Recently Diane Hird, the Local Network Lead (LNL) Community Project Coordinator, met with LNL Dr Stefana Juncu to learn more about open research activities at the University of Portsmouth. This blog is the result of that conversation.
Stefana Juncu is a senior lecturer in Forensic Psychology at the University of Portsmouth. Her role involves teaching, student placement coordination, tutorials, dissertation supervision and much, much more.
Many researchers discover reproducibility through ReproducibiliTea journal clubs, however Stef learned of it through an online course during her Masters. The ideas stuck and in the first year of her PhD she decided to do a registered report. One of her supervisors was really supportive and it was the beginning of her open research journey. She subsequently discovered ReproducibiliTea and, along with other PhD students, went on to found the Portsmouth club.
Stef is also a key member of the UoPen group, a network focused on open research, founded by Matt Miller-Dicks and Beatriz Lopez using internal Research Culture funding. This small interdisciplinary team also includes the university Research Lead Jo Corbett, Research Data Officer Gary Pike and the Associate Dean for Research and Innovation in the Faculty of Science and Health Joy Watts. Their first task was to identify existing open research initiatives and they decided to create a central toolkit structured around the research process. This is currently under development. Portsmouth have recently agreed to continue funding UoPen work via their Research Culture fund.
As part of UoPen work Stef has delivered Faculty-specific talks to convince PhD students of the relevance of open research to their research area. The UoPen team are currently working with at least one ‘Faculty Rep’ from all the Faculties across UoP so they can better engage with researchers across all disciplines. Stef plans to work closely with the Reps with the aim of developing an open research plan that is informed by everyone rather than being heavily Psychology-driven. This includes expanding the activities of ReproducibiliTea. Next year UoPen are planning Faculty roadshows based around specific research techniques and types of engagement with open research. They are trying to connect people across the Faculties because it is important to have conversations together to understand the different needs of researchers within and between research areas.
An important feature of University of Portsmouth is the Graduate School which all graduate students attend independent of funder. This offers a great way to engage students with open research, and Stef and Matt have already delivered workshops this past year. During February 2025, Stef will deliver more workshops and plans to ask members of different Faculties to explain how they have engaged with open research so students are hearing information relevant to their discipline. Recent restructuring within UoP has brought together aspects of Research Culture and the Graduate School. This was great news for UoPen as they were already engaging with both of these groups separately. There is also a university-wide Researchers Network (Stef being one of the co-convenors for that as well) that now links to the Graduate School under a wider Researcher Development umbrella.
The Portsmouth local network started with ReproducibiliTea, led by PhD students with around 20 people. The club has been running every year since its inception in November 2019, moving online during COVID and being organized by different PhD cohorts, which Stef is very grateful for. In the future, she hopes that the teaching done as part of the Graduate School will complement the journal club, enabling it to become more a space for staff and students to discuss papers with less focus on educating the annual intakes of students.
Many of the Faculty Reps are ECRs who teach research methods, they contact Stef requesting teaching materials and she often directs them to FORRT. She is currently putting together generic materials for undergraduate teaching and fellow staff value the fact that these are created specifically for Portsmouth. In her own teaching Stef includes open research methods within her critical thinking lectures. As MSc dissertation module coordinator she now hopes to include workshops, for example on preregistration. Many students enjoy learning about reproducibility, the replication crisis in psychology involves work they studied at A level and makes them question the foundation of their knowledge.
Preregistration has been discussed widely within her School and is now encouraged. There are different ethics forms for staff and student research projects, the student one is a School level form rather than a Faculty one. The UoPen team were able to slightly adapt the student form to more resemble a preregistration so that all students were more familiar with the preregistration process, completing an ethics form whether or not they went on to preregister their work.
Stef cited Surrey and Edinburgh websites as good examples of collated open research resources. She also finds the UKRN Open Research Across Disciplines webpage very useful. People realise that open research is relevant to their discipline, graduate students found it very useful. Stef really enjoys talking with other people and learning what they are doing within their university. She enjoyed the LNL Retreat in Newcastle earlier this year, ‘getting to know everyone and having that link is so important’. Being part of a community with common interests helps researchers both within their institution and also if they move institution. LNLs are part of a wider LNL and UKRN community, there are ReproducibiliTea journal clubs worldwide.
Asked to think about the next 5 years, Stef believes that education is key, for example teaching open research in undergraduate courses and ideally in schools. Wider areas of research culture such as EDI and decolonizing the curriculum can also be helped and improved by people engaging with open research. She would also like to see increased engagement and understanding from non-academics partners – funders, government, health professionals – because their needs affect the types of research being prioritised. Again this comes back to education. Finally she would love to remove the separation between research and open research, ‘open research is not the cherry on top of the cake, it is the cake!’
Stef feels lucky that she is involved now, there have been huge changes and increased engagement in the last five years, let’s see what the next 5 years bring.
Huge thanks to Stef for her time.