SPARKing Change: Being more open?

Open research, open science, open access, whatever the terminology, there is a push within the UK HE sector to be more ‘open’. The open research agenda aims to:

• Shift research culture toward greater openness, transparency, and reproducibility across the research lifecycle.
• Ensure the process, content, and outcomes of research are openly accessible by default to evaluate, critique, reuse, and extend.
• Amplify collaboration and our collective intelligence to find solutions and develop responsibly, and;
• Accelerate scientific advancement for innovation, health, and prosperity.

Driven by FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable) principles, the open research agenda is impacting on the activities of academics, from data management, Open Access publishing, protocols and preregistration, to CRediT and more.

The principles and benefits, and concerns, limitations and barriers have been, and are being, considered and researched in a growing literature. So far, the evidence indicates that the penetration into social sciences compared to the physical or ‘hard’ sciences is slow.

In my endeavours to understand the culture around open research and the use of open research practices, I have been bamboozled by the amount of information. There is a vast array of resources and platforms that boast the ability to enable you to ‘be open’. The fragmented, diverse, and multitude of potential options can leave you at a loss – which is the best repository for data? Where should I put my protocols and pre-prints, wait, can I pre-print? What are the rules, from funders, my organisation, my networks, my colleagues, and the expectations of different communities of actors? What is most useful to, or effective for, me?

I undertook ‘Open Research Train-the-Trainer’ sessions (led by the UKRN and supported by GW4) in 2023 and have developed and run sessions to help researchers think about how they can engage with open research. These sessions introduced the concept and highlighted the sectoral influences driving open research (such as funder and publisher policies, and the REF). They provided an overview of how open research practices interact with various stages of the research lifecycle.

Our activity in SPARK to promote engagement with open research has been integrated into Cardiff University’s IGNITE research culture leadership development programme. I led 3 sessions on open research to approximately 75 research staff. Most importantly IGNITE provided an opportunity to engage with current and future research leaders and provide them with space to critically reflect on their actions and ability (or willingness) to engage with open research. An important aspect within these sessions was the interdisciplinary nature of the participants, enabling reflection on disciplinary differences in the adoption of open research practices.

It was also an opportunity to do this in a creative and innovative way. To this end, I opted to use the GHOST Collective’s ‘Open Science Against Humanity’ game. Having provided a background to open research and vibrant discussions around the benefits and barriers to engaging with open practices, the card-based game provided some light and informal relief, minimising barriers to sharing, and prompting participants to reflect on their own experiences. The game was well received, and once groups were in the swing of it, conversations about their experiences were drawn out and there was quite a lot of laughter along the way!

I’ve also delivered training to colleagues across SPARK and I’ve made these materials available on Figshare (an open repository), they might be useful to social scientists stepping into the realm of open science and open research. Please go and take a look and think about how open you are, or how open you could be!

At the same time as the drive for openness ploughs forward, the emphasis on interdisciplinary solutions to societal issues through applied research in the social sciences brings further pressure to engage in open practices, to understand the language and practices of other disciplines, to increase our reach and grow our networks and to have impact. This is no mean feat, as academics we often have very specialised knowledge, specialised language, specialised practices, behaviours and cultures that have developed over years, decades, or even centuries. We can never know everything, it is about using what we know to advance knowledge and society, helping others along the way, providing new perspectives and understandings and enabling change.

Within SPARK, our team aims to provide support to those within the building to be creative, collaborative and impactful, develop greater connections and create a positive open research culture. Sharing my understanding and experiences of engaging with the open research agenda have enabled me to widen my networks and begin to think in different ways. I hope the resources and links provide you with some food for thought, and if you have any questions, want help to organise events, or just to have a chat, please feel free to get in touch with me – my door (not that I physically have one) is always open!

By Katy Huxley: SPARK Research Fellow

huxleykl@cardiff.ac.uk