for novel positive in tidy outcomes and this Shields all sorts of concerns from selective reporting questional research
Practices reduction in Sharing Etc and then that has a cascading effect which ultimately leads to increased research waste slow progress and per return on investment what we still need to do is we need to change this to improve the rewards system and indeed you know the ultimate goal is these incentives should
Be for rigor and high quality methodology and as you can see here this with then promote complete reporting transparency in all aspects of research both during the process afterwards and then replication and as you can see this would then Cascade to lead to less waste more progress and more return on investment
However what’s interesting to me is that leads have been actually a Trailblazer in themselves and this is where I need to shout out to extraordinary and Brilliant work by cat Davies our Dean for research culture and Amanda bretman our dean of research quality leads had a
View a number of years ago around the same time that we were trying to join the ukm to really try and change the culture and any colleagues who are either both internal to the university or external if you haven’t seen our research culture strategic plan if you
Just Google it and I’m sure someone could cleverly put it in the chat um while I’m speaking I’d urge you to lead it to read it sorry because again it really sets this fantastic scene for where we’re at um in terms of uh moving to a more transparent and open culture
However I think what what we were doing at the same time that that document was being written was we joined the ukrn and the ukrn when Neil um Jacobs will give us a lot of detail on many aspects of the program very soon but basically it’s a peer-led Consortium which is trying to
Change and transform the higher education um landscape so it’s a topown as well as a bottom up um approach so the idea that we’re trying to work with heis across the entire United Kingdom um in a way where we can try and improve quality improve training etc etc and
You’ll see more about that in a second but from a lead’s point of view what I’ve been keen on when we joined last November was to really engage as much as we can with some of the key aspects which will make a difference both to leads but also to this sector overall
And indeed this is just a brief overview of what the five-year open research program um that that ukn has been funded by by research England and again s of a training evaluation and sharing of resources and again Neil will explain that in detail when he presents very
Shortly but a of that work what I was Keen is there’s two key bits that I want to share with you today which are most pertinent to where we’re at one is that I was Keen for us to get involved in What’s called the open and responsible researcher reward and recognition
Project this is one of the one of the key projects in the overall open research program which is led by colleagues in Cardiff and the reason why I think this is important because as I was alluded to earlier given that we’ve we still have this bias and somewhat
Broken research culture in the sense that the incentive scheme and the the reward structure in UK science is remains problematic we don’t reward and we don’t incentivize the open research practices enough and ultimately the best way to change a behavior is to change the incentive structure and I think the
Way we evaluate research and and and all aspects of open science and open research is crucial here so one of the things that we’ve we’ve started in the first meeting was last week where was this particular um reward and recognition project and leads will be
One of the all being well one of the um case study institutions where over the next um two years there will be a lot of work going on both internally and externally where we’re going to try and Achieve these objectives where we’re try and embed um researcher reward and
Recognition in a more responsible way and again I don’t expect you to read all this details now but the idea that would be a process of trying to decide how we best assess this we’re going to be looking at you know where we are at the moment in terms of our maturity in
Relation to responsible reward and recognition and again we’ll be moving on to hopefully agree this at a at an Institutional and then also at a national level but again we’ll hear more about that as that project develops but the other thing which we’ve been um Keen
To be involved in is how do we assess open research what are the best open research indic ators and what the United the ukrn did a little while ago they had a they had a survey in in the ha sector to try and identify what the four main open research indicator priorities are
Again we don’t have time to talk about this within the context for example of ref but ref 2028 we know that research culture is key but also um how we assess and evaluate openness um will become even more important and as a result of the survey there were four key
Priorities is identified how do we best assess institutional levels open and fair data so the extent to which you’re engaging with that data accessibility statements pre-registration and the use of the credit system and and actually what’s extraordinary and again Neil mayor may not talk about this when he
Speaks shortly what I’ve been impressed by is first of all to establish these priorities but really has impressed me was then working with solution and providers from right through all aspects of the publishing you know from plus through to lere to many different organizations are now working with ukrn
To kind of come up with the best way on how we can easily robustly fairly and accurately assess these different um key indicators of open research so that’s pretty much where we are now so all I leav to say is and I’m happy to take any questions later is let’s just watch this
Space because hopefully over the next couple of years we will be moving in an exciting way working of course with you know I should say all the Professional Services for you the library Services Claire and Nick and Sally doton and and then of course with Amanda brettman and
Also with cat Davies as a whole team and anybody else and Ike and I will be hopefully working on this over the next number of years so I hope you enjoy that really nice photograph that I took flying back from Ireland only a couple of weeks ago I will leave it there that
Is 15 minutes right on the nose thank you very much thank you very much darl and excellent time and thanks for the f and so hopefully AA you should be able to share your slides if you want to go next as I say though I’d left you 15
Minutes on the agenda you don’t have to fill it all can if you like less time for Q Anda take them up I think so let me just try and share this I hope this does work can you see this yeah that’s fine thanks like all right
Then yeah welcome everyone it’s great to to have so many people in the room here to to talk talk about uken and how it increasingly connects to our work at at leads um I think there my brief comments will s connect seamlessly with with what darl just talked about because what what
I would want to do here is mostly to uh introduce you to the bottom up local community that is sort of trying to integrate the various voices and and sort of researchers and professional staff across campus who share an interest in all of the things things that darl just touched on all the
Various aspects of of open research and so transparency and uh Integrity in in doing the work we do whatever shape or form it might take which discipline we P so uh just briefly to say that uh what we are again is a really diverse uh and Hope hopefully maximally open open
Research community that is I’m trying to be as inclusive as possible um horizontally and vertically I’m talking to you today because I’m uh sort of acting as the local network lead for for our for our leads UK Ren Network I’m a lecturer in politics in in media and
Politics in the school of politics and International Studies um so I’m a social scientist but our Network compos is composed of at current 212 leads academic and professional staff members uh which as I said all share an interest in research transparency and riger and they come from all seven faculties at
The University so we are really diverse Bunch which makes for um really interesting and I think I find stimulating environment to have these open research discussions in so ours is a really open open research space I dare say so at the moment our our Network
Like I said is a is a bottom up researcher l or a Grassroots L initiative um and it fulfills two main functions in my view which is to offer these academics and and professional staff as well uh more information about the rapidly developing uh discussions around open
Research in leads around the UK and around the world indeed so offering a space for information there and also to offer Community around these issues sort of possibility and opportunity for for lead uh people interested in open research to find like mind people sry to interrupt I I’m just you sound slightly
Robotic it’s not too bad but I just wonder maybe if your camera off might help with the bandwidth Poss possibly um oh okay well I can try to move closer to the microphone otherwise I don’t we can hear you but it is SL slight it sounds like um a network thing
That it’s slightly robotic but we we can hear you sorry to interrupt so does it yeah you can hear me I hope yeah yeah we can hear you it’s just the quality is not great but it’s okay sorry to carry on okay sorry for that it won’t be uh I won’t take too
Much time anyway any ways so you can join us if you are leads academic or professional staff and you’re not yet part of our MS Microsoft team you can join us via this link um if you want to join The Wider open research discourse appdates so we’re sharing information there you will
Learn about sort of news the latest Publications in in open research so I share each each end of the week what I call the open research Friday reading which is a means of familiarizing leads academics with the latest and greatest Publications in the in the open research
Space um we share job opportunities open research events at leads and Beyond um and information about the latest developments in open research in general such as published reports pentary reports that come that have come out this year for example recordings of open research talks uh and also we pl other communities of
Interest to open research minded people such as for project and so on so we’re trying to connect lead leads to these transnational uh sort of communities of within open research um and hopefully therefore positioning leads within that wider Community as well um so that’s information the community aspect of it
Is uh mostly realized at the minute through our monthly reproducibility uh session so reproducibility for those of you who are are not aware is a social a journal Club format which which has been around for quite a few years now and is practiced at or present at many campuses around
The world um here in leads uh we uh use reproducibility to offer space for our like I said horizontally and vertically inclusive community of open research interested people the current team uh is is really as diverse as community at large I think we come from very different uh faculties and and therefore
Representative of different perspectives we are in our fifth year if you want to become active within reproducibility as well so we’re mostly e RS in in this team uh if you want but yeah never mind if you’re ECR or not if you’re interested in in joining the journal Club organization in leads
You’re very welcome to reach out to us and to come member so now we now have events every month during the teaching semester and they’re usually hybrid the next one is tomorrow and it’s about a paper uh where we will discuss a paper informally right having an informal
Discussion about paper that’s all about the role of open science for early career researchers and how they can run into challenges or also help promote open open signs uh in general so that’s tomorrow there’s a link to register there there’s going to be another reproducibility that’s a little bit
Going ahead that I’m really looking forward to for and that I want to flag right now because I’m so excited about it which is going to happen in March next year where we will welcome Crystal Stelton who’s the training Ed and education manager at the center for open
Science who hosts the the open science framework which we will talk about uh qualitative methods and open science practices which is something she she published a very interesting paper about quite recently so uh stay tuned for more information about this particular event uh which will be great to have a cost
Represent at leads and yeah what does the future hold uh we will aim to further develop the network sort of hopefully expanding it but also deepening perhaps our our conversations and by that I mean that in addition to circulating ever more information Pro continuing to provide spasis for
Community to perhaps also uh sort of go them by the in the way of starting actual leads based collaborations of various sorts from within the the local network and that might include meta research projects which some of us have been involved in as darl already mentioned organization of additional
Events or even developing resources for open research in the various communities and faculties on on campus which is something I think we will need to uh engage in more going forward so there’s more to happen uh again if you’re interested please join us and just click the logo below to join our Microsoft
Team thank you very much thanks ion I’m sorry if I put you off your stride a bit there with uh coming in halfway through but I was I just wouldn’t your audio it was fine it was just slightly off so um that’s the two support acts I guess Neil um if you’re
There you’re the headliner um if you can share any slides you’ve got I will do I don’t like being build as a headliner that’s not fair on me or darl and IA um and what AA was too modest to mention was that he’s just been elected to be a member of the uh
Central Steering group or supervisory Board of the UK reproducibility Network so he’s got a national role uh steering steering the whole thing so thank you very much AA for agreeing to stand for that and congratulations on on being appointed to that role so I’m going to say a little bit about the UK
Reproducibility Network and some of the things that we’re doing I’m going to mainly talk about um the open research program but darl’s done such a good job of introducing that that I can skip over some of that reasonably fast perhaps so what is the UK reproducibility Network
It’s a it’s a network of different communities so that’s researchers and institutions and funders and Publishers and others all of whom have an interest in improving research uh improving the quality rigor transparency of of research and ukrn is a platform to enable us to collaborate to enable that
To happen far too much competition in the sector already ukrn is about collaboration so I’ll say a few words about um make slides work some some activities that we we’re uh doing to enable that to happen uh so I’m going to talk a little bit about cross disciplinary perspectives and then talk about
Research culture and research integrity and then get on to open research so I hope that’s interesting and and uh I’ll look forward to questions so I wanted to start off by talking about reproducibility and transparency across different disciplines because there is a tendency sometimes for these conversations to get a little bit sort
Of quantitative a little bit stem heavy um and I don’t think that’s necessary in the slightest we’ve already heard examples of why that uh isn’t the case um here’s a blog post is uh is history having a replication crisis this is from Anton house who we we spoke to as the
Ukrn uh a few months ago there may well be some interesting conversations to be had there about the ways in which history is or different kinds of History I practiced only last week the UK reproducibility Network partnered up with the British psychological society and the practice research Advisory Group
So these are Arts practitioners so theater people music people uh sculptors and others uh to look at the ways in which they talk about transparency and positionality and what does reproducibility mean in those sorts of disciplines really interesting conversation there’ll be a report coming
Out of that in the next uh few weeks and we just starting actually to learn from a range of different disciplines including the humanities thinking here we have a story associate just starting at the Arts the the ukrn funded by the Arts and Humanities research Council and they’re bringing in scholarship about
Story and narrative Theory to see whether or not we can find better ways for research researchers to tell the story in journal articles for example or in books to tell the story of research to tell it more accurately and more uh more completely um there is a a tendency I
Think when research is reported to always report a very clean narrative uh as Daryl said we always find what we were looking for in what our first hypothesis was can we find ways from perhaps uh story and narrative to tell better more accurate more truthful stories about all of the messiness that
Goes into research and of course open science and open research which is what we’re talking about today mainly looks very different in different disciplines and this is a sort of a section from a web page we have on the ukm page and this is built out of work done at the
University of su to provide resources and case studies and reference points in a whole range of different subject areas to show what open research looks and feels like in those different discipline areas broadly following the ref units of assessment there uh and of course some of the the
Case studies that have been developed at leads feature in these Pages too but I want to talk briefly and take a detour through research culture uh and you might wonder why I want to do that there’s a whole lot of conversations around research culture of course at the
Moment across the sector um and I want to do that because I want to highlight these sorts of findings this is a finding from a very large survey of research Integrity that came out in 2021 and this was quoted in the UK committee on Research Integrity annual statement
From this year and there are some really quite startling figures here I think so these are self-reported figures and obviously there’s an incentive perhaps for people not to report some of these things they are not uh not positive aspects of of research so including authors who haven’t contributed sufficiently over half of researchers
Reported having done that not conducting a thorough review of a manuscript uh choosing only to uh not to report findings if they contradict your theories one in five reported doing that so these are really quite startling figures at least they are to me and they suggest that we’re working in a in a
Culture that doesn’t necessarily reward the kinds of good rigorous high quality research that we’re all interested in doing there’s a a difference between what we’re incentivized to do and what we have sort of intrinsic motivations to do as researchers that tells me that there’s something a Miss in research
Culture and this is one of the things of course that the the ref is trying to address the early decisions for 2028 suggested a far greater emphasis uh and closer review of the cultures in which research is done and there has been a lot of discussion around those proposals
And uh some people Keen to maintain the focus on Research outputs as being the sort of measure of Excellence but I think Gemma argues quite cogently in this piece uh from about a month ago that really that opposition to changing the way the ref works really shows why
Why that change is needed why that change in culture is needed and that needs to be reflected in the ways in which the sector is assessed through things like the research Excellence framework so what is ukrn doing about all of this um and there’s quite a lot
On that slide and I don’t want to go through all of these things but I will mention uh quickly four five six and seven here so one of the things that we’re doing is we’re just convened or just starting a project co-funded by um uh research by some ukrn institutions
Including leads um who are interested in the ways in which universities use research evidence when they’re making decisions or developing strategies that affect research culture so do we as institutions use the kind of research evidence that we’re we’re very good at creating do we actually use that
Evidence ourselves so that’s a piece of work that’s just starting now uh I think will be a very interesting piece of work we are working with the UK committee on Research Integrity looking at point five here on just looking at what the literature says about the enablers and Inhibitors of research integrity and
This is work that we’re doing with with two of our uh local network leads people like AA at different institutions in this case at wolver Hampton at sford are working on this literature review for the UK committee on Research Integrity we’ve uh worked together to draft a response to those ref 2028
Initial decisions and we have outlined what we feel as ukrn to be an excellent research environment the sort of research environment that is conducive to high quality research and that’s published now on our website and we’ll be talking with the UK committee on Research Integrity indeed tomorrow about
Some of those those points that uh we feel are important and the final thing I’ll just mention is that we I’ve got ukri funding this year for a community support project to support the work that people like ier are doing across the 70 institutions that have got local network
Leads uh to make sure that they they they feel supported by ukrn and are able to develop a peer community of practice across the country doing that sort of work I’m going to skip this slide because uh we can come back if that pequs your interest we can come back to
That in the the Q&A at the end um so I’ll just leave it there for a second or two to see whether it does but I want to talk about open research that’s the the billing for today um and what do we mean by open research and why uh a Shameless piece of
Self-promotion you might have seen in uh research professional news today this piece that I I’ve written about the international context and the international context comprising us rejoining Horizon Europe of course but also there’s uh work coming out of UNESCO and coming out of the United States there’s a global movement towards
Open research which the UK really needs to be a part of we have been a leader uh and in many places we are still a leader uh but there’s a lot of activity in other places now and uh we we uh have have got our work out to maintain that
Leadership position I think so what do we mean by open research this is a graphic from the UNESCO open science recommendation from uh from last year uh it sets out a whole range of things that they mean by open research so there are things that we typically understand perhaps scientific Publications data
Open Access perhaps open source and code pre-registration would be up there and this is what they call open scientific knowledge but there are three other quadrants to that uh that round there uh open science infrastructures engagement with societal actors so this is where public participation and citizen science
Might fall and open engagement and dialogue with other knowledge systems as well so for them open science is a really broad canvas in which research is operating and we’ve been working with UNESCO and with the Swiss reproducibility Network to produce a guide that will will be released this week actually at the
UNESCO General Assembly a guide for institutions who want to implement these recommendations from from UNESCO and they are recommendations that are signed by 194 National governments including the UK government so they are ones that we should be paying close attention to um quickly mentioned the Third bullet
Point here before I go on to the open research program the third bullet point here is is another project that we’re just starting again with with support uh from University of Leeds among other ukrn institutions uh to look at the ways in which universities have found it easy or
Not to put in place arrangements to uh support research data open research data so things like the training the infrastructure the guidance the support the kinds of things that universities need to do to make it easy for researchers to share fair and open research data under the uh the sort of
Commitments that the open research data concordat sets out U how easy has it been for institutions to do that and are there lessons that we can share and are there ways in which we can inform national policym uh to make sure that it’s uh in line with what what really
Universities are uh able able to do in that way so that that project’s just starting off now uh again a piece of meta research that the ukn is doing but I’ll crack on talk about the open research program now it’s now got 22 universities and growing uh as part of
It and you can see there’re the four main strands of work training re form of recruitment promotion and Appraisal uh sharing of institutional practice and some work around evaluation meta research and and indicators so I’ll skip through some of these things uh on training we have now got a train
The trainer program in place this is designed to to build up institutional capacity uh as part of our sustainability model so that institutions have uh a range of trainers available uh for researchers to train their peers for Professional Services staff to also train in a whole range of
Different aspects of open research and we’ve sort of set those out in this trffic according to sort of a broad research life cycle if you like uh there’s a schedule online now we uh have uh a set of uh training train the trainer sessions that are running over
The course of the next two or three years and more will be added to that as just uh if you’re interested to have a look at the schedule on the UK and website we’re also building up a community of trainers a national community of trainers so that we can um
Share good practice or enable good practice to be shared among those trainers uh so that we really do have the best uh open research training in the world if we we possibly can do that so that’s the training I won’t go into too much detail about the specific
Training that’s available we can come back to that if you’re interested I do want to talk about this though and uh darl’s already mentioned this as uh a major uh announcement today actually um of the 43 institutions that have joining the the o4 project as either case
Studies as in the case of leads or parts of the community of practice uh to reform the ways in which staff are recruited are promoted and are appraised to make sure that open research practices are recognized in these processes 43 institutions a huge diversity of Institutions there from the
World col music to the University of Cambridge uh to the cancer research UK’s Scottish Institute so I mean a really vast range and a really significant uh number of Institutions representing taken together over 8,000 researchers across the UK sector this is a really major movement among a wide range of
Institutions to reform the ways in which uh they recruit and promote staff so that researchers can be confident that uh the kinds of open research practices that you do at leads will also be recognize should you God forbid look for a job at another University um they this will be
Supported by um sort of maturity framework uh and a guide to help institutions Implement uh Implement these reforms and plan the ways in which they would want to make those sorts of improvements over time so that’s a huge piece of work a major achievement I
Think by the the team uh that have been working on that the fourth aspect of the open research program that I I’ll quickly mention is a more General approach that we’re trying to take to enable universities to share good practice among themselves so to find out you know what are your peer
Institutions doing to support open research by way of training guidance infrastructure tools statements of principle and so on so we will be developing we have developed some static Pages here’s the one of Kings College London um we are developing those into what we would like to call a living website so
Something a bit more Dynamic than that that enables the community of of change agents across these institutions to learn from each other and share good practice over time that’s something that we’ll have in place within the next year or so and the final thing I’ll talk about
The strand of work area we call evaluation design but broadly speaking it’s about how do we know that we’re making the changes that we think we’re making and that we intend to make uh there’s been a large scale survey there uh that many institutions have run
Uh we are Keen to bring a little bit more coordination to the world of surveys we think there’s clearly a lot of surveys out there researchers are not under surveyed uh Daryl mentioned the brief open research survey that Charlotte Penington and others ran we as ukn as
Part of the open research program and a survey that are also surveys put out by the center for open science and by individual in tion such as Oxford we’re working to try to get a little bit of coordination into that landscape maybe we can have some common question sets or
Or similar sorts of survey instruments over time um but the thing I really want to mention here and this is something that Daryl’s introduced already is the open research indicators Pilots which about 15 institutions are going to be joining in including leads um and they are intended to be an exploration to find
Out whether we can we can indeed reliably ethically practically uh and validly measure different aspects of open research so here’s my rather clunky graphic to try and describe that we have a number of Institutions together as I’ll say about 15 who forming a community about uh uh looking into this
Topic um we have a number of Partners Solutions providers if you like who will be working with these institutions uh combining their sort of third party data and expertise with the the expertise and data from the institutions themselves uh looking at those uh those topics so can we find Reliable and valid
Indicators of progress on these things but the thing I’d really like to stress about this is that this is indicators to help institutions plan and evaluate their progress their support for open research practices these are not indicators to inform research or research or assessment these will be Aggregate and Anonymous indicators they
Will not be individual uh indicators that can inform sort of those sorts of recruitment promotion type type activities I think those two uh should be kept as as distinct as they possibly can so that’s all I had to say to be absolutely honest I hope that’s been a
Useful skip through some of the work that we’re doing and we’ve got time for some discussion some questions thanks very much Neil and uh I was going to hand over to you I think for Q&A okay absolutely okay I’ll first of all thank Neil for for giving this uh
Overview of so the multiplicity of of different different work streams within uken um after darl has a broad overview of the of the General concerns that that motivate UK rents works and I i’ be interested to know if if you have any questions for either uh Daryl or Neil if
So please just raise your hand or speak up right away there is one question uh I notic chat about um fees for um pre-registration I think Nick I saw that it’s from m in my department it’s a good point Mel I I didn’t think I thought there were some
Which were didn’t attract a fee so does clinical trials the clinical golf trials sorry the American version I didn’t even I thought the UK version which is what you’ve cited didn’t didn’t cost so have you looked it recently it did cost something yes so can you hear me darl
Okay yeah I can hear you yeah yeah yeah yeah um yeah so it’s about a 250 pound pre-registration fee but it’s also a particular pre-registration that NHS ethics tends to almost require actually as part of their ethical approval process um and I did inquire about this
Within the school and they said I have to come up with a funding myself to pre-register if there’s a funding um if there’s cost involved but I can see how you know that could put people off pre-registering given in some situations they might be a fe involved um which you
Know is down to the individual I mean currently of course if you use the open science framework there would be no cost attached to that it’s just well not the funer or the NHS would be happy with it it’s a good point actually because you
Know in fact you’re right in in the past when I’ve done it it’s just been part of a grant so the cost has been there so but um I mean the other way do of course Mel is you publish the protocol and then that becomes pre-registered yeah times it’s a chicken
And egg situation though to publish the protocol you might need the pre-reg or so sometimes there um but yeah I’ll look into it a bit more a bit more maybe I can find an alternative that’s free It just strikes me that point as well might be something that we in the
Library might need to consider I don’t want to put my CLA NOS on the spot and I think if you’re still there CLA but in terms of Open Access fees I mean there might be a danger of int journals introducing these additional fees As We Know they are tending to do for all
Sorts of value ad at the moment and while we’re now increasingly covering Open Access um fees to publish then you know if more journals took up uh registered reports and we’re charging additional fees for that and that’s something I think we in the live might want to be aware
Of I don’t know if you’re wanted me to respond Nick but well yeah if you can do if you want I want to put you on I think we always need to be aware of what the costs are and keeping these costs manageable I know NE used to work for J
And um our negotiations go through J and understanding what the costs are and transparency of them and that we don’t get cost for one thing and then another added on as we’ve seen with color charges and things like this the final cost needs to be the final cost and
That’s both for planning but also making sure it is manageable and transparent obviously we get some funding here in the UK from um ukri but we have to be aware that not everybody’s that fortunate in other places as CLA can I just come back with one just
Quick thing just just come back to Mel’s broader point so but don’t forget you know any type of pre-registration can be free on as predicted or or there’s many other platforms where you can do it very easily and I urge everyone to use as predictive if you want a quick and easy
Route which is there’s less borers there and then the register report idea which is entirely transparent and most journals offer that for free so in I it’s part of the subscription model it’s different if it’s of course it’s an open access Journal you’d have the open act the APC
To be paid I don’t know um Neil do you have anything to offer on that I don’t really I think you’ve covered it darl and yeah yeah I think just to add to this excellent question that I think uh flags for us also a need to provide an overview institutionally for our leads
Researchers of the various options that are available uh for sort of engaging with these sort of open practices so so that’s a a really helpful question more generally thanks how do we inform our researches about what’s possible and and so on I saw there was a question by Andy
In in the chat as well about uh sort of collaboration between uh our local network lead and and other campuses in leads um I to be honest there hasn’t been any any collaboration so far I I am aware there’s there’s a local network Le local network at leads Becket as well
It’s actually an interesting thought to try and reach out to to them to see what they’re up to I to be honest I have no idea what’s what’s happening on at leetes Becket but um if you have any thoughts or ideas for for what it is
That we could or should do there very happy to to to talk and and see what we can organize in need more widely or what was the background of your of your question perhaps you can say a little bit about that any just there was a question from uh
Andy Turner as well like I should enable the chat the the question function really should because they’ve sort of disappeared back up the chat thread but Andy a colleague from research Computing do you want to ask in person Andy I can see you there yeah so that’s that’s what
I was talking about so I think when I met with Daryl and um you were just come into the university in 2013 and we talked about setting up um this leads ukrn node as a thing for the city sort of or city region um and at the time there were four universities
That were sort of working out of lead a little bit the open um university has got its base somewhere else now and it’s shut the office in leads but there’s three universities really U I don’t know what’s going on with Trinity but obviously we’ve got a contact there
That’s on the ukn list of Safir and leads Becket but then you know that’s all academic and there’s a lot of research that goes on in other parts of um the city as well so I thought about it as a more regional thing rather than um of Ivory Tower
Thing but um yeah I I I don’t know if if other other places have got somewhere to join um you know so if you worked in the hospital or if you worked in a in a business or something whether you could be part of this to
Publish in AC yeah like like I said our general ethos is to be as open as possible so reaching out beyond our is absolutely something I would be quite open to as well so if you I mean contacting sphere absolutely might be a worth well thing to do um also if you
Have other points of contact that you would like us to explore think would be worthwhile uh sort of using to expand our reach U yeah please feel free to send over to me and I’ll I’ll pick it up it could be that Nick knows safia because he came from Leeds Becket and
Helen as well who’s working in the same team but I don’t know I know the name I’m not sure I’ve ever met Sophia but yeah we’ll definitely follow up with Ellie I mean it’s one of those things we keep thring to do more so um I’ve got a
Question um I if that’s okay probably for sure sure sure please for Neil really on behalf of um uh Alex robertsburg who’s actually in the office with me when we were just talking a little bit I think you’ve touched on it perhaps Neil a little bit with the
UNESCO stuff but um Alexa and I were just talking in the office that there seems to be perhaps an emphasis on Publications and as head of public engagement here at leads Alexa I think was interested in the broader sense that you were sort of alluding to with um the
UNESCO stuff is that something that ukn explicit will will start to focus on or is it is it really sort of the publication Focus that that you focused on so I think um I’m going to answer that by saying that ukar focus is on the research process and by way of making
That process more rigorous making the outputs more rigorous and if that process needs to be participatory in order for the research to be rigorous then ukrn is interested in it does that make sense yeah that Mak sense yeah she’s nodding yeah thank you we hope very much that there will be
A um a new primer coming out on um public participation and engagement in research as a part of the ukn primer series recently soon oh we’ll just ask that question as well Neil if that’s all all right because she did refer to the Wikipedia and open research primer so I
Just wondered when that might be progressed one the Wikipedia one yeah yeah um sorry to put you on the spot it’s just you mentioned in the in the uh in in the slide and I meant to bug you about that anyway uh okay I’ll I’ll have
A look at that this afternoon I’m sorry if I’ve held that up Nick any other questions in in the in the virtual room for for NE or darl or myself no doesn’t seem like it um I don’t know Nick if you want to say any final words
Today we’re almost at the end of the hour yeah now we’re at the hour thank you very much to all three of our speakers um who of course aren’t um supporting acts and Headliners they’re all entirely equal as in as we’re trying to promote in terms of research as well
Um but thank you very much for uh coming along to everybody and to to to to our speakers and for uh interacting and you know we certainly at lead and I’m sure colleagues from other universities are happy to keep the conversation going in whatever channels are appropriate so
Yeah please stay in touch I’ll stop the recording and I can certainly hang around for a few minutes because I always think it’s a little strange to uh just close the recording down straight