On 12 October, UK Research and Innovation convened several hundred Future Leaders Fellows in Birmingham for their annual conference.
These research fellowships aim to develop the next wave of world-class research and innovation leaders in academia and business, so the UK Reproducibility Network were delighted to host events for Fellows to discuss open and transparent research.
In two special interest sessions, co-hosted by UKRN and the UKRI open research team, future research leaders discussed the benefits and challenges of topics such as sharing open and FAIR data, research software code and open access publishing.
Participants noted that transparency in research data is important, but not easy. They agreed that data should be open where possible, with documentation and related code. Community norms will accelerate this, as will journal and funder policies moving beyond ‘the data behind the publication’.
A full report of the discussions can be found here : Future Leadership Fellows discuss open reasearch
UKRI and UKRN would like to thank the Future Leaders Fellows for their very insightful comments during these discussions and will use these reflections to inform our activities. Balancing trust, transparency and efficiency will continue to be important we move toward open research.