The 8th World Conference on Research Integrity (WCRI) was held online and in person at the Megaron Athens International Conference Centre from 2-5 June 2024. The aims of the WCRI’s co-chairs to ‘cater for all disciplinary fields, all professional ranks, and all career stages’ were clear from the range of themes arising in Plenary, Symposium, Oral Presentations and Posters brought to the event.
As King’s College London’s Project Coordinator (or ORCA) for the UKRN’s Open Research Programme (ORP), I took a poster outlining how we at King’s were implementing the Train-the-Trainer work in our local context. The Training Project within the ORP delivers Train-the-Trainer courses focussed on different aspects of open research practices and is fundamental to the programme’s aim to accelerate the uptake of high-quality open research practices. So, it’s successful delivery and embedding in the local institutional context is essential, not just to the achievement of the programme, but to the longevity and sustainability of implementing open research practices.
It was wonderful to be able to share this work with those at the conference and at the same time be able to speak with people connected to research integrity from across institutions, initiatives and projects. Especially reassuring were the number of projects using the Train-the-Trainer model of sustainable knowledge-sharing and upskilling especially in areas of open research and integrity. Whilst attending the WCRI, I saw lots of friendly faces from across the open science/open research sphere (including bumping into colleagues also working on the ORP!) and whilst the content of the conference was various, key themes preoccupied a number of talks, posters and discussions: open research, reproducibility and their relationship with integrity.
To mention only some of the incredible talks given about open research and reproducibility were Daniele Fanelli’s outlining of the ‘cautionary tales from metascience’; Joeri Tijdink’s discussions of the future of reproducibility; Tim Errington’s exploration of open science and the work of the Center for Open Science; Katilyn Hair’s overview of the iRISE project around interventions to improve reproducibility; Rosemarie de la Cruz Bernabe and colleagues discussing the ROSiE Project; and Olivier Le Gall discussing how technology might support open science.
Whilst Daniele Fanelli challenged notions of seeking reproducibility without nuance across disciplines and global contexts, Joeri Tijdink similarly acknowledged the need for diversity in understandings of reproducibility and considered the enablers required to drive forward better evidence and better research. In considering how we might learn from studies already conducted, Katilyn Hair also shared an overview of the iRISE Systemic Online Living Evidence Summary (SOLES), a body of work that will gather up-to-date evidence on reproducibility interventions and make it accessible via a public-facing dashboard. These talks and works around reproducibility brought together central concerns of research integrity in continuously driving for excellence throughout the research lifecycle. This similar concern was clear in the talks of Tim Errington, Rosemarie de la Cruz Bernabe and Olivier Le Gall in considering the role for open science in the research landscape; what best practice could look like; and what tools and frameworks were available to encourage and support the uptake of open science practices.
The 8th WCRI created a space to demonstrate programmes and projects addressing open research, reproducibility and their connection with research integrity, whilst at the same time allowing their definitions, aims and focuses to be challenged with the goal of clarifying them for future work. I left the WCRI with more notes than I know what to do with, but with a very clear sense of the widespread engagement in the open research field across the world and the hope that our work at King’s and within the Open Research Programme in the UK helps shape that field.