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ORP ORCAs
Celebrating the vital role that Open Research Coordinators and Administrators play in the ORP ProgrammeOur ORCAS
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Farewell and Thanks to our ORCAS
Some of our talented ORCAs, who have contributed greatly to UKRN, have now moved on to exciting new opportunities in their careers. Recognizing Our ORCAs: Celebrating their Impact
Spotlight an ORCA
Spotlight an ORCA is series of pieces that will describe and celebrate the vital role that Open Research Coordinators and Administrators (ORCAs) play in the Open Research Programme. Every partner institution has at least one ORCA and may also have other staff involved. ORCAs and these other staff are the backbone of the Programme delivering the outputs that all partners use, such as the train-the-trainer programme, the OR4 resources and community, the survey, the open research indicators and the living website. They also have a critical role within their institution, enabling those outputs to be turned into benefits locally in the shape of more informed trainers, reformed recruitment and promotion procedures, better insight into the uptake of open research, and learning from other institutions.
Jackie Thompson |Adam Partridge | Banaz Jalil | Alice Howarth | Karen Desborough | Ruth Davies | Joe Corneli | Steve Boneham
Jackie Thompson
Jackie Thompson is the ORCA at Oxford University.
One of Jackie’s several roles is the ORCA at Oxford. She also works with the Open Scholarship team (Bodleian Library) and Research Practice team (Research Services) at Oxford, as well as retaining a post as Senior Research Associate at the University of Bristol. In common with several others who are now ORCAs in the Programme, Jackie became interested in open research during her postdoc years. She saw an opportunity to make a significant impact on the sector, in her case through research on research, as well as a chance to join a strong activist community. The ORCA role fitted Jackie’s aspiration to explore research-adjacent roles. She now sees her role at Oxford as foot soldier, operational and practical, arranging and providing training and support, inputting into strategies, and championing open research at Oxford.
Oxford was a pioneer, with the Reproducible Research Oxford (RROx) grassroots community predating UKRN. That is an important community for Jackie’s ORCA role and related Oxford roles. She supports many of their activities, such as training via the Software Carpentries. More generally, she coordinates the training offer from the UKRN Open Research Programme at Oxford. She also delivers training directly, including developing and delivering a course on preregistration – which is something she sees as a key achievement.
However, given Oxford’s scale and complexity, this is only one set of initiatives that Jackie coordinates as ORCA and with the Open Scholarship and Research Practice teams. For example, one major activity is the Oxford-Berlin Autumn School for Open and Responsible Research, now in its seventh year. Last year Jackie co-organised this weeklong event with her colleague Monica Palmero Fernandez. It included lectures and workshops on, for example, meta-research, EDI, open access and preprints, and the responsible use of AI in research. This is the other achievement of which she is most proud.
Nationally in the Open Research Programme, Jackie has contributed to ongoing discussions on the evolution of the Programme survey, those discussions involving other teams such as the Brief Open Research Survey (BORS). She is very engaged in the regular ORCA meetings and particularly the recent in-person ORCA awayday in Manchester.
Being a Senior Research Associate at Bristol keeps Jackie in touch with the daily realities of being a researcher. Her main project at the moment is, in partnership with CWTS Leiden, leading a project to define a disciplinary mapping of what constitutes ‘responsible conduct of research’ – a much broader concept than open research. This is surfacing the different epistemic and methodological commitments across the research landscape, as well as the practical demands of different kinds of research. But Jackie is also involved in work at Bristol on incentivising the ‘registered reports’ publishing model.
When asked where open research culture would be in three to five years’ time, Jackie noted that, “the longer I work in research, the shorter these time periods seem!”. She sees the ideals of open research spreading among funders and publishers and, to some extent, institutions. Open research won’t fix all the problems of research, but the systemic approaches being taken that don’t rely solely on the actions of individual researchers, are an important factor in positive change. She sees that change as leading to a reduced need for roles such as the ORCA, as hopefully ‘open research’ just becomes business as usual.
Before that happens, though, training needs to get to hard-to-reach researchers, who might not prioritise it or see it as an afterthought or compliance requirement. Jackie sees working with teams that combine both professional and research staff as the best way to tackle this important challenge. She sees her future in this space – combining research and professional roles to improve research practice.
Outside work, as a mobile early career researcher Jackie has friends and family scattered across the world, and loves spending time with them as much as possible. She also loves gardening, has an allotment and brings produce in to colleagues according to the season, including an annual butternut squash harvest festival. Sadly, she has no secret strategies to counter the slugs and snails. Jackie also finds time to be part of a singing group – a wonderful community to be part of.
Adam Partridge
Adam Partridge is the ORCA a the University of Sheffield.
The University of Sheffield is fortunate in having Adam Partridge as its Open Research Coordinator and Administrator – ORCA – within the UKRN Open Research Programme. Adam joined Sheffield after managing the Brain Stimulation Lab at CUBRIC, Cardiff University where he was also the UKRN Local Network Lead. Before that, he did a PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging at the University of York, with specific interests in brain stimulation and auditory processing.
He first learned about open research during his MSc and he used some open research practices such as preregistration and preprinting during his PhD. Like many early career researchers, he could see issues with the academic system and open research was gaining some traction as a way of addressing these issues. This was initially mainly with enthusiasts; these ways of working were not recognised more widely. He saw the ORCA role as a way of speeding up this process. He was familiar with the UKRN from his local network lead role and also saw this as an opportunity to build relationships across the network.
Adam’s overall role at Sheffield is the Open Research Training Lead. This encompasses his work on the UKRN Open Research Programme and local open research activities. There is therefore a lot of synergy between his ORCA activities and local activities.
The collaborative and multidisciplinary nature of open research itself is reflected in his work with wider teams at Sheffield. He is based in ‘Research, Partnerships and Innovation’ – part of professional services which includes researcher development and ethics teams amongst others. However, he also works with library staff (such as Open Research Manager – Dr Jenni Adams) and reaches out to departments too. The Sheffield Open Research Working Group has members spanning different disciplines and is led by their UKRN Local Network Lead Dr Jim Uttley. Adam is also a member of the more formal Open Research Advisory Group, giving him the chance to engage with senior academic and professional staff across Sheffield. He works most closely with Sheffield’s Research Practice Lead – Professor Tom Stafford – who is also Sheffield’s Institutional Lead for the UKRN and is based in the Psychology Department.
Across the Open Research Programme nationally, Adam has primarily been involved with the Training Project. This part of the Programme is responsible for working with training partners and institutions to enable delivery of the training. He has particularly enjoyed connecting with the training partners, learning more about their initiatives, and also getting to know the other ORCAs.
His deep involvement in the Programme has given Adam clear insights into its likely impact. The most immediate effect of the training project is increasing open research skills and capacity across the sector. However, Adam feels that many of the benefits go beyond the measurable outputs, for example ORCAs are able to start or strengthen conversations around open research and connect different teams within their institution. Further, he sees the Programme itself helping to normalise cross-institution collaboration on training. Training is often considered a core part of an institution’s offering to their staff, with efficiencies via inter-institution collaboration rarely considered. As a result, policies around the use of openly licensed materials and sharing materials are often absent or unclear and, even when they are present, collaboration is not normalised. One concrete benefit from changing the culture around the use of openly licensed materials is the potential to improve staff workload – which Adam anticipates might be welcomed.
Outside, but very related to, the Open Research Programme, Adam has just finished an ELIXIR-UK data stewardship fellowship, which involved developing training materials around open data and research data management. He is a FAIRsharing Community Champion, where his involvement so far has included developing an infographic and working to make institutional research data policies more FAIR-enabling. He also recently became a Carpentries instructor through the Programme. He is thus developing an international network and profile.
Reflecting more generally on the future of open research, Adam sees it becoming a more normalised part of the research process in more disciplines. He is particularly interested to see what open research looks like in the arts and humanities, where the values underpinning open research such as collaboration, transparency and rigour are important, but the research methods are very different. He expects to see a less siloed and more multidisciplinary culture with metaresearch being valued more, as long as academia in general takes the right path going forward. The foundations of traditional academia, like control of knowledge and prestige are being challenged by open research and the internet. Longer term, he also sees a more pluralist, decentralised and community-owned future, where research communities decide what they value and they can independently fund, review and publish work that fits with those values. Such a change will need changes in funding, procurement, business models, recognition and reward, and infrastructure.
As an ORCA, Adam is most proud of his contributions to the training team last year, when Sheffield led it. The team moved from having a list of training providers and list of priority training topics to delivering a train-the-trainer programme. Currently, delivering training is hard for individuals to prioritise, given the lack of incentives. A next step would be for institutions to better recognise and support the trainers and the training they deliver during and after the Programme. The training community of practice should enable trainers to maintain momentum, learn from each other, and create a lasting impact, while these incentives are being implemented.
Personally, Adam would like to continue working in the area of open research. Whether that’s supporting institutions to implement open research, conducting metaresearch, or a combination of the two. Being an ORCA has helped with this as it enabled him to learn more about the research and training ecosystem. It’s also enabled him to gain experience with project management and develop links with UK institutions and international partners. Finally, it has also enabled him to develop stronger links with other teams within Sheffield and gain a better understanding of the many different perspectives on open research.
Banaz Jalil
Banaz Jalil is the ORCA at UCL
With a background in pharmacy and pharmaceutical science (Master, PhD) from University College London (UCL), Banaz spent a lot of time discovering useful research in the literature, only to find some issues in the reproducibility and reporting of research outcomes. Sensing issues as a postdoctoral research fellow, she noticed when UCL issued its institutional statement on ‘Transparency in Research’ in 2019 and immediately became involved. Initially, she worked part-time in the Research Policy team, part of the UCL Office of the Vice Provost Research, Innovation and Global Engagement (RIGE) to evaluate UCL’s training for ‘Transparency in Research’ and to raise awareness of open research more generally. Alongside this, in her research fellowship position at the UCL School of Pharmacy, Banaz develops guidance on responsible and reproducible research: more on this later. While the UCL transparency statement was successful in specifying some aspects of research that a wide range of people, from doctoral students to professors, felt deserved attention, it is a high-level statement of the kind that does require further action for implementation. Banaz is one of the key people at UCL driving change and action. Over the last 3-5 years, there has been a major improvement in awareness of open research, though this is not evenly spread across disciplines and career stages.
Banaz is currently a senior project officer in the UCL Research Culture team, part of RIGE, and the Open Research Programme Institutional Coordinator (ORCA), part of the UKRN Open Research Programme (ORP). She is also involved with the UCL Office for the Open Science and Scholarship team and is able to bring together these institutional strands of work with the UKRN ORP. The other part of her role is as a postdoctoral research fellow in the UCL School of Pharmacy, where she uses Delphi consensus methods to develop best practice guidelines and open-access tools on responsible research, study design, and reporting (also cooperating with EQUATOR Network guidelines) in the areas of medicinal plant and natural product research. The guidelines and the tool were awarded UCL’s Open Science ‘honourable mention’ award in 2023. These guidelines and tools are core principles for reproducible research and transparent reporting in the field, embedding open research practices.
Banaz plays a lead role in the Open and Responsible Research Recognition and Reward (OR4) project; one of the projects within the ORP. She joined this project in mid-2024 and has taken over as project manager following the departure of Anna Korzeniowska. The team is diverse, with a wide range of skill sets, and Banaz enjoys working as a core part of the team. Banaz looks forward to engaging with the OR4 international advisory group. The OR4 toolkit is one of the ORP outputs that will be immensely useful to UCL, building on the groundwork undertaken by the UCL Research Culture team and UCL more widely. The diversity of people, perspectives and networking via the ORP beyond UCL has been the most rewarding for Banaz. She enjoys collaborative working, which aligns with UKRN’s ethos. She is passionate about improving research quality and outcome, reducing research waste, transparency and sharing to speed up research and increase its impact. She is keen to see the evidence that UKRN and the ORP will make a difference to researchers and research practice by making the transition to open research easier than it would otherwise be. This approach is apparent in her interests outside work. Banaz enjoys travelling, which is often for work; she usually takes extra time to explore the places she visits and their cultures. Banaz’s most recent trip was to Krakow. Banaz plans to hopefully travel to Napoli next year for a scientific conference.
Alice Howarth
Alice Howarth is ORCA at the University of Liverpool
Alice is the ORCA at the University of Liverpool who is involved in a quite dizzying number of activities with the Open Research Programme, at Liverpool and beyond!
Liverpool is heavily engaged in the Open Research Programme, playing a leading role in most of the projects, mainly via Alice but also involving the APVC(R) where the University of Liverpool is reforming reward and recognition as a case study institution in the OR4 Project, and involving the institutional lead Bill Greenhalf and others in designing and running some innovative evaluation methods to attribute change to the Programme. Alice is also co-leading, for Liverpool, one of the Open Research Indicator pilot projects, with Reading on the downstream effects of sharing research data.
Her research background gives Alice plenty of relevant experience – she did two postdocs before deciding that the academic research system was sufficiently broken that her time would be better spent fixing it. Her particular frustrations included the non-publication of “negative” data and findings and the relatively closed nature of the ways research is often done. She wants to see a much more open research culture, in many different ways.
Part of the ORCA role is helping the Programme add value at Liverpool, given the particular institutional context there (everywhere has a particular institutional context!). Alice sees herself as an ambassador for the Programme within Liverpool, and is well-placed within the Libraries, Museums and Galleries team to play that role. Within Liverpool there is both an Open Research Leadership Group (senior, formal) and an Open Research Community (grassroots, activist), and Alice is a key driver of both of these, giving her a unique opportunity to promote coordination between them. She also works closely with the ‘Academy’; the professional unit delivering training and development for researchers. There appears to be a lot of senior-level support for improving the local research environment to promote more open and rigorous research, in particular from those at associate PVC level; support that Alice has both nurtured and now benefits from.
As part of her Liverpool role, Alice co-organises an Open Research Week, as a collaboration also with three other universities – last year it had 1300 people registered. Other groups of institutions are now setting up similar regional initiatives, for example in the East Midlands.
But Alice is also extremely active in the Open Research Programme nationally and, indeed, internationally. With Ruth Davies at King’s, she co-leads our work to meet our responsibilities to be inclusive and promote equality and diversity. The Programme made some commitments to Research England, but Alice and Ruth are working with the UKRN EDI Advisory Committee to push us beyond those, if we can. She draws from her experience and expertise as the chair of the Liverpool disabled staff network for this and is building EDI into the Programme Evaluation Design work based on the ‘theories of change’ workshops that each ORP project did last year, again co-organised with Ruth; few of the projects had really considered EDI at that point, and so there was clearly work to do. It is these workshops that Alice feels most proud of in her ORCA role.
Her work with the Evaluation Design project team goes further, though – this is in fact the area that she was hired to focus on. She hopes that this work will build on cross-Programme conversations to find reliable and inclusive ways to monitor the changes we intend to make. There is both national and international interest in this topic – as mentioned above Alice is co-leading work on indicators as well and is a member of three international working groups related to UNESCO, CERN/NASA and the French ministry, all of which are developing ways to monitor open research.
As if that were not enough, Alice is also a leading member of the project team on ‘Sharing and Integrating’, developing the living website. She is enthusiastic about the prospect that people like her will be able to share and learn from each other’s practice, so she is leading interviews and focus groups to work out how this will best be done, with Steven, Evangeline, Louise and others.
Alice is optimistic that research culture and open research are now embedded in both institutional and national agendas, and that we are moving from awareness to action. In common with many others in the ORP, she is excited about being part of the movement at this stage, being part of a really significant change in the sector. But Alice will likely not move back into an academic career – that is behind her now. The ORCA role as cemented that decision for her, and also given her a lot of different experiences and expertise over quite a short period of time, that will be very useful. For example, in the next step in her career, Alice would like to have a role in public engagement in research, and her work on the ORP Evaluation Design team will mean that she can demonstrate relevant experience for that.
Almost unbelievably, outside of work Alice is also an active public speaker in the UK and more widely, runs a podcast, edits a magazine and co-organises a conference.
Karen Desborough
Karen Desborough is ORCA at Cardiff University
Karen works at Cardiff University, with one day a week devoted to her role as an ORCA in the Open Research Programme. Cardiff is an unfunded partner in the Programme, which limits the level of engagement it has – although you would hardly know that from the work put into the OR4 Project by both Karen and the Cardiff institutional lead Karin Wahl-Jorgensen. More on that later.
Karen’s immediate background is research, though before that she worked in marketing in the private sector. She did a PhD and a number of research associate roles at Bristol before joining Cardiff, specialising in global feminist activism. She moved out of purely research roles when she moved to Cardiff, becoming the professional services lead for the institutional implementation of DORA as the Responsible Research Officer. Seeing clear synergies between this role and open research practices, and potentially with issues of equity and inclusion from her time as a researcher, she was keen to pick up the ORCA role when that became available.
At present, Karen’s ORCA role is almost all devoted to building and supporting the OR4 community of practice. This is now up to 49 institutions, which is an extraordinary achievement given that the initial target was 15. The community is working together on their journey to reform research assessment – how they recruit and promote staff – in particular to recognise open research practice, but in the wider context of DORA, CoARA and national drivers such as the REF. Karen leads the OR4 team’s work on this, for example providing both the tools and the social environment that enable this group of institutions to feel safe in sharing their journey with each other and with the OR4 team. It is not always easy to share challenging experiences, and the OR4 team need honest feedback on the support materials provided, and so establishing trust has been vital. The ambition is to expand the community further, both in the UK and perhaps more widely. Understandably, creating this community (with others in the OR4 team) is Karen’s proudest achievement as an ORCA.
While mainly benefiting the wider sector, Karen’s support for the OR4 community has given her insights that have helped her engage with Cardiff’s senior management on potentially joining CoARA in due course.
Karen is aware that there may be more Cardiff-facing work coming down the track from the Open Research Programme, in particular local coordination of the train-the-trainer sessions. This will be a challenge, as her other four days per week are already taken up with her role as Research Culture Officer within the Research Culture team, headed up by Karin. Within this role, she has most recently been drawing on her research background for qualitative analysis of Cardiff’s research culture survey. This has provided evidence that informs a strategic commitment by Cardiff and an action plan that was launched in June during a week-long set of dedicated activities to promote a positive research culture.
This commitment by Cardiff includes, but is much broader than, open research. Importantly, though, it does include a focus on fair attribution of contributions and authorship, e.g., using the CRediT taxonomy. Karen has been running training and feedback sessions about this across the institution, and adapting Cardiff’s approach accordingly. She will also take a leading role in monitoring the effects of this intervention, based on data from Cardiff’s internal peer review system rather than their repository.
Karen’s hope for the future of open research is that researchers have the resources and training they need to make it a genuinely inclusive set of practices. Quite a lot of work is needed for this, especially considering questions of equity, both across the research system and also globally. In a perfect world, Karen would see this work supported by Cardiff; practically speaking this would mean support for professional and academic skills development and a higher institutional profile for research done in this way. Karen hopes to continue to be part of this work at Cardiff, as part of the wider reform of research culture.
Outside work, Karen is a keen runner and enjoys visiting Latin America, and she loves both hearing music (at gigs) and playing music (just started learning the drums).
Ruth Davies
Ruth Davies is the ORCA at King’s College London
Ruth moved from the Civil Service to join the Open Research Programme in 2022, from the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC) to King’s College London. Her time at DLUHC gave her experience of policy roles, especially on housing, and corporate roles, and in EDI work, through co-chairing the Departmental Gender Equality Network. Increasingly, though, Ruth became interested in the evidence landscape around policy and practice, reflecting on how policy and policy-making could benefit from the open research agenda. Relatedly, she saw that both the methods and the insights from social sciences could be central to these questions and began her route back into academia (she had previously worked at Anglia Ruskin’s London campus) by doing a part time Masters in Sociology. The ORCA role was a perfect fit, also being part time, and fitting her experience and interests, as we will see.
At King’s, Ruth’s ORCA role is as a project coordinator within the Research Integrity Office, a team within the department for Research Governance, Ethics & Integrity. Ruth acts as the point of contact and ambassador for the Programme, communicating its activities and value to fellow professionals and researchers across the institution. She works with the UKRN Institutional Lead Tim Newton and Serena Mitchell (Research Integrity Manager), to dock the Programme in with activities at King’s. She promotes the Programme training via local networks and teams, and she’ll be working closely with King’s colleagues who undertake Train-the-Trainer courses as part of the ORP to ensure they’re supported in bringing their learning and expertise back to King’s. This approach is clearly working – King’s has more trainers attending the Programme training so far than any other partner institution.
However, most of Ruth’s time is spent on Programme-wide roles. She is active in the training team – being the lead contact for the VIRT2UE ethics training to be delivered in June – but her main roles are co-leading the Programme’s work to exceed its EDI commitments and in the Evaluation Design project.
EDI is foundational to open research and Ruth co-leads the Programme’s work here, with Alice Howarth (Liverpool’s ORCA). Any positive change in research culture, such as a move toward greater openness and transparency, has equity, inclusion, and diversity at its heart. While this will take time, Ruth’s work means that the Programme is putting the right things in place to enable that change. As the Programme supports training, reform of reward and recognition, sharing practice and better insights, it will do these things in ways that strive to be equitable and inclusive.
The Programme’s approach to evaluation promises to be one of its most innovative contributions; Ruth co-led work – again with Alice – to engage with people across the Programme and explore how they were thinking about evaluation. Using the UK Treasury Magenta Book and theory-of-change approaches, Ruth has engaged with researchers and academics to help us develop an evaluation protocol that should both enable the Programme to monitor change and be an example of inferentially sound evaluation for others to build on when attempting complex change programmes.
When asked about what she is most proud of as an ORCA, Ruth chooses none of the above, but instead she highlights the way that ORCAs have worked together quickly, to create a collaborative place that is welcoming to new members, where they can work well together at pace and with trust, often amid some uncertainty.
Where next? Well, Ruth wants to know more about the benefits and barriers of open research, and of collaborative working, to build her expertise on the research landscape, evaluation, etc. This, with the theoretical and methodological content of her Masters, will stand her in good stead for her next career move.
In the meantime, in her spare time she enjoys sports – joining netball and other clubs on moving to Bristol – and reading.
Joe Corneli
Joe Corneli is the ORCA at Oxford Brookes University
What is Joe holding in the picture? You’ll have to read to the end to find out…
This spotlight feature is about Joe Corneli, the ORCA at Oxford Brookes. In fact, Joe is only three days a week on the Open Research Programme; his other time is split between leading an AI and data analysis network and wide-ranging work for the Research and Innovation Directorate at Brookes. For example, when I spoke with him he was planning a presentation that distils recent quantitative findings for a workshop on diversity in university spinout companies. This emphasis at Brookes on community and civic engagement runs as a thread through Joe’s work too. As part of his Brookes-facing ORCA role he is working with their institutional lead, Eric White, to create a “library lab”, which will be a hybrid place for open research, including events, training, videos, equipment and support for open and participatory research. In preparation for this, Joe is producing 20 taster videos on open research, that orient researchers and give them the right starting points at Brookes. Joe is also the UKRN Local Network Lead at Brookes and so this work will help nurture the local network, particularly later this year when he might have more time to devote to it.
Joe finds himself at Brookes spending some time explaining open research to worried researchers; they might have concerns that open ‘science’ is not relevant to them, or that they are doing it ‘wrong’. As an evolution in research practices, these concerns about open research are understandable but it is Joe’s role to have the right reassurance and guidance. At a more strategic level, he has also brought this experience to bear in co-authoring the Brookes open research action plan.
In the national ORP, Joe has ranged quite widely but is mainly based in the training team where he has played a leading role in developing our approach to evaluation. This has been a bit of a journey, and Joe has had to be creative and collaborative in crystallising out a concrete plan from early ORP ideas and suggestions. He’s worked with the ‘evaluation design’ and the ‘sharing and integrating’ project teams, as well as now with Steve Boneham on the training community of practice – we expect formative evaluation to happen within the community. Realising an approach to evaluation that is practical, meets the needs of the community, and that should lead to publishable research outputs, could be the ORCA achievement of which Joe is most proud. And a co-created and co-owned training community is also at the heart of his principal ambition within the ORP – the key to sustaining its benefits beyond project funding.
The ORP sits at several interesting intersections, one of which is between being an organisational development project and being a research project. In places, it is both, and Joe has been a leading voice in the ORP helping us explore where those places are, why, and how operational and research aspects can come together. We are working across methodological, professional and conceptual boundaries.
Joe’s career has brought together academic research with community action, and that is what drew him to the ORCA role. He has long experience in online communities, from PlanetMath in the 2000s and 2010s (he ended up on the Board) to Peeragogy more recently. This led to a PhD and postdoctoral work, for example related to Tim Gowers’ knowledge coproduction in maths. As a more recent example, Joe developed a workshop methodology for rapid open collaborative research, leading to both interest via an international conference and local work at Brookes, noted above.
But, in the spirit of Brookes, Joe takes this out of the university too, for example he has begun to collaborate with the local county council and the other nearby university in a ‘local policy lab’ to build a community on locally-relevant research, data, analysis and skills. This, thinks Joe, is a sign of things to come for open research, which is perfectly placed to respond to the call for ‘nothing about us without us’.
Joe’s many linked roles and his work to set up large communities and collaborations within and beyond the ORP set him up well for his future career. At a recent event he spoke with Diane Hird, the UKRN Community Officer working primarily with local network leads; she highlighted how her experience nurturing international research collaborations has been very relevant to her UKRN role. It is very likely that Joe will find similar career pathways.
Somehow Joe also finds time also to bring his talents to community activities completely outside work, such as being part of a citizen science project with Surfers Against Sewage, monitoring water quality in local lakes and rivers (sufficiently reassuring that he continues to swim in the Thames). He also both makes and plays musical instruments, such as the Stroh Viola pictured here. He plays this, or the Bass, in the Starlings Global Folk Orchestra.
Steve Boneham
Steve Boneham is the ORCA at Newcastle University
Starting his research career working on HIV vaccines, Steve is all too aware that major developments, unfortunately, can take time. Having had two postdoc positions, he became increasingly disillusioned with academic research culture and so joined a Jisc service focused on using the internet for teaching and learning; then something of a novelty. He took the job as OA support at the library in Newcastle to move back toward engaging with researchers, and this has given him some opportunities to talk with them about why and how they do research. However, as we know, OA typically comes late in the research process, and both Steve and the researchers wanted to collaborate earlier and support practices beyond publication and about things other than compliance with policies. Fortunately, this coincided with an institutional priority at Newcastle, in part arising from a wider set of projects and events around research culture. As a result, the tone of the conversations has changed, becoming much more about how research and others can work together to make a positive difference to how research is done. The conversations are still, though, with those researchers who see the need for change; Steve and the team are not really engaging yet with those who do not. This background gives some clues as to why Steve welcomed the chance to become an ORCA.
So, at Newcastle, Steve is the Open Research Office with responsibility for Training. He leads the operational ORP-related work at Newcastle. Since open research is one of the priority projects under the ‘research culture’ banner at Newcastle, you could see his ORCA role there as co-delivering (with the research community) an institutional Open Research Programme (ORP), covering training, recognition and sustainability. For example, the Newcastle trainers coming out of the ORP train-the-trainer sessions form a local community that he supports and works with on training at Newcastle. He is also setting up an open research champions network (drawing on the new UKRN primer) and is confident that external initiatives like the ORP and, at a different scale, REF, mean that there will be a good response. Perhaps some of that response will come from those who have won awards in the open research awards scheme that Steve is managing for the third year, and which has proved very successful at surfacing previously unknown open research practices. Steve was the UKRN local network lead at Newcastle but is handing that role over to not one but two new people.
As with all ORCAs, Steve also works on the central ORP projects; in his case specifically on the Training Team. In early 2023 he initiated our thinking about what has now become the trainers’ community of practice, because he could see that a diverse group of trainers would need specific support to sustain and embed their training when back at their institutions. Working more recently with Joe, the ORCA from Brookes, the community has been launched with a high profile event featuring an international speaker. It is too early to judge success, but almost all those who have done the ORP train-the-trainer sessions have joined the community list, including those at Newcastle. The challenge will be to build high levels of engagement and peer support so that the community really adds value. Another innovation that Steve has pioneered in the ORP is the use of badges for trainers. He made the case for how they would benefit both the trainers and the ORP and has then designed and led their implementation. Over 70% of trainers have taken up their badge, which is a very high rate compared with other schemes.
The wider ORP is a good home for Steve’s work. For example, he is able to work with a Wellcome-funded Newcastle project on reward and recognition, and with the ORP OR4 project, to build in recognition for open research trainers and champions. He is also using the COM-B model at Newcastle, which is one basis for how the ORP will evaluate training effectiveness – in the context of other ways to enhance skills.
The experience of co-creating training at Newcastle, in the context of a local project on ‘releasing time’, is prompting further innovation, which Steve is keen to explore with other ORP partners. For example, the recent preregistration train-the-trainer course might best be converted into local training by splitting it between an overview session and then something like a writing retreat where specific types of preregistrations can be supported. This is the kind of innovation that the ORCA community can share and take forward. Steve feels that, thanks to the hard work by Ruth, Alice, Noémie and others, the ORCA group is a strongly collaborative community of passionate and expert people who want to share, and that this feeling does pervade the wider ORP. It’s a rewarding initiative to be part of, even if it can be quite demanding.
One Steve’s challenges is going beyond the researchers who welcome open research, and engaging with those that don’t. The ORP helps with this, but we do need to understand that it is only one step on quite a long journey, and we must be realistic about the scale and pace of change. There are many research cultures within an institution; there will inevitably be ways in which open research looks and feels different in particular research fields, and there will be resistance.
Apart from the community of practice, the other thing that Steve is most proud of as an ORCA is hitting his target for getting Newcastle trainers signed up, at the first time of asking. This built on months of hard groundwork; raising awareness, building relationships and putting support in place. The Newcastle training community, with researchers and professional staff working together, is now empowered to deliver high quality training. Steve hopes that the ORP can emulate this at a national level, nurturing communities that can and will take over the work once the funding is finished.
Looking to his own future, the ORCA role has helped get Steve better positioned at Newcastle and more generally so that, if or when opportunities arise, he can take advantage. However, he does see the difficult times anticipated for the whole sector being reflected in his own prospects. He will always have his baking though. Steve bakes – some cakes, but mainly bread, and not in an automatic bread maker but properly, kneading the dough and letting it rise. It is the closest he currently gets to experimental science, with its own issues of reproducibility, and its own community of practice (ie friends and colleagues). He also loves walking in the glorious local countryside and upcycling, for example, furniture – as you can see!