Open Research is the usual research process where sharing takes place much earlier in the process and outputs are discoverable from a very early stage.
Open Research is just the normal research process carried out with more transparency at every stage. As the Foster website explains " Open Science is about extending the principles of openness to the whole research cycle, fostering sharing and collaboration as early as possible thus entailing a systemic change to the way science and research is done".
The text in yellow indicates what needs to be done to make each stage in the process open. By doing this, research becomes more discoverable. There is no duplication of effort or data, data becomes reusable and citations increased as a version of a paper is made available at a much earlier stage in the publishing process via the institutional repository, i.e. Arrow@Tudublin. Open Research is more collaborative in nature and outputs are shared as early as possible are freely available to all and not hidden behind paywalls.
Useful resources
View additional ORSU Resources.
Open Research is not without its issues. The traditional scholarly communication model relies heavily on high-impact journals and academic publishers make huge profits because of this. This has led to a reliance on quantitative measures for research evaluation which are based on citations as a reflection of the quality of the research. But there can be many reasons why articles get cited, for example, gaming where a group of researchers cite each other or an article can be cited for being bad science and so on. It is a crude method of evaluation but it is simple. Open Science relies more on rapid dissemination of knowledge in the true spirit of scholarship and emphasis is laid more on impact and quality of the actual research.
TU Dublin has an official policy on Open Access to Publications and Data, and fully supports and endorses the European University of Technology Statement on Open Research / Ráiteas um Thaighde Oscailte.
DORA
DORA (Declaration of Research Assessment) states that the way research is evaluated has to change and move away from reliance on high impact journals to looking at the individual’s contribution to scholarship. View the declaration which produced a number of recommendations aimed at researchers, institutions, funders and publishers. The Declaration has been signed by a large number of individuals and organisations from over 150 countries.
Leiden
The Leiden Manifesto is a list of 10 principles to guide research evaluation published as a comment in Nature on the 22 April, 2015. It came out of the 19th International Conference on Science and Technology Indicators held on the 3 - 5 September in Leiden in the Netherlands. The Leiden Manifesto builds on the ideas presented in DORA and presents 10 principles with a description of each and emphasised that there should be a detailed and close evaluation rather than an excessive reliance on quantitative methods.
In July 2020 Elsevier, a major academic publisher endorsed the Leiden Principles. This is particularly important as Elsevier produced Scopus and its analysis tool Scival. They have pledged to improve research evaluation tools and indicators in line with the Leiden Principles.
Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA)
The Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA) is a coalition of research funding organisations, research performing organisations, national/regional assessment authorities and agencies, as well as associations of the above organisations, learned societies and other relevant organisations. It was launched in 2022 and the objective is to broaden the diversity of recognised research outputs and activities, thus maximising the quality and impact of research. It is looking for a fairer and more humane way to evaluate research that is more than counting the numbers. The Agreement on Reforming Research Assessment includes the principles, commitments and timeframe for reforms. It outlines a shared approach for signatories which means that they are committed to implement changes to research assessment, and to mutually support and learn from each other as they progress in their reform journey. As of December 2022, 390 organisations have signed up to the Agreement. TU Dublin, University of Galway, University College Dublin, University of Limerick and the Health Research Board were all initial signatories.
Integrity in research means research that is carried out in accordance with the highest standards of professionalism and academic rigour, and refers to the accuracy and integrity of the research record in terms of publications and data. This promotes trust in the methods used and findings arrived at. In practice it means the use of honest and verifiable methods in proposing, performing, and evaluating research. reporting research results with particular attention to adherence to rules, regulations, guidelines, and, following commonly accepted professional codes or norms.
The fundamental principles of research integrity are honesty, responsibility, fairness, and accountability. There exists what is know as the “replication crisis” where the results of many scientific studies are impossible to reproduce or replicate. There are also cases of deliberate fraud and fabrication in research (see Harvey, Lee: Research fraud: a long-term problem exacerbated by the clamour for research grants. Quality in Higher Education, 2020 https://doi.org/10.1080/13538322.2020.1820126) which does nothing for the reputation of research.
Making publications and data available openly makes it more possible to replicate, reproduce and verify findings. The essential principles of open research such as collaboration, transparency, accountability all help to encourage research integrity and to advance scholarship. As the Foster taxonomy illustrates, each stage of the research process can be open and transparent all of which contributes to academic rigour.
Increasingly academic publishers are looking for a link to the underlying data to a publication, funders are mandating that publications be made open access and in some cases data also. This can only be good for research as research that displays integrity, honesty and openness will be trusted by other researchers and society at large.
The ORSU can deliver custom training to your research group or research centre as required. Some of the training we have developed and delivered in the last year includes:
- Introduction to Open Research
- Open Access to Publications
- Data Management Plans (DMPs)
- Open Search - Beyond Google Scholar
- Active Research Data Management (RDM)
- Data Publishing & Metadata
- Licencing for Open Research
- How to Upload to Arrow
- Open Educational Resources: At a Glance
Training that is currently being developed:
- Gamification for Open Research
- Informed Participant Consent for Open Research
- GDPR in Open Research
- Developing your Narrative CV
Please complete the Training Request Form (you can use this form to request bespoke training sessions).