Sharing and Integrating

UKRN Open Research Programme

Lead

Steven Vidovic, Southampton University

Background and scope

The Programme aim is to accelerate the uptake of high quality open research practices. The Center for Open Science theory of change highlights five types of action that can promote change. This project is focused on making open research normative as local practice, in particular by providing tools and other support so that institutions that employ researchers can see and learn from each other, and are thereby enabled and encouraged both to share practice and to integrate others’ practice locally where appropriate.

Aim

This project will improve how institutions share and integrate practice in support of open research, making good institutional practice the norm. ‘Practice’ here includes procedures, training, guidance, support, tools and workflows, communications, and policies.

Outputs

  • Tools to support communities.  As a first step, we have set up maintained web pages on the UKRN website for each participating institution, outlining their current practices to support open research, especially with respect to training, reward and recognition. We are now exploring options to enable the community to share a wider range of material, including training resources and, perhaps less publicly, evaluations of practice and benchmarking.

Goals

Intervention outputs and outcomes

  1. By Sep 24 there is a UKRN open research website that is used by at least 18 institutions to share resources and practices, leading to measurably better and more consistent support for open research across institutions in the Programme by Aug 26.

Evaluation objective and output

  1. By Aug 26, report published providing evidence on the extent to which the project aim was met.

Activities

Activity Description and contribution to [outputs and outcomes]
1. Building a community of institutional change agents Working with Programme staff to identify how to influence relevant decisions at their institutions, and supporting a community to exert that influence by providing activities, tools and resources [A].
2. Living website platform to support the community Building from a set of static pages to specify and deliver online tools that support the community [A].
3. Content provision and use Providing guidance, support and tools to enable and encourage the community to both share and use content about open research policies, procedures, etc [A].
4. Evaluation Assessing the extent to which the Programme and the community has been able to influence relevant institutional decisions, drawing from the content that has been shared on the platform [B].
5. Background research Academic investigations into relevant topics such as institutional decision-making related to research culture, the provision of sustainable support for open data, and the enablers and inhibitors of research integrity.

Schedule and relations between activities

Dependencies with other projects in the Programme

The ‘Management and sustainability’ project provides leadership, adequate resources, communications and other relevant support to the project.

The ‘Training’ project should produce training materials to be shared.

The ‘Reward and recognition” project should produce guidance materials and reflections from case study institutions to be shared.

The ‘Reward and recognition”, “Training” and “Integration and sharing” projects are all supporting communities of practice, and coordination will be needed.

Communications and engagement

The UKRN open research website will be co-created with partner institutions, and in coordination with UKRN’s wider communications activities.

Training

Enabling UK institutions to improve the skills in open research practices

i

Evaluation and Design

Developing effective ways to assess changes among researchers and institutions

l

Management and Sustainability

Enables the other projects to deliver their goals

Reward Recognition (OR4)

To support the institutional implementation of responsible researcher assessment policies and procedures