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Open Research
Alice Steiner
Open research (also known as “open science”) is vital if we are to tackle society’s greatest challenges. By making publicly funded research available to a worldwide audience, those who may benefit can access it. By making research data and methodology more transparent via data sharing, the quality of research and research findings can also be examined and lifted.
The systems and processes that underpin the open research model aim to nurture access, ensure integrity of data and methodology, and assist reproducibility of research. With openness, the potential for collaboration among researchers is enhanced, and recent research suggests that openly available publications attract on average 18% more citations (Piwowar, 2018).
This chapter presents a selection of resources and readings that provide an introduction to the open research movement. Further insight can be gained by consulting the website of Open Access Australasia.
Getting Started
An overview of open research
Open research goes beyond providing access to publications. To be fully open, the availability of data and other research materials is just as important. Open research therefore involves three components: pre-registration of experiments, open data and open access publishing. The initiatives that support this include repositories for sharing publications, repositories for software and data, and directories listing open access journals. Appearing very recently on the scene is Octopus, a new service which also aims to disrupt research culture – “Open by design, Octopus is free to use and publishes all stages of the research process, whether it is a hypothesis, a method, data, an analysis or a peer review”.
Open research also relates to all of a research project being made openly available. This includes the parts that were successful as well as the parts that were unsuccessful.
Exercise:
View the publishing model of Wellcome Open Research, a service of the charitable foundation “Wellcome”.
Watch their short video outlining the benefits of open research.
Pre-registration of experiments
Pre-registration services allow researchers to specify a plan for their research, prior to undertaking the study and publishing final results.Pre-registration of experiments can improve the quality of research, as details such as data collection methods and approaches to analysis can be considered early on. By recording an intitial plan, the possibility of succumbing to biases once the data is collected can be reduced.
Take a look at the website AsPredicted, which provides a template for creating a preregistration.
learn more
Data sharing
Publishing data and citing its location in published works allows others to replicate, validate and ensure accuracy of results. This is why funding institutions increasingly require that research data is shared. The Australian Code for the Responsible Conduct of Research encourages data openess, and QUT has adopted the F.A.I.R data principles to make research data Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Re-usable.
While open data can produce benefits including increased attention to the research, new collaborations and additional funding, some researchers remain hesitant as they wish to protect data for their own use. Poor data management practices can also limit the reusability of data.
Open-access repositories, including institutional and disciplinary repositories, provide free access to research outputs for all potential users. Employing the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH), their content can be harvested by search engines to further increase visibility. As well as allowing access to those outside of institutional log-ins, open-access repositories provide a workspace for in-progress research, and increase collaborative, interdisiplinary approaches.
Browse the Registry of research data repositories – some are discipline-specific and some are interdisciplinary. Try a keyword search and filter by content type and other criteria.
The open access conditions for individual journals can vary greatly. While most open access journals deliver articles under a Creative Commons licence, some publishers impose an embargo period which works against the “openness” of the research. Some publishers charge fees (article processing charges) to be paid by the author or their institution, but many open access journals are free to users as they are fully funded by a host university or scholarly society.
The license agreements of open access journals are laid bare for the researcher to consider by services such as Sherpa Romeo.
Exercise:
Use Sherpa Romeo to see how ‘open’ a journal really is. View publisher copyright policies for your favourite journals.
The DOAJ for instance, hosts a curated list of scientific and scholarly journals that meet two key criteria for inclusion. Firstly, they must make all of their content available for free, as soon as new content is available; and they must employ a quality process, such as peer review or editorial control to the selection of content. The mission of DOAJ is to “increase the visibility, accessibility, reputation, usage and impact of quality, peer-reviewed, open access scholarly research journals“.
Open-source software and sofware sharing is another successful component of open research. Copyright owners make their work available under a licence, allowing others the right to use, change, and distribute the software (with its source code) for any future purpose.Software sharing therefore provides the possiblity for new products to be developed collaboratively. “Source-available” software refers to a condition that a copyright owner can apply to make their source code available to all for examination, without allowing for modification or redistribution.
Exercise:
CiteAs is a tool that helps researchers to cite software and code, so that the right creator is attributed.
The pandemic has provoked a rapid advance in open research activity due to the worldwide need for a quick understanding of COVID-19. The following articles provide a picture of recent developments, including the use of open research infastructure during the pandemic, who has been accessing data and for what purposes, and what needs to take place next for ongoing traction to occur.
Consider: Will the open research movement see lasting benefit from the lessons learned during the pandemic? Are we better placed now to solve other global issues like climate change?
Attribution
Content in this chapter has been developed by QUT Library, including content derived from: