Open Research Across Disciplines

Examples of open research practices

Examples of open research practices

Open Methods Open workflow. For example, “ESCAPE (European Science Cluster of Astronomy and Particle physics ESFRI research infrastructures) brings together the astronomy, astroparticle and particle physics communities. With this, ESCAPE puts together … projects with aligned challenges of data-driven research, with demonstrated capabilities in addressing various stages of data workflow and concerned with fundamental research through complementary approaches.” ( more info)

Open Data The Galaxy and Mass Assembly (GAMA) is a “project to exploit the latest generation of ground-based and space-borne survey facilities to study cosmology and galaxy formation and evolution… Using public data, its own campaigns and data sharing with independent survey imaging survey teams, “GAMA is creating an extraordinary multi-wavelength photometric and spectroscopic dataset with outstanding values to both the large-scale structure and galaxy evolution communities.” Details of data releases are provided on the GAMA website ( GAMA | Galaxy And Mass Assembly).

Examples of open research practices

Open Data Using and contributing to open data. Examples are reported in Table 1 of Feng et al. (2019), such as: “Species distribution records were collected from the Ocean Biogeographic Information System (OBIS; http://iobis.org, accessed February 2016), from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF; http://gbif.org, accessed January 2016), the Reef Life Survey (RLS; http://reeflifesurvey.com, accessed February 2016) and for a few species via personal communications (Bosch et al., 2018).” (From Feng et al (2019). A checklist for maximizing reproducibility of ecological niche models. Nat Ecol Evol 3, 1382–1395)

Open Data Working alongside ‘Open Microscopy’, Glencoe Software have developed and adopted Open Microscopy Environment – Next-Generation File Formats (OME-NGFF). This is a new “Cloud-friendly data format for multi-D bioimaging data using… It has been designed from its inception to work with scalable, cloud-based data resources and for public or shared data repositories used for AI training and data publication. There are examples of using OME-NGFF for whole slide imaging (as in digital pathology), high content screening and 3D imaging of large tissue samples.”. (OME-NGFF in action;  Glencoe Software, Inc.)

Examples of open research practices

Examples of open research practices

Examples of open research practices

Open Methods The “Unseating Big Pharma” case study involves collaboration from 15 countries with the aim to end the legacy of big pharma. Scientists are working together in an effort to show how an open-science model can end dependency on manufacturers and benefit vaccine equity. ( Unseating big pharma: the radical plan for vaccine equity)

Open Data “Carsten Brink works with sensitive personal data in the field of radiotherapy for cancer patients. Having FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) data is essential to the researchers in his field, because they need interoperable data from a large number of patients to predict outcomes. The researchers in his field used to gather data from many different institutes and pool them in one physical location to run models. But, because they need to preserve the patients’ confidentiality, physically moving the data is a legally complicated task. Instead, they now work with distributed learning, which allows them to analyse data at other institutes without having to physically move them.” ( more info)

Examples of open research practices

Open Methods Hoch, O’Grady and Adolph (2019) studied locomotion exploration in infants and found their movement to be instigated by the journey of exploration instead of a particular destination. Their data were obtained from Datavyu, an open-source video coding and data visualization software which incorporates machine learning algorithms that can be used to annotate videos. It also generates paths taken by individuals as well as identifying people in videos which allows behaviour coding inputs to be conducted in real time. Datavyu has the aim of making behavioural data accessible to increase transparency in research and to instigate the use of videos as raw data. By using openly shared videos for data and documentation, the preserved data create an opportunity to ask new research questions and accelerate progress in the field.

Open Methods The Many Babies project aims to use an open approach to research into early development. The project works collaboratively with labs around the world to make all key project decisions (e.g., the research question, data collection, and the analysis). Their first project explored infants’ preferences for infant-directed speech, compared to adult-directed speech ( MB1). The study involved 69 laboratories, from 16 countries, with a total of 2,329 infants studied, with each lab using one of three methods to measure the infants’ discrimination: the head-turn preference, central fixation, or eye-tracking. Through collaboration, this project was able to replicate a well-known finding from developmental research, in infants around the world. The materials used in this study and the data collected are all openly accessible on GitHub and the Open Science Framework. The collaborative projects undertaken by the Many Babies Project allow standardized replication of developmental research around the world whilst being as open and transparent as possible.

Open Methods and Open Data PLAY (Play & Learning Across a Year) is a project that aims to explore infants and their mother’s natural behaviours in their homes, across 50 universities in the United States. All materials, home visit protocols and the video and questionnaire data collected are all openly available on their website.

Open Data Anne Urai focuses on the neural basis of decision-making across mammalian species, the interaction between learning and perception, and the neural basis of cognitive aging. The International Brain Laboratory (IBL) is a collaboration of ~20 laboratories worldwide. Its researchers are dedicated to standardizing mouse decision-making behavior, coordinating measurements of neural activity across the brain, and using theoretical approaches to formalize the neural computations that support decision-making. In contrast to traditional neuroscientific practice, in which individual laboratories each probe different behaviors and record from a few select brain areas, IBL aims to deliver a standardized, high-density approach to behavioral and neural assays. This approach relies on a highly distributed, collaborative network of ~50 researchers – postdocs, graduate students, and scientific staff – who coordinate the intellectual, administrative, and sociological aspects of the project. IBL has a data portal that provides tools and solutions they adopted and developed at IBL which are open-sourced and accessible on GitHub.

Examples of open research practices

Examples of open research practices

Examples of open research practices

Examples of open research practices

Examples of open research practices

Examples of open research practices

Examples of open research practices

Examples of open research practices

Examples of open research practices

Examples of open research practices

Examples of open research practices

Open Data The following are examples of things that could be listed as open data: lists, tables or matrices containing organised, numerical, categorical, and ordinal information (e.g. the population of French medieval cities, a list of participants in the Society of Independent Artists exhibition in 1917, the GDP of European countries before and after Brexit, etc.). ( source)

Open Data Objects can also be research data. These include historical artefacts, digital (incl. digitised) documents, images, sound and video recordings (e.g. archaeological finds, medieval manuscripts, poetry texts, social media posts, paintings, recording of a theatre performance). ( source)

Open Methods Make the workflow open of how you arrived at your open data from your source. Share or at least indicate, to the greatest extent that you can, the contextual components and contributors to your understanding of the material and realization of your conclusions etc. ( source)

Open Methods and Open Outputs Establish your sharing rights while you are at the archive, or otherwise accessing sources. Have the documents I need been digitised? If so, how can I obtain digital copies? If not, may I photograph documents myself or order photographs? May I share any photographs I take away? Under what conditions? Under what license(s) (such as the Creative Commons CC-BY)? ( source)

Examples of open research practices

Examples of open research practices

Examples of open research practices

Examples of open research practices

Open Methods Language and Cognition field manuals and stimulus materials from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics provide an example of open resources and historical data for the fields of elicitation of semantics and collection of verbal behaviour. Due to the open nature of the tasks, they have been refined over many uses, which makes them a “joint product of many scholars working in over 50 languages and cultures.” The use of these materials can be coupled with open data from earlier uses, for comparison.

Open Data The Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) requires the production of a technical plan for any project it funds in which digital technologies play a significant part. Asa case study of this, Francesca Benatti worked on a project creating a searchable database, curated mostly from existing resources. She was required to produce a technical plan for the project, outlining the methodology, any technical support needed, the planned outputs, and a plan for the preservation, sustainability and future use of the project. ( DCC: DMPs in Arts and Humanities)

Examples of open research practices

Open Outputs The National Gallery of Art (NGA) is a key example of a gallery that is gradually opening its resources for the public to use freely. This is in the format of an online repository named ‘NGA Images’ with the following terms: “NGA Images is a repository of digital images of the collections of the National Gallery of Art. On this website you can search, browse, share, and download images. A standards-based reproduction guide and a help section provide advice for both novices and experts. More than 45,000 open access digital images up to 4000 pixels each are available free of charge for download and use. NGA Images is designed to facilitate learning, enrichment, enjoyment, and exploration.” As well as providing staff and external users with simplified access to research material, the move to open access has resulted in an increased awareness of the gallery’s collections, thus highlighting the advantages of open research. ( NGA Images)

Open Data The Concordat on Open Research Data defines research data as “evidence that underpins the answer to the research question” which “can be used to validate findings” (UKRI, 2016). In 2021, the Practice Research Advisory Group (PRAG) recommended that practice-based research datasets could include items such as notebooks, work in progress sound recordings, score drafts, storyboards, and interview transcripts (Bulley & Sahin, 2021). Leeds Arts University supports its researchers to make their research data as open as possible and as closed as necessary (Leeds Arts University, 2024). An example of one such researcher is Garry Barker, who has deposited sketchbooks relating to his practice-based arts research outputs as open research data on Zenodo under CC BY (Barker, 2024a; Barker, 2024b; Barker, 2024c). These sketchbook datasets are open online archives of Barker’s preliminary work, allowing users free access to underpinning information instrumental to his methodologies and thinking.

Examples of open research practices

Examples of open research practices

Examples of open research practices

Examples of open research practices

Examples of open research practices

General The Open Science Grid (OSG) is a large-scale computational infrastructure based in the United States and partly funded by the Department of Energy. Having been applied to highly reputable experiments such as the Large Hadron Collider, the OSG holds an invaluable role in supporting a variety of scientific applications by providing service and support to resource providers and research institutions. This is achieved by allowing contributors to grant access to their computing, storage and software resources which promotes usage of shared data and resources. With aims to expand further globally, the OSG plays a key role in ensuring a collaborative environment for scientists and researchers working on computing issues and solutions development as well as guiding new, less experienced users in the computing community. ( Open Science Grid)

General Good computing workflow practices. Summarised in Box 1 of Wilson et al. (2017). For example: “Software Place a brief explanatory comment at the start of every program. Decompose programs into functions. Be ruthless about eliminating duplication. Always search for well-maintained software libraries that do what you need. Test libraries before relying on them. Give functions and variables meaningful names. Make dependencies and requirements explicit. Do not comment and uncomment sections of code to control a program’s behaviour. Provide a simple example or test data set. Submit code to a reputable DOI-issuing repository.”

Open Data and Open Education Tim Coughlan from The Open University provides his case study of postgraduate computer science in using open data as a material for describing the process of producing assignments, and learner responses to them. He views open data as a powerful material for designing learning activities because of its qualities of ease of access and authenticity. As assignments, students used e-book text files which required them to build an e-reader application. They were then given a set of requirements that progressed from the basic creation of the application, towards challenging them to make use of the data that is available that suits them in complex ways. Feedback from the assignments shows that students responded well to the assignments and reported a high degree of satisfaction. ( Open Data as Open Educational Resources)

Open Outputs and Open Data CHI and SOUPS introduced full open access starting in 2026, with the options for authors to publish preprints. SOUPS introduced the Research Transparency Guidelines in 2026, suggesting authors to publish data as FAIR as possible.

Open Methods Tang et al. (2025) found that 65% of papers published in SOUPS from 2004-2024 are affected by statistical validity issues. They provide recommendations for test selection, reporting, and interpretation.

Open Methods Martius et al. (2025) found that researchers across Human Computer Interaction have difficulties adhering to Data Management Plans (DMPs), which are required to handle user data. They give concrete recommendations for researchers to follow when doing research with sensitive information.

Examples of open research practices

Examples of open research practices

Examples of open research practices

Open Data: “The Qualitative Data Repository (QDR) is a dedicated archive for storing and sharing digital data (and accompanying documentation) generated or collected through qualitative and multi-method research in the social sciences.”

Open Data: Interview transcript data, meeting transcript data. For example, “The Language Technology Group [from the University of Copenhagen] work with transcript data from the Danish Parliament. They publish their data, the Danish Parliament Corpus (2009-2017), in a FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) way in CLARIN-DK. Having FAIR data is essential to their field, because without freely accessible data they could not perform their research”. ( source)

Examples of open research practices