Thursday, 25 November 2021

Celebrating open research at York

 In this post Ben Catt, Open Research Librarian, talks about the success of this summer’s York Open Research Awards scheme which highlighted engagement with open research practices and principles across the University. 

Image credit: Giorgio Trovato on Unsplash

Back in September 2020 the University Library submitted a successful bid for a £2,500 grant from Wellcome Trust to help develop an open research community of practice at York. As I explained in a previous blog post, the University is committed to supporting the values, principles and culture of open research whereby all aspects of the research cycle can be shared freely for others to reuse. A key element of this is ensuring that good examples from our research community are shared and celebrated, hopefully inspiring others to consider adopting open methods in their own practice. We decided that an awards scheme would be a great way to achieve this, and we were delighted to receive support for our proposal from Wellcome alongside match funding from the University Research Development Fund.

We can’t take credit for coming up with the idea of an open research awards scheme; University of Reading were probably the first UK institution to run such a scheme in 2019, which they repeated in July this year. Similar prizes have also been awarded by King’s College London, University of Bristol, University of Surrey and most recently our White Rose Libraries partners at University of Sheffield. A useful primer from the UK Reproducibility Network offers advice from awards scheme organisers at some of these institutions, and our initial proposal followed a similar model with the focus on running a high-profile showcase event for the winners.

A shift in focus

Plans for the awards were set aside until summer as we concentrated on other initiatives, including the formation of our Open Research Advocates network and organising two successful Open Research in Practice events; Software Sustainability in Practice and Open Humanities in Practice. We then decided to turn to our research community for their thoughts on our proposal (in hindsight, we should have involved them in our plans at an earlier stage).

Our Advocates network and academic colleagues from the University Open Research Strategy Group provided useful feedback on the need to carefully define the criteria by which submissions should be judged, bearing in mind the difficulty of comparing practices like-for-like and the disparate levels of engagement and issues surrounding open research in different areas (as highlighted by our open research awareness and engagement survey last year). Another suggestion was to focus on encouraging engagement in disciplines where open research is not common practice and to bring about wider benefits to the research community by developing eligible submissions into case studies for training purposes. 

With this feedback in mind we decided to refocus the awards as a less competitive and more inclusive opportunity to highlight projects and advocacy initiatives across disciplines. The idea was to recognise work that encourages dialogue, reflection and broader thinking about some of the issues involved in open research and barriers to its implementation. The prizes (£200 each) were split into categories by faculty and role (staff, postgraduate researchers and undergraduate students), thereby encouraging participation from a wide range of potential entrants. We also decided to set aside some prize money to use as additional funding for selected initiatives at the discretion of the judging panel, which comprised academic staff from each faculty and an ECR (Early Career Researcher) representative from the Strategy Group. 

A simple submission process was devised where we asked entrants to provide a brief description (no more than 1,000 words) of their research project or initiative, focusing on ways in which they have engaged with, reflected upon or advocated for open research practices and principles. They could also provide links to supporting materials, for example open access publications, open data sets or pre-registration documents arising from their work. The submission form was open from May 10th to June 4th and publicised through various channels including our recently-created York Open Research Twitter account.

And the winners are...

Fifteen submissions were received, covering a diverse range of projects and initiatives from across all three faculties and from researchers at different stages of their careers or studies. We received several submissions in some categories, but less entries than we had expected overall. The judging panel agreed to be flexible in how the prizes were distributed, and so we decided that all submissions were deserving of recognition. A full list of the projects and initiatives that were awarded can be found on our York Open Research wiki.

Several submissions were for open research advocacy and training initiatives, and the judging panel decided to award additional funding to two submissions based in Psychology. The first of these is Open Autism Research, a collaborative network encouraging open and reproducible practices in the field of autism research led by Dr Hannah Hobson. The network was launched at an online event in September attended by over 40 delegates from around the world and Hannah took the opportunity to talk about this at our recent Open Access Week showcase event, Open research across the White Rose Universities. The second initiative to receive funding is our local ReproducibiliTea journal club, who meet bi-monthly during term time to discuss diverse issues, papers and ideas about open and reproducible research. The organisers (who are all ECRs) are now planning events to expand their membership and exchange experiences with researchers across other disciplines. We look forward to seeing how both these initiatives develop in the upcoming year!

We are also working with researchers to turn their submissions into Open Research in Practice case studies, another initiative borrowed from the University of Reading. The focus of these case studies is on the experiences of researchers and lessons learned through their engagement with open research practice. The first set of these include Romans at Home, a collaborative outreach project with York Archaeological Trust led by Digital Heritage MSc student Eleanor Drew, and Covid Realities, a participatory research programme with low-income families led by researchers in SPSW. If you are a researcher based at York then we would love to receive your case studies to help inspire others to embed open practices in their work.

What next?

We would like to run the York Open Research Awards again next summer but we are still in a very early stage of planning. We welcome any thoughts from the research community on how the scheme could be improved, or suggestions on how to help incentivise and celebrate open research practice across the University. 

Please feel free to email the Open Research Team (lib-open-research@york.ac.uk) with your ideas and follow us on Twitter for updates on this and other #YorkOpenResearch initiatives.


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