Open Research at Cambridge conference

Open research helps to support key features of research and innovation such as transparency, openness, verification and reproducibility and it also helps to foster collaboration within and across disciplines. Institutional support for suitable infrastructures that underpin research plays a key role in enabling open research practices within the research community. In this session we will provide an overview of the open research programme currently being developed, with a particular focus on infrastructure. This will be followed by a series of short talks showcasing a range of systems and services available within the University, and more widely, to support open research areas such as early publication of research findings following FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Re-usable) principles, open peer review, amongst others.

Talks:

Open Research Infrastructure – supporting open research practices at Cambridge (Dr Agustina Martínez and Peter Sutton-Long)

Octopus - the new primary research record for science (Dr Alexandra Freeman)

From Digital Library to Digital Humanities: the creation, curation and reuse of collections-based data (Huw Jones and Andy Corrigan)

The benefits for your work, your field, and your institution that come from publishing research Open Access (OA), whilst numerous and proven, are often unknown or misunderstood.

In this session we will look at:

• our article and ebook usage data to show why publishing OA results in more citations, more downloads, and broader reach for your research vs non-OA regardless of its field
• popular myths about OA, and then debunk them
• a case study featuring Cambridge OA authors and the effect on their research
• the different routes to publish OA you have as Cambridge University researchers.

Have you wondered how research data is used after it has been shared publicly (as open data)? What are some of the impacts of sharing data and of its subsequent reuse by others? Does the researcher or research group who shared their data openly benefit in any way from its reuse? What are the essential properties of a reusable dataset? In this session on ‘Open data sharing and reuse’ we will explore these questions amongst others via case studies presented by a panel of four University of Cambridge researchers from various fields – neuroscience, political sociology, medical imaging and law. All four have shared their research datasets as open data and had their data reused by others. Presentation of the case studies will be followed by questions from attendees and discussion.

Introduction to Public Engagement at Cambridge: Why do you want to engage, who do you want to engage with and why should they care? It’s only once researchers have considered these questions do we talk about what they would like to do. Join us to find out how we support public engagement across the University from activity that inspires to coproduced research with global impact.

Open access long-form scholarship is an increasingly important area of scholarly communication. New business models have been devised to support the publication of open access monographs, while funders continue to implement OA policies for the books that they fund (such as the recently announced UKRI policy). Yet one possible roadblock to a sustainable open access future is the book processing charge. As open access books require significant up-front investment for publishers, BPCs have rapidly become one of the dominant models for funding open access book publication. In the humanities, where funding is limited, BPCs have the potential to make open access a preserve of only those that can afford to pay, potentially excluding junior scholars, unfunded researchers and colleagues from universities outside the Global North. Alternative models are therefore needed for any wholesale move to open access for books.

In light of the recent UKRI policy requirement for open access books, this session will discuss the challenges around open access book publishing and the alternatives to the book processing charge that publishers have developed, highlighting experiments in funding no-fee open access book publishing. It will feature leading experts and practitioners in open access book publishing and a discussion with members of the Cambridge community.

Narrative CVs provide space for candidates to elaborate on their contributions to the research community that go beyond traditional outputs such as publications. The hope is that, by encouraging candidates to provide evidence for, and selection panels to consider, qualities that promote good research cultures, such as open research practice, we will start to select candidates who demonstrate this in addition to their traditional research contributions. What does this mean for researchers at Cambridge? This session will introduce some of the current formats of narrative CVs being used or considered by funding bodies in the UK and Europe and the implications for researchers, and recruiters and selectors of researchers who might use them. Since the format is still very much under development in the sector, the session will provide an opportunity for participants to discuss and feed back on what they see as the benefits and challenges of narrative CVs. The workshop leaders will feed the outcome of this session into relevant discussions happening nationally around the development and adoption of narrative CVs.

Open Access has by now become established in all academic fields, including the arts and humanities, but what about other aspects of Open Research? There is a perception that the language and concepts around OR are driven by the way scholarly communication is practised in the sciences. Based on the 8 Pillars of Open Research and the work of the University of Cambridge’s working group on Open Research in the Humanities, this roundtable will discuss some of the ways in which the principles of OR can be applied to humanities research and how OR can be incentivised and supported, but also what some of the problems might be. Audience participation in the discussion will be encouraged

This workshop session will bring together researchers from across the University to explore approaches to supporting more reproducible research. The workshop will take an interdisciplinary approach, seeking to tackle the obstacles to reproducibility in quantitative and qualitive research and explore how different disciplines can learn from each other's experiences. The Workshop will be offered by members of the University's Reproducibility Working Group and outcomes from discussions will help shape proposals for future University approaches to supporting reproducible research.