University of Surrey Open Research and Transparency Showcase

In 2017, the ECPR (European Consortium for Political Research), the leading scholarly society for political scientists in Europe, launched Political Research Exchange (PRX), their new flagship Open Access in collaboration with Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.

Both committed to Open Access Research, Alexandra Segerberg, from the University of Uppsala, and I are its chief editors. Our aim is to address the benefits of Open Access and the challenges that lie ahead for the field of political science.

However, transparency alone (whether as Open Access or Open Research) does not secure equality of access, opportunity and treatment for all authors, reviewers, and readers. Even with the best intentions, institutional settings, publishing systems, financial constraints, processes and practices retain the potential to reinforce, repeat, and perpetuate hidden biases and barriers. In the presentation, I will explore benefits and challenges of Open Access Research in the publication sector.

Watch a video of this case study being presented at the Surrey Open Research and Transparency Showcase 2021.

Follow on Twitter:

• @SPGuerra
• @ECPR
• @Rout_PoliticsIR.

This case study describes a journey of embracing the principles of open research with a particular focus on the creation, storage and dissemination of research, as well as its preservation for further impact.

In 2018 I was awarded a Cancer Research UK grant to use video observation methods to understand the GP-patient conversation and how this could impact on earlier cancer diagnosis. As part of the grant submission I wrote a short data management plan about how we would manage the data. Once the grant was awarded it became clear that our data management plan was inadequate; it didn’t provide enough detail to address issues around patient consent, data storage/ management or provide a means to ensure the data had longevity beyond the lifetime of the grant. This presentation will describe the steps we took to maximise the potential of the data and the lessons we learnt along the way.

Watch a video of this case study being presented at the Surrey Open Research and Transparency Showcase 2021.

Follow on Twitter:

• @Katriina01.

The principle of study pre-registration was introduced to an undergraduate programme to update the teaching and learning of research methods.  Students learn to rank the strength of evidence in published papers based on study design.  Recognition of study pre-registration in the assessment of research quality supplemented this teaching, as a marker of trustworthy research.  This concept was linked to the curriculum design, where students are provided with a research question, and asked to develop a hypothesis and a study plan to investigate it further.  Importantly this occurred before having the opportunity to undertake the research in a subsequent module.  Students found the assignment challenging and would have benefited from more support.  Barriers to learning the importance of study pre-registration included an absence of veterinary examples in the public domain.  This was overcome by highlighting requirements for pre-registration of regulatory studies in the pharmaceutical industry.

Watch a video of this case study being presented at the Surrey Open Research and Transparency Showcase 2021.

Since its golden era in the 19th century, the research and dissemination methods of Roman legal scholarship have hardly changed. My research project offers a constructive challenge to this traditional field on both counts: (1) it uses computational methods for an empirical analysis of Roman legal texts, and (2) it embraces a fully open research strategy. The talk will explain how open research methods helped to reach new audiences, fine-tune research results, improve their reuse potential, and generate opportunities for future collaborative projects. It will also present a publication strategy with cascading open research formats such as version control, public repositories, data- and research papers. The case-study will demonstrate how open research can revitalise fields dominated by traditional research and dissemination methods in the humanities, social sciences and beyond.

Watch a video of this case study being presented at the Surrey Open Research and Transparency Showcase 2021.

Neuroimaging research relies upon several open source tools offering methodologies for a wide range of measurements of brain structure and function. However, they lack a well-established framework to integrate them into flexible, reproducible, and scalable pipelines increasingly demanded by current studies. Automatic Analysis is a unique integration framework for these packages. It allows researchers to design, execute, and share pipelines while reducing the barrier for those with limited computational background. Developed in a heterogeneous neuroimaging research environment, its capabilities have been shown in challenging conditions involving large-cohort, complex, multimodal datasets; and its usability has been shown for many applications and types of users. Automatic Analysis addresses key issues in neuroimaging providing a reproducible, publishable, and executable high-level description for complex neuroimaging workflows. Moreover, it stands out by offering tighter integration of tools, improved usability, and supporting reliability and transparency by providing detailed diagnostics and reporting facilities for quality control.

Watch a video of this case study being presented at the Surrey Open Research and Transparency Showcase 2021.

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• @TiborAuer.

Systematic reviews (SRs) aim to present an unbiased, comprehensive picture of all the available evidence which can be used to drive practice in healthcare and other disciplines. The cornerstone of performing a PRISMA-compliant SR is a meticulous search strategy to ensure accurate article retrieval. A methodological limitation that researchers face is the lack of open practical guidance in methodology on how to design an appropriate search algorithm. In our PROSPERO-registered SR which is related to HOX genes and colorectal cancer, we decided to implement open research solutions by requesting the organisation to make our methodology, internationally accessible after the declaration of study completion. Our algorithm format provides a certified search code for PubMed, EMBASE, Web of Science and Cochrane, which is easily replicable and modifiable by researchers worldwide. We expect this solution to be widely useful for researchers conducting SRs not only in cancer research but also in other disciplines.

Watch a video of this case study being presented at the Surrey Open Research and Transparency Showcase 2021.

Follow on Twitter:

• @EiriniMartinou.

Open data and research have been increasingly encouraged in tourism and hospitality research. The research team at the School of Hospitality and Tourism Management demonstrates open research by using open data and making data and/or software codes openly accessible internally and externally. Using online tools and services, the research team was able to increase the transparency of the research processes and methodologies applied in tourism and hospitality research. This not only makes our research more accessible, transparent or reproducible but demonstrates rigour and the pathway to originality. Through this, it has opened up new collaborations both with academics and industry, ensuring both research rigour and impact more effectively and accessibly; embedding open research principles in teaching and learning has allowed our students to become more aware of the importance of transparency and accessibility of knowledge.

Watch a video of this case study being presented at the Surrey Open Research and Transparency Showcase 2021.

Follow on Twitter:

• @yooriikim.

Anyone who has had to work with materials from other laboratories will probably have been frustrated by missing information and other problems. Usage of computational information should be less affected by this, but need investment in training and usability of the tools used in Data Science. The programs used for data science are commonly only available in Linux/Unix, and use the command line interface, which is alien for those used to Windows/Mac computers. This is a significant hurdle for most scientists.

This Open Science Case Study remedies this by providing an online course which uses short (Zoom) video tutorials, with the user being able to do the course at their own speed. They are provided with a fully equipped virtual Linux computer which works on MS-Windows or Apple laptops, with relatively modest hardware requirements.

The take home message: making bioinformatics and genomics less scary for novice users, and accessible for scientists without requiring expensive computing equipment. Open(ing up) Science.

Watch a video of this case study being presented at the Surrey Open Research and Transparency Showcase 2021.

Follow on Twitter:

• @dutchscientist.

During my undergraduate placement with the CoGDeV Lab at Surrey I took the lead on the STORM project, which explored undergraduate students’ understanding of open research. What was initially intended to be an internal questionnaire for Surrey students quickly grew into a nationally distributed survey and was expanded to investigate whether awareness, knowledge, perceptions and experience of open research practices differ by academic year group and across Universities (member of UKRN vs. non-member of UKRN). The project also provided me the opportunity to engage first-hand in open research practices myself and I was able to pre-register the project and make the materials openly available on the OSF. The STORM project received over 1,000 responses and will be invaluable in the next steps for the team in establishing benchmarks of student views of open research and will serve as a cornerstone for developing educational materials for undergraduates in this domain.

Watch a video of this case study being presented at the Surrey Open Research and Transparency Showcase 2021.

The Companion Animal Open Data Hackathon PetHack brought innovators around the world to work collaboratively to find real and innovative solutions to monitoring, diagnosing and controlling Covid-19’s impact on the animal health community. A joint and interdisciplinary initiative of Surrey CoDE at Surrey Business School and the Veterinary Health Innovation Engine, this 100% virtual hackathon used open collaborative methods to widen participation in research and experimentation. Key results included 5 innovative submissions delivered; more than 50 participants, 11 mentors, 3 judges and 8 partnering institutions working alongside researchers and industry experts to prototype the solutions; and compiling a first round of open but disperse datasets in Animal Health available on open tools for any researcher to access. Overall, the success of the event confirmed the validity of open practices to come up with real, scalable solutions for important world problems and for igniting an ecosystem of innovators around Vet data and Open Research.

Watch a video of this case study being presented at the Surrey Open Research and Transparency Showcase 2021.

Follow on Twitter:

• @CarlaBonina.