8 Committing to open research
In Weeks 1 to 7, you learned about different aspects of transparency, integrity, and accessibility in open research. You discovered why these principles are important, and which open practices you can enact to ensure your own research is more in line with them.
Now is the time to find out how you can commit to open research and make these practices a part of your research habits and norms!
8.1 Behaviour change
Research is behaviour – we do research. Engaging in open research means engaging in a variety of specific behaviours. Some of these behaviours may have even been discouraged in some of the research training you have received, depending on when you did your research training. For this reason, it can be useful to think of engaging in open research as just another behaviour that you can think about changing, like healthy eating or exercising!
The COM-B model proposes that capability, opportunity, and motivation are necessary for behaviour change. The diagram below summarises what the COM-B model says about the conditions that are most likely to lead to effective behaviour change.
In a survey of researchers in psychology departments across the UK and Ireland, researchers found that capability, opportunity, and motivation all affected someone’s likelihood to engage in open research practices (e.g. preregistration, and open data and materials). However, the strongest predictor was automatic motivation – that is, the researcher agrees with these statements:
- I have developed the habit of engaging in open research practices as an everyday part of my research process.
- When I think about my research, I automatically think about the open research elements as well.
Do you agree with these statements?
Activity 1
Allow about 10 minutes.
Think about what you’ve learned so far this course. Write down your ideas about how you could implement open research as part of your everyday research habits.
8.2 Open access repositories
One of the things that can make open research difficult to ease into is that there are many different resources, with contradictory or confusing advice on the best ways to engage in different open research practices. It can be onerous to find and navigate the multiple platforms, software packages and systems.
Luckily, the Open Science Framework (OSF) does a lot of this work for us. The OSF is a free, open platform that supports research and enables collaboration. It also provides guides on different aspects of open research. The OSF is not the only way to engage with different open research practices, but since it has functionality that covers several open research practices at once, it can be a good place to start. Some of the ways that you can use the OSF are outlined below.
Projects
OSF projects allows you to plan, collaborate, and organise your research studies. First, you create an OSF account. Then create a project: think of it as a folder for everything to do with one study. You can add collaborators, upload files, and review any additional capabilities that you may or may not want to use (e.g. integration with different software like Google docs or GitHub). Projects can be kept private or made public, so this can be a great way to share your data and materials publicly when they’re ready. Some people find it helpful to add materials as they progress with a study, and others just upload everything when finished.
Preregistration
You can also use the OSF to preregister your studies. Preregistration plans can be of various levels of specificity (from answering a few quick questions to creating extensive documents including analysis plans), and these different levels can all be preregistered on the OSF with a variety of templates for research from different disciplines or methodologies. After you have drafted your preregistration, once you ‘register’ them officially, they get locked and timestamped. You can link your preregistration to your OSF project, which also enables you to include any additional documents related to your project.
Preprints
You can also use the OSF to upload a preprint of your work. As you learned in Week 6, a preprint is an open-access version of your work. A preprint server is the platform that hosts your preprint: it is free to access, both for you, the uploader, and your readers. Preprint servers are usually by research discipline, but can also be organised in other ways, e.g. AfricaArXiv is a preprint server for research done by African researchers across all disciplines. Several preprint servers are hosted through the OSF (including, but not limited to, PsyArXiv, SocArXiv, and SportRxiv. If none of the listed servers represent your work well then you can also upload your preprint under the general ‘OSF preprints’. You can also link the preprint to your OSF project, so readers can easily access other materials related to your project.
In general, the OSF is a great ‘one-stop shop’ for enacting many of the open research practices that you have learned about in this course. By learning how to navigate and use this one platform, you can integrate many open research practices into your research habits. But it is not the only trusted repository – as you learned in Week 2, there are various institutional and discipline repositories. The Open University also has its own research repository for collaborating, planning and organising research projects, called ORDO.
Activity 2
Allow about 20 minutes.
This activity will familiarise you with two open access repositories: ORDO and OSF.
Activity 2.1
Browse through ORDO and see if you can find a dataset for a project called ‘Building trust in digital policing: A scoping review of community policing apps’ published by an author of this course. How many categories (fields) are included in this project?
Show / Hide Discussion
You should have been able to locate the dataset. It was part of a research project which included seven fields of study, and the dataset has been downloaded several hundred times. It is stored on ORDO under a permanent, citable web link.
Activity 2.2
Now, we turn our attention to the OSF. If you belong to a discipline for which the OSF would not be a natural choice, you can substitute a different repository that is targeted to your discipline.
Make an OSF account (if you don’t already have one), and create a project for one of your research studies. You can keep it private so don’t worry about making it perfect! Go through some of the OSF guides, then upload some documents and organise your project into different components and subfolders.
Show / Hide Discussion
You have now set up your own OSF account and created a project. You can choose to make the elements of your project public when you’re ready, or if you are using this as a private practice run, that’s okay too. It’s useful to keep OSF guides nearby while you familiarise yourself with the OSF platform. Keep practicing and if you like, explore other features e.g. adding collaborators (contributors) to projects!
8.3 Finding your community
Having access to resources that help you engage in open research practices is a great first step, but navigating your open research journey will be so much easier if you surround yourself with like-minded people who can help each other. Being a part of a community means you have people you can turn to if you have questions: you can learn from each other’s mistakes and successes, and maybe even forge collaborations!
Nowhere Lab
Nowhere Lab is an online community that anyone can join that holds weekly Zoom meetings and has an active Slack community. It is hosted by the lead author of this course. Although Nowhere Lab is not explicitly focused on open research, open research is a topic that is heavily covered, whether that be through discussion sessions, journal clubs (where members discuss a paper together), or training on different open research practices.
FORRT
The Framework for Open and Reproducible Research Training (FORRT) is a community of educators who wish to integrate open science principles into their teaching. They strive for open and reproducible research training, advancing research transparency, reproducibility, rigour, and ethics through educational reform. FORRT provides educational infrastructure and resources designed to support the teaching and mentoring of open and reproducible science. You can explore their resources directly to learn more about open research, and join their Slack community.
8.3.1 Open research across disciplines
Interdisciplinary communities can be great for learning about how open research affects different fields differently. They can also be helpful for finding out how open research is done in your specific field. For this, check out Open Research Across Disciplines – a tool for exploring open research resources and case studies across fields. You can also use this resource to find people working on open research in your field and even reach out to them!
Big team science
Big team science has been mentioned a few times in this course, and it’s worth noting that as well as the benefits for credibility and accessibility of research, big team science can also be a great way of finding and building community. Joining a big team science project in your field can be a great way to learn about open research and get started in some open research practices before applying them to your own research.
Activity 3.1
Allow about 10 minutes.
Use the Open Research Across Disciplines tool to find resources for open research in your field. Think about how you could apply these tools or ideas to your own research habits.
Go back to your notes for Activity 1 of this week, where you were asked to write down ideas of how you could implement open research as part of your everyday research habits. Now, think about how you can share your data and materials from a research project you have finished. If you have not finished a project yet, you can use an imaginary one.
Activity 3.2
Allow about 10 minutes
Click on different parts of the image to go to the relevant section within this course.
Use the open research decision tree to look up some possibilities. Not all of these actions may be appropriate or achievable in your particular project – that’s fine! Once you have lined up some possible courses of action, you can choose the ones that are most practicable.
Record in your notes what you find.
8.4 Quiz
Are you ready to test your knowledge and show yourself how much you have learned? Take the quiz now!
- When can you publish a preprint? (Select one)
Feedback: Despite the name, a preprint can be published whether or not you have published or intend to publish in a journal (as long as the publisher allows this). Reread Week 6 to remind yourself of different publishing models and check different publishers’ rules on preprints in Sherpa Romeo, https://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/.
- Only before publishing in a journal Incorrect
- Either before, after, or instead of publication in a journal Correct
- Only instead of publishing in a journal Incorrect
- Only after publishing in a journal Incorrect
- Do I have to do everything mentioned in the course for my research to be open? (Select one)
Feedback: Open research means different things in different disciplines, and there are different issues and requirements across these different approaches. If you apply any of the principles covered in this course to your work, you have committed to open research.
- As long as it has integrity, it does not matter if it is not transparent or accessible Incorrect
- As long as it is accessible and transparent, it does not matter if it does not have integrity Incorrect
- Yes, otherwise it is not open Incorrect
- No, just do as much as you can or is appropriate for your project Correct
- Can I use open research practices if my field, discipline or methodology is not explicitly mentioned in this course? (Select one)
Feedback: Open research is suitable for any field, discipline or method of study, but not every action or principle will apply to every project. You will find that some practices are appropriate for you, while others are not. However, knowing about open research issues and the practices of researchers working on other projects will help you to evaluate the integrity of their work.
- No, open research is only appropriate for certain fields Incorrect
- No, open research is only appropriate for certain methodologies Incorrect
- No, open research is only appropriate for certain disciplines Incorrect
- Yes you can Correct
- What are the principles of open research? (Select one)
Feedback: The principles of open research have been defined in this course as transparency (being open and honest about all aspects of the research process), integrity (the degree of trustworthiness or believability of research findings), and accessibility (ensuring that all who are interested are able to consume, evaluate, and otherwise interact with research products and processes).
- To use quantitative research methods Incorrect
- To use qualitative research methods Incorrect
- Transparency, integrity, and accessibility Correct
- To publicise all your raw data to the widest possible audience Incorrect
- Can I apply open research to my finished projects? (Select one)
Feedback: It can feel as though open research is only possible for new projects, but this is not the case. While some actions can only be taken at the planning stage of a project and some only as you are actively doing research, there are still things you can do to make your finished research projects open. To find out what actions are suitable for your finished project, use our Open Research Decision Tree.
- No, you can only apply open research practices to projects you’re actively carrying out, and have already started collecting data for Incorrect
- Yes, all open research practices are suitable for finished projects Incorrect
- No, if you have finished your project, you’re too late Incorrect
- No, you can only apply open research practices to projects at the planning stage Incorrect
- Yes you can, but not all practices will be suitable or possible at all stages of a project Correct
8.5 Summary
Congratulations – you’ve reached the end of the final week of the course! This week, you explored how to incorporate open research into your research routine by using the support and resources that are out there, and discovering your own open research community.
Over this whole open research course, you’ve learned about why transparency, credibility, and accessibility are so important in open research, and how to apply these values to your own research. You have explored some of the actions that you can take in order to ensure your research complies with these. You have developed skills in key processes of open research, such as replication, preregistration, transparent writing, robustness analysis and open publishing.
We hope you have enjoyed the course, and that you will continue enjoy taking what you have learned here into the wider world of open research.
