Research and Scholarly Communications - Blog

On this Friday of #OAweek, we will share the work of our fourth and final research assistant, Daniel Dunlavey. Daniel decided to consider they key benefits of Open Research. 

Through a series of images and short videos (see below) for social media campaigns, he captured some of the key benefits of Open Research.

These are wide and range from breaking down barriers in research and promoting equity in the research ecosystem, to fostering collaborations and innovation, to enhancing the visibility of research. Open Research contributes to accelerating research through sharing methodology, data, research results through pre-prints (even negative ones that are often overlooked in formal publications), and publications. There is also an argument that Open Research is just research done properly and that it improves trust in research from the public. 

Serendipity wants that this year International Open Access Week partly coincides with Global Media and Information Literacy Week. This seems appropriate at a time when disinformation and misinformation circulates widely. This crisis is heightened by the proliferation of AI tools, opening research is one of the mechanisms to curb this proliferation. 

Have a look at some of the messages included in these short videos and think about how you could participate in Open Research. You could also read the recently adopted  Open Research Statement that shows the University of Sunderland's commitment to opening research.

Today’s blog shares the work produced by Heidi Guest, another of our research assistant. Her work in education inspired her to look at Open Research from the point of view of an educational Researcher. 

She developed a range of resources to demonstrate how Open Research can enhance the impact of educational research. 

In her first resource she asked What can you do to make your research Open?

Her second resource looks at the benefits of making educational research Open Access. 

While her final resource looks at five ways to make research open looking at methodology, data, analysis, professional connections and publications. 

Contextualising and understanding how Open Research can benefit your own discipline is important. Different disciplines will be confronted to different issues and barriers when it comes to adopting Open Research. 

However, what can be open should be to enable other researchers, policy makers, school leaders and teachers, parents and maybe the children themselves to engage with that research. The principles of Engaged Research might be interesting to explore in the context of Open Research. To learn more about engaged research check out the Wellcome Institute and UKRI information.

In today's blog, we are continuing to showcase the work of our research assistants. They produced a range of resources to support our collective understanding of Open Research. Today, features the work of Barbara Long-Flint about Creative Commons licenses (CC) and the part they play in Open Research. 

In an earlier blog, we had highlighted how the use of CC licenses was part and parcel of the Open Access and Open Research movement.  

Most Open Access articles are now published with an CC license. The preferred license for most funders and the REF is CC-BY. This license allows for the work to be distributed, reused, remixed without the need to ask permission. However, there are other more restrictive versions of CC licenses that might be used. In the current system, the publisher often becomes the copyright holder and charges people for the reuse, remixing and distribution of the work.  If you are funded, it might be that your funder requires a specific CC license to be applied to your work. Awareness of what CC licenses are and how they work is important. As an author choosing a CC license can empower you to decide  what people can do with your work.

To help us with our understanding, Barbara produced a series of resources showcased below: 

A guide introducing Creative Commons Licenses

A guide about Data and Creative Commons Licenses

A poster entitled the Copyright Dilemma exploring the factors that might lead the choice of copyright.

We hope these resources are useful and that they can help guide your choice and increase your understanding of this key element of Open Research and Open Access. 

Earlier this year, the Research and Scholarly Communications team was awarded funding to support and enhance the research culture at the University of Sunderland, particularly in relation to Open Research. This funding meant we could employ 4 postgraduate researchers, each of whom created a variety of materials that will enrich future advocacy and training sessions.

One of these researchers, Lisa Meek, created an Open Research text-based computer game that not only promotes the benefits of open research, but also shows how researchers can best engage with open research practices at every stage of their research journey.  We also love that it brings back memories of some much-cherished games from (many) decades ago!

The game is fully open access, and is published under a CC-BY license which sits well with the Open Access Week imperative to ‘prioritize approaches to open scholarship that serve the best interests of the public and the academic community’.

Here’s Lisa explaining how the game works, and her reasons for creating it. 

International Open Access week falls this year October 21^st – 27^th . 

International Open Access Week is an annual word-wide initiative, organized by the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), with the aim of facilitating the open sharing of knowledge, and a chance to connect the efforts of individuals, institutions, and organizations tasked with furthering the global drive to make research freely available. 

The theme this year, “Community over Commercialization”, a sentiment many of us would like to see applied to many areas of life, both academic and beyond, continues that of last year.  In the context of Open Access, however, the event hopes to “[…] prioritize approaches to open scholarship that serve the best interests of the public and the academic community.”

Recent developments, such as the integration of AI into academic systems at an incredibly rapid rate, will certainly inform the responses of HEIs to ongoing critical questions going forward.  These, according to the Open Access Week website include:

• What are the consequences when a small number of corporations control knowledge production rather than researchers themselves?
• What are the hidden costs of business models that entrench extreme levels of profit while exacerbation inequity?
• When does the opaque collection and use of personal data by commercial platforms begin to undermine academic freedom?
• When and in what ways can commercialization align with the public interest?
• What community-governed infrastructures already exist that better serve the interests of the research community and the public (such as preprint servers, repositories, and open publishing platforms)?
• How can we shift the default toward using these community-minded options?

While some of these questions are levelled squarely at the academic publishing industry, others are more positive, and forward-thinking, and I’m certainly interested in how other institutions use the web in a more open and, let’s be honest, responsible way when it comes to sharing knowledge. 

There have been some really inspirational academic publishing initiatives, such as the White Rose University Press (non-profit, open access), which are both academically rigorous and community-minded, and it strikes me that this has to be the way forward given the enormous problems associated with the current methods of subscription-based or gold OA publication.

A huge series of free (and open!) events are planned, and can be found here [Events — International Open Access Week].

We’re hoping to attend some of these sessions, and we’ll write about our experiences later in the week.