EVENT CANCELLED: Developing open research indicators - the UKRN Open Research Indicators Project

Recent years have seen UK research institutions commit to transforming their research practice in the direction of openness - evident in the issuing of institutional statements on open research and the commitment to change-oriented initiatives such as DORA and COARA. Yet how can institutions determine the extent to which researchers are actually employing such open practices as pre-registering studies, including a Data Availability Statement in publications, applying the CRediT taxonomy, sharing data and code and adhering to the FAIR principles?

This session explores a recent UKRN project which ran several pilot studies - each addressing a specific aspect of open research practice - in which researchers and information professionals from a number of UK universities collaborated with commercial and nonprofit organisations in the data and scholarly communications field to explore the possibility of measuring usage of these practices. The session will explore findings and insights from the project, as well as the implications of these for a broader consideration of what it means to ‘measure’ aspects of open research and what challenges such efforts must negotiate.

We’ll hear from the project leader, Neil Jacobs, Head of the UKRN’s Open Research Programme, as well as colleagues from UK institutions involved in the different pilot projects that comprised it: Mark Kelson (University of Exeter), who co-led the pilot project on pre-registration, and Laurian Williamson (University of Leicester), co-lead of the pilot on Data Availability Statements. Jenni Adams, who will chair the session, was also co-lead of the pilot project on FAIR data.