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Research Support Advent Calendar 2025
By Naomi, on 1 December 2025
It’s time. For the third year in a row, we have a wonderful Advent Calendar of Research Support for you to enjoy!
We will be sharing a link each day on our Bluesky account, as well as our Linkedin account, but don’t worry if you’re not on Bluesky or Linkedin – the interactive calendar is embedded below for you to access at your own pace, or you can access it directly on your browser. We will also update this blog post throughout the month with an accessible version of the content.
We hope you find something here that will interest, inform and inspire you during this month of advent.
Cover image from UCL Press website.
1 December: Unwrap timeless ideas this festive season with Bentham’s open access Essays on Logic, Ethics and Universal Grammar, which publishes today. These thought-provoking essays explore reasoning, morality, and language- perfect for cosy winter reflections and sparking deep conversations by the fire!
Image by Mary Hinkley on UCL imagestore.
2 December: Nothing says Season’s Greetings like writing and sharing your data management plan!
Image AI-generated using prompts from Christine Daoutis.
3 December: Father Christmas has been collecting data again this year…But is his list protected by copyright? Take our online copyright Christmas quiz.
Cover image from UCL Press.
4 December: End the year with a powerful read.
Publishing today, The Chronopolitics of Life is the final book of the year from UCL Press. This open access work explores how time shapes life, politics and power, offering fresh insights for reflective winter reading and inspiring conversations as the year comes to a close.
Image by Alejandro Salinas Lopez on UCL imagestore.
5 December: Read about the gift of rights retention, which is now included in UCL’s updated Publications Policy, and the actions for UCL authors.
Open Access Week Webinar: Who Owns Our Knowledge?
By Naomi, on 3 November 2025
Graphic from openaccessweek.org, photo by Greg Rakozy
To mark this year’s Open Access Week (20-26 October), the UCL Office for Open Science and Scholarship hosted a webinar exploring this year’s theme: Who Owns Our Knowledge?
Facilitated by Bibliometrics Support Officer Andrew Gray, a panel of four speakers from different areas of UCL offered their time and expertise to consider this complex question.
- Lauren Cantos is the Research Integrity and Assurance Officer in the Compliance and Assurance team. Previously she worked in the Research Ethics team at UCL, and her background is as a Humanities and English researcher.
- Christine Daoutis is the UCL copyright support officer, based in the library. Her background is in open access, open science and copyright, particularly the ways copyright interacts with open practices.
- Catherine Sharp is Head of Open Access Services in Library Services [or LCCOS]. She manages the Open Access Team, which delivers Gold open access, including transformative agreements, and Green open access through UCL’s repository, UCL Discovery, for UCL staff and students.
- Muki Haklay is a Professor of Geographic Information Science at UCL department of Geography. He founded and co-direct the UCL Extreme Citizen Science group. He is an expert in citizen science and contributed to the US Association for Advancing Participatory Science (formerly the Citizen Science Association), and the European Citizen Science Association (ECSA).
The webinar began with a short reflection on the theme from each of the panellists, followed by a discussion structured around these questions:
- What does “ownership” mean for research – for outputs and for data? And when we define what “ownership” means, how do we decide who the owners are – or who they should be?
- We often think of ownership as linked to “authorship”. A wide range of people contribute to research – including many outside academia – but not all become named as authors. How do we recognise them?
- What happens when copyright (or other IP rights) conflict with academic expectations around ownership and authorship?
- How is the production and the dissemination of research influenced by commercial considerations around ownership and access?
It was a thought-provoking discussion in which the panellists touched on a wide range of subjects, including considerations of attribution beginning at the outset of a project, recognising contribution from individuals outside of academic structures, understanding copyright concerns when having work published and how UCL’s updated Publications Policy can help with this. As well as answering questions, the session raised other questions and, as is often the case, the complexity of these questions didn’t allow for straightforward answers. As Andrew aptly put it towards the end of the webinar – ‘sometimes saying the question is complicated is an answer in itself’. This particularly resonated with regard to the issue of AI tools failing to attribute authors, and also the matter of widening participation within the production of knowledge.
If this has piqued your interest, or you attended the webinar and would like a recap, you can watch the full recording now:
Access the full recording on MediaCentral
Useful Links
A selection of useful resources were shared in the webinar chat:
- The Authorship Integrity Toolkit from UK Research Integrity Office
- UCL’s updated Publications Policy
- ‘Who Owns Our Knowledge? Understanding how copyright can shape the discourse around open scholarship’ – blog post by Christine Daoutis
- Managing intellectual property rights in Citizen Science by Teresa Scassa and Haewon Chung
- Typology of Citizen Science projects from an intellectual property perspective by Teresa Scassa and Haewon Chung
- ‘Who Owns Our Knowledge? Retaining author’s rights through UCL’s updated Publications Policy’ – blog post by Catherine Sharp
- EIFL Rights Retention and Secondary Publication Rights
- Introducing CC Signals: A New Social Contract for the Age of AI – Creative Commons
- Open Science at the generative AI turn: An exploratory analysis of challenges and opportunities | Quantitative Science Studies | MIT Press
- Copyright considerations in text and data mining: sharing and adopting best practice – UCL Library Skills training session
- “Wait, not like that”: Free and open access in the age of generative AI
- Join UCL Copyright Literacy Community on MS Teams
We are very grateful to the speakers who contributed a lot of insight and provided much to reflect on from this webinar. We hope the conversation around these questions will continue and answers will develop as we navigate the complexities.
The UCL Office for Open Science and Scholarship invites you to contribute to the open science and scholarship movement. Stay connected for updates, events, and opportunities.
Follow us on Bluesky, LinkedIn, and join our mailing list to be part of the conversation!
Celebrating Open Science & Scholarship at UCL: Highlights from the Third Annual Awards Ceremony!
By Naomi, on 29 October 2025
Photo by Kirsty Wallis
On the afternoon of 22nd October 2025, 40 people gathered in Bentham House to celebrate the winners and honourable mentions of this year’s UCL Open Science and Scholarship Awards.
Sandy Schumann and Jessie Baldwin, the UKRN Local Network Leads at UCL, hosted the ceremony and awards were presented by David Shanks, UCL’s UKRN Institutional Lead. Sandy began by congratulating this year’s cohort – 69 applications were submitted for consideration this year, so the competition was fierce! She also thanked the judges, as well as UCL Press for sponsoring the event.
There were five categories in total, and after the awards were presented, the overall winner of each category showcased their project.
Photo by Kirsty Wallis
The first category was, ‘Activities Led By Non-Academic Staff’, won by Vassilis Sideropoulos (Senior Research Technical Professional, Department of Psychology and Human Development, IOE) for his work establishing an open research training programme and practice community within the IOE. Vassilis saw the need to make open research practical and relevant, and created a programme with modular training covering topics such as Data Management and Pre-Registration. Following feedback on the initial training programme delivered between 2019-2023, he spent 18 months considering how to improve it, which led to a revamped programme with more applicable guidance. Alongside this, he recognised that researchers were seeking a community, a place where they could reach out to someone who could train them and respond to their questions, which led him to establish an open research practice community.
To encourage engagement with the practice of open science, an understanding of what researchers need is vital. By listening and responding to feedback, Vassilis recognised this and has created a programme that has transformed the ways in which IOE researchers engage with and understand open science.
Photo by Kirsty Wallis
The winner of the second category, ‘Activities by academic staff (including post-docs) or PhD students: Open-source software/analytical tools’, was Deyu Ming (Lecturer in Mathematics and Data Analytics, School of Management, Faculty of Engineering) for the development of the open-source package ‘DGPSI’, which allows for scalable surrogate modelling of expensive computer models and model networks. In his showcase, Deyu took us on the journey of this project. From the origins of the idea in 2019, to translating it into something that others could use and publishing it on GitHub in 2020, to it subsequently appearing on the python package index and on CONDA in 2022. But it didn’t stop there. In 2023, the package started making considerable impact through the UKRI-funded projects Net Zero Plus and ADD-TREES, which support AI-enhanced tree-planting decision tools used by DEFRA, Forest Research, the National Trust, and other stakeholders to advance the UK’s Net Zero 2050 goals.
Since 2021, there have been 19 releases of the software, and it is now 60x faster than the original. As creator, lead developer, and sole maintainer of ‘DGPSI’, Deyu has worked incredibly hard on this open-source software, and with already over 100,000 downloads, it will no doubt continue to make a resounding and long-lasting impact.
Photo by Kirsty Wallis
The award for ‘Activities led by undergraduate or postgraduate students’ went to Yinan Chen, Eric Chen and Adelina Xie (undergraduate students at the Department of Statistical Science, Faculty of Mathematical and Physical Sciences) for developing an open peer-review system for statistical science undergraduate coding assignments as part of a UCL ChangeMakers project. The problem they set out to address was the limitation in Moodle (the learning platform used at UCL) with regard to peer review, as students could only receive general feedback on coding assignments. Since Moodle only supports the review of PDF outputs and not raw R code, there was no option for line-by-line code reviews, and they felt that collaborative learning opportunities were being missed. Their solution: GitHub and Moodle integration. This innovative hybrid approach, with GitHub’s powerful code review system and Moodle’s familiar interface, has led to a practical, accessible and scalable tool designed for students, by students.
This is a recently concluded pilot project, but it is already having significant impact. A paper is being written on it for the Journal of Open-Source Education, and it has attracted interest for presentation at the Royal Statistical Society’s education conference, which shows its potential for nation-wide statistical education – testament to Yinan, Eric and Adelina’s hard work and dedication. Alongside this, their commitment to the practice of open science at such an early stage in their academic career was inspiring to see.
Photo by Kirsty Wallis
For the category ‘Activities led by academic staff (including post-docs) or PhD students: Open publishing’, the award was presented to Adam Crymble (Lecturer of Digital Humanities, Department of Information Studies, Faculty of Arts and Humanities), for the open publishing initiative ‘Programming Historian’ which he co-founded. Programming Historian offers over 250 peer-reviewed tutorials for digital humanities in English, Spanish, French, and Portuguese. Adam explained how a gap in digital skills amongst humanities professionals was the motivation for the project, and from its humble beginnings as a blog, it has become a financially self-sustaining open publisher. By offering practical applications and case studies in each tutorial, as well as ensuring translations are culturally adapted, this project has had far-reaching influence and continues to do so.
Since the outset, community and collaboration have been vital in the development of Programming Historian, and Adam has worked hard to expand the project’s global community and to ensure inclusivity. This approach, alongside the use of open peer review and the promotion of open data and open-source tools, epitomises the principles of open science and was fantastic to hear about.
Photo by Kirsty Wallis
The final category was ‘Activities by academic staff (including post-docs) or PhD students: Enhancing open science and reproducibility capacity in the academic community’, won by Martin Mokros (Lecturer in Earth Observation, Department of Geography, Faculty of Social and Historical Sciences) for his COST Action 3DForEcoTech project. Four years ago, Martin noticed the issue of scientists undertaking similar forest ecosystem research but not talking to each other about it. He wanted to standardise laser scanning technologies for forest ecology and inventory to allow for collaboration, and so launched COST Action 3DForEcoTech – the first global open-science network focused on ground-based 3D forest monitoring. With over 600 members from 50+ countries, the reach is impressive, and it is an innovative approach to scientific practice. Open science was a key motivation for the project, and it incorporates fully accessible datasets, algorithms and benchmarks results, as well as open-source software and an algorithm library.
Alongside the provision of open data and tools, this project has engaged with open science by creating equitable access to knowledge and opportunities through supporting ECRs, enforcing gender balance and ensuring participation from underrepresented regions. The idea of equitable access underpins the entire concept of open science, and by making it a central tenet to the COST Action 3DForEcoTech project, Martin has provided an excellent example of how this can be done.
Each of these award winners have advocated for, harnessed and showcased open science in various fields of research and study, and we are delighted that they have received recognition with a UCL Open Science & Scholarship Award.
We are looking forward to hearing about these projects’ ongoing impact and wonder what new initiatives they might inspire!
The UCL Office for Open Science and Scholarship invites you to contribute to the open science and scholarship movement. Stay connected for updates, events, and opportunities.
Follow us on Bluesky, LinkedIn, and join our mailing list to be part of the conversation!
Open Science and Scholarship at UCL: A Year in Review
By Naomi, on 24 October 2025
Each year during Open Access Week, we like to share an update about what’s been happening in the past year across the various teams supporting Open Science and Scholarship at UCL and beyond.
This year, the Office for Open Science & Scholarship and UCL Press partnered with colleagues at The London School of Economics and The Francis Crick Institute to launch an inaugural London-based Open Science Festival, instead of our usual annual conference. Taking place from 2nd – 6th June, there were a range of online sessions, as well as in-person sessions hosted at UCL and LSE, covering subjects such as Authorship and AI, Open Access in an Age of Populism, and Creativity in Research and Engagement.
Browse the full programme, read write-ups and watch recordings in this summary blog post.
We are delighted to share that planning has already begun for next year’s festival, with more London institutions joining to put together a programme with even wider reach. Watch this space!
Back in November 2024, the Office for Open Science and Scholarship fully committed to Bluesky, where our activity and following has increased over the last 12 months. From just over 200 followers at the end of October 2024, to a current total of 1,762 followers, it is fantastic to connect with a wide community engaging with Open Science. Our LinkedIn audience has also grown from 600 followers to over 1000, and it has been great to see more UCL students and staff engaging with our content on there.
Find us on LinkedIn and Bluesky if you’ve not connected with us yet!
Open Access
Over the past 12 months, the Open Access Team has facilitated the Gold open access publication of over 3,500 papers across 40 transformative agreements with publishers. UCL Discovery has continued to go from strength to strength, with over 62 million downloads, reaching the 60 million milestone in July which we celebrated in this dedicated blog post. The publications repository now boasts over 196,000 open access items, including 26,100 theses, with over 11,500 uploads over the last year.
UCL Press
Photo by Mat Wright, UCL Digital Media
This summer, UCL Press celebrated its 10th anniversary! To mark this significant milestone, an open access monograph panel event took place in person and online on 10th June, featuring speakers from universities and the publishing sector. UCL Press was launched in line with UCL’s commitment to open science and scholarship, and as the UK’s first fully open access university press, has to date published 423 books and 15 journals, surpassed 26 million open access downloads, and reached 242 countries and territories.
Discover how to publish your book, journal or journal article with UCL Press.
Copyright
It has been a busy year for the Copyright Team. In 2024-2025 we ran 36 sessions for UCL students and staff on a range of topics, including copyright for theses, publications, data, images, publishing contracts, and GenAI, continuing this year with a similar programme and offering bespoke sessions, too.
New resources included our Copyright and AI Libguide, our Getting Started with Copyright webpage, and the launch of our Copyright for Humans game: an engaging, playful and critical approach to copyright, which can be played in person or online.
AI-generated in Copilot with prompts by Christine Daoutis
As the new mascot, Colin the Copyright Literacy Nerd, will tell you, copyright education is much more than knowing about what the Copyright Act says or what a licence allows you to do. In April we launched the UCL Copyright Literacy Strategy 2024-2027, which sets out a vision and a plan of action to develop copyright confidence and understanding across UCL. One outcome of the strategy is our growing Copyright Literacy Community, which offers UCL staff and students opportunities to discuss copyright issues, share questions and best practice, and participate in collaborative projects.
For more information, contact the copyright team.
Citizen Science
Photo by Sheetal Saujani at this year’s Open Science Festival
This year marked a major milestone for Citizen Science at UCL, with our first community event bringing together UCL staff and students to exchange ideas and explore participatory research. In addition, we expanded our UCL Citizen Science Community on MS Teams to over 120 members and introduced the UCL Citizen Science Support Resources Hub, a collection of articles, tools, and guidance on different aspects of citizen science projects. The Office continues to support new UCL Citizen Science Academy training programmes leading to the UCL Citizen Science Certificate, ensuring consistently high standards across different cohorts. We have also very recently set up a UK-wide Citizen Science Enablers Network, a new initiative supporting groups and individuals interested in enabling Citizen Science at their own higher education institutions.
We’re committed to developing our support service for Citizen Science at UCL – one that empowers staff and students to run impactful projects and strengthens UCL’s position in Citizen Science.
Join our community and talk to us about your ideas and projects!
Research Data Management
In the world of Research Data Management at UCL, the past year has been significant as the Research Data Repository surpassed the 1 million mark for both views and downloads, with the figures currently 1.3 million for views and 1.2 million for downloads. A fantastic achievement from the UCL Research Community. These views and downloads took place in over 190 countries and territories across the world, which demonstrates the wide-reaching impact of the Research Data Repository. There is currently an impressive total of over 1000 items published on the repository which we hope will continue to increase, along with the total views and downloads.
Find out more in the newly published RDR user guide.
The UCL DMP template has also been updated this year, and you can find more information on managing your research data across the research lifecycle on our webpages.
Bibliometrics
Photo by Lukas Blazek on Unsplash
The Bibliometrics team ran a full calendar of 12 scheduled training sessions in the Library Skills program as well as a large number of smaller individual sessions, including developing training and support for new tools such as OpenAlex and emerging citation analysis tools. A major theme this year was advising on using the new Overton service, which offers researchers a way to discover grey literature as well as to identify new impacts of their research. We also assisted a wide range of teams at UCL in their work to measure and report on UCL’s research activity and impact.
It’s been a fantastic year, and we’re looking forward to what the next one has in store – read along on this blog, sign up to our newsletter, and follow us on LinkedIn and Bluesky to keep up to date!
The UCL Office for Open Science and Scholarship invites you to contribute to the open science and scholarship movement. Stay connected for updates, events, and opportunities.
Follow us on Bluesky, LinkedIn, and join our mailing list to be part of the conversation!
‘Who Owns Our Knowledge?’ Reflections from UCL Citizen Science and Research Data Management
By Naomi, on 23 October 2025
Guest post by Sheetal Saujani, Citizen Science Coordinator, and Christiana McMahon, Research Data Support Officer
Graphic from openaccessweek.org, photo by Greg Rakozy
This year’s theme for International Open Access Week 2025, “Who Owns Our Knowledge?”, asks us to reflect on how knowledge is created, shared, and controlled, and whose voices are included in that process. It’s a question that aligns closely with UCL’s approach to citizen science, which promotes openness, collaboration and equity in research.
Citizen science provides a powerful lens to examine how knowledge is co-produced with communities. It recognises that valuable knowledge comes not only from academic institutions but also but also from lived experience, community knowledge, and shared exploration.
Photo by Sheetal Saujani, at a Citizen Science and Public Engagement workshop
Through initiatives like the UCL Citizen Science Academy and UCL Citizen Science Certificate, we support researchers and project leads to work in partnership with the public, enabling people from all backgrounds to take part in research that matters to them. These programmes are designed to be inclusive and hands-on, helping to build confidence, skills and shared responsibility.
For those of us working in academia, this theme reminds us that open access isn’t just about making papers free to read – it’s about changing how research is produced. Involving citizen scientists in forming research questions, collecting data, and interpreting findings opens up the research process itself, not just access to its outputs.
The Principles for Citizen Science at UCL emphasise respectful partnerships, transparency, and fair recognition. They reflect our belief that citizen scientists are co-creators whose insights – rooted in everyday experience and local knowledge – bring depth and relevance to academic work.
Graphic from gida-global.org/care
In particular, the fifth principle for Citizen Science at UCL states that CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance should be considered when working with marginalised communities and Indigenous groups. These principles are: Collective Benefit, Authority to Control, Responsibility, and Ethics, which remind researchers that creating knowledge from Indigenous data must be to the benefit of Indigenous Peoples, nations and communities. These Principles support Indigenous Peoples in establishing more control over their data and its use in research. The Research Data Management Team encourage staff and students to engage with the CARE Principles in addition to the FAIR principles.
So, who owns our knowledge? At UCL, we believe the answer should be: everyone. Through citizen science and its principles, we’re building a future where knowledge is created collectively, shared responsibly and made openly accessible – because it belongs to the communities that help shape it.
The UCL Office for Open Science and Scholarship invites you to contribute to the open science and scholarship movement. Stay connected for updates, events, and opportunities.
Follow us on Bluesky, LinkedIn, and join our mailing list to be part of the conversation!
‘Who Owns Our Knowledge?’ Retaining Authors’ Rights through UCL’s updated Publications Policy
By Naomi, on 22 October 2025
Guest post by Catherine Sharp, Head of Open Access Services at UCL
Graphic from openaccessweek.org, photo by Greg Rakozy
“Who Owns Our Knowledge?”, the theme of this year’s International Open Access Week, asks how “communities can reassert control over the knowledge they produce”. With commercial publishers continuing to monetise academic content through ever-increasing subscription and open access fees – the costs of so-called “transformative” agreements to UK HEIs is around £140m – and to report substantial and growing profit margins, while at the same time attempting to restrict authors’ rights in their own work, this remains a challenge for all HEIs. Against this background, the UK’s rights retention movement is a vital tool in the effort to free academic research and empower authors to use and share their knowledge.
UCL’s Intellectual Property (IP) Policy has long enshrined the principle that UCL staff own the copyright in their own scholarly materials, and that UCL has the right to use them for academic and research purposes. This year, with the introduction of an updated Publications Policy, UCL has joined a number of other universities, including Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial and Manchester, in taking action to assert this right. This is known as rights retention.
In practical terms, this means that from 2026, having notified publishers of UCL’s pre-existing licence, UCL will make the accepted manuscripts of scholarly articles by UCL staff open access without an embargo in UCL Discovery, UCL’s open access repository, under the Creative Commons Attribution licence (CC BY) (unless an alternative licence or exemption is requested). The CC BY licence allows widespread re-use and sharing, and is the licence that research funders, including Wellcome, UKRI, NIHR and EC funders, require.
Photo by Mary Hinckley, UCL Digital Media, ISD-LTMS
While UCL will continue to provide opportunities for authors to publish Gold open access through transformative agreements and in fully open access journals, articles that are not Gold open access will also benefit from immediate open access, on publication, in UCL Discovery. This will allow all UCL authors to meet their funders’ (including REF) open access requirements while continuing to publish in their journals of choice, and to benefit from open access through higher impact, increased citations and more collaborations.
Photo by Mary Hinkley, UCL Digital Media
The policy also benefits co-authors, and UCL authors are encouraged to let their co-authors know about it and to take advantage of it. Aside from that, authors do not need to take any action other than to upload their accepted manuscripts to RPS, on publication.
We are looking forward to seeing the practical effects of the policy as more UCL research is made available, more freely, than ever before.
The UCL Office for Open Science and Scholarship invites you to contribute to the open science and scholarship movement. Stay connected for updates, events, and opportunities.
Follow us on Bluesky, LinkedIn, and join our mailing list to be part of the conversation!
‘Who Owns Our Knowledge?’ Understanding How Copyright Can Shape the Discourse Around Open Scholarship
By Naomi, on 21 October 2025
Guest post by Christine Daoutis, Copyright Support Officer at UCL
Graphic from openaccessweek.org, photo by Greg Rakozy
The theme of this year’s International Open Access Week is a question – and a call for collaboration. By addressing ‘who owns our knowledge’, it invites diverse communities to recognise and challenge existing assumptions about how scholarship is created, disseminated and built upon; to recognise power dynamics that shape these assumptions; and to make decisions that best serve the interests of the public and the academic community.
Understanding how copyright frames these assumptions, power dynamics and decisions is essential. In the strictest sense, who ‘owns’ scholarship (perceived as the IP rights in the outcomes of research – publications, research data and any other outputs created in the life of a research project) is, after all, defined by legislation and by the terms of publishing agreements and other contracts. In a broader sense, ‘owning’ can determine the ‘what’, the ‘how’ and the ‘who’ of scholarship in the first place: what is selected to be funded and published? How will the outcomes be disseminated? And crucially, who is able (or not able) to access, understand, benefit from and possibly build on the outcomes of a work? While many of these questions depend on IP rights, other factors (including criteria of research quality and impact, academic freedom, linguistic and cultural barriers to access) also influence how we address them.
Image from www.freepik.com
Keeping close to this year’s theme, this post will focus on three key approaches related to copyright which should help adopt practices that support open scholarship.
- Understanding authorship and copyright ownership
To make a work as open as possible, it is first necessary to establish who the rights owner is, as it is the rights owner who has control over reproducing and disseminating the work. It is natural to assume that the author(s) of a work should be its owner(s). However, this is determined by copyright laws and by contract. In the UK, the first owner of a work is its author. However, if the work was created in the course of employment, the employer is the owner unless there is an agreement that says otherwise (CDPA 11). Understanding – and where necessary, negotiating – ownership empowers authors to make their research widely available and reusable. This involves reading and understanding institutional IP policies and the terms of grant agreements, publisher agreements and collaboration/co-production agreements. In terms of publishing, rights retention policies (covered in another post this week) ensure that authors and their institutions keep key rights enabling them to make their research articles immediately available under the terms of an open licence. - Addressing authorship and ownership in collaborations
Moral rights – which include the right to be attributed as the author of a work – are just as important as economic rights when addressing copyright. Deciding who is co-author in a work and in what order they should be credited is essential. Further, contributions to a research project that may or may not also involve direct authorship of a publication should also be established and acknowledged. This includes acknowledging contributions by research participants, citizen science participants and anyone who has played an advisory or supporting role in the research by applying standards such as the Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CrediT). - Understanding and using open licences
Open licences, including Creative Commons licences and open source licences, support the dissemination and reuse of a wide range of works. While research funders have requirements around the use of licences (for example, the CC BY licence for research publications) researchers can also apply licences to a broader range materials (educational resources, images, preprints, datasets). Particularly in the age of AI, understanding how licences such as Creative Commons work is important, both for authors and users of scholarly works. Creative Commons are also introducing ‘preference signals’ to support transparency and reciprocity in how scholarly works are used by AI.
Further Support
The UCL copyright service helps you navigate these issues through training, discussion and opportunities to follow and participate in current debates. To engage with copyright at UCL:
- Join one of our sessions, which include addressing copyright in publishing agreements and discussing copyright and open access issues via our Copyright for Humans game.
- Join our UCL Copyright Community Teams channel for discussions, events and opportunities to share and develop your copyright knowledge.
- Contact copyright@ucl.ac.uk for support.
The UCL Office for Open Science and Scholarship invites you to contribute to the open science and scholarship movement. Stay connected for updates, events, and opportunities.
Follow us on Bluesky, LinkedIn, and join our mailing list to be part of the conversation!
Open Access Week 2025: ‘Who Owns Our Knowledge?’
By Naomi, on 20 October 2025
Graphic from openaccessweek.org, photo by Greg Rakozy
The theme for this year’s Open Access Week is ‘Who Owns Our Knowledge?’ – a fundamental question in the world of Open Access. Here at the UCL Office for Open Science & Scholarship, we will be joining the global conversation around this question with blog posts from the perspectives of Copyright, Rights Retention, and Citizen Science, as well as a webinar with a panel discussion between four experts.
The Open Access Week website unpacks the theme by first asking ‘how communities can reassert control over the knowledge they produce’. Increasingly, knowledge is being used without the permission or even awareness of those who produce it, through AI scraping, politicisation of research, and lack of attribution. What can be done to prevent this? The temptation may be to retreat from Open Access, as a means of protecting knowledge from inappropriate and indiscriminate use, however this is not the solution.
Knowledge is a human right.
Michelle Bachelet, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, gave this statement in 2020, ‘Worldwide people need States, international bodies, science and medical institutions and practitioners to ensure the broadest possible sharing of scientific knowledge, and the broadest possible access to the benefits of scientific knowledge. This is key to any effective public health policy. It is essential to the combat against climate change. And it is a fundamental matter of human rights.’
Lucia Obst (WMDE), CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
With this in mind, we should consider knowledge not owned solely by its producers, but by humanity collectively, to be accessed, used, and built upon.
At the same time, the considerable amount of effort that individuals and groups dedicate to producing knowledge needs to be appropriately recognised. A very pressing concern is that this is not something that AI tools are currently doing, with considerable discussion in the media covering concerns about materials being ingested into large language models and then regurgitated, often inaccurately, without attribution to the original authors.
In response to this, Creative Commons are working on ‘CC Signals’ – a project still very much in its early stages, which hopes to improve author attribution from AI. This topic, and Copyright in general, are complex areas within knowledge ownership. To explore further, we will have a dedicated blog post later this week from our Copyright Support Officer, Christine Daouti.
Photo by Mary Hinkley, © UCL Digital Media
Ultimately, most researchers want their knowledge to be used for the greatest benefit – to enhance people’s lives, improve how things are done, and find solutions to our biggest problems. Reasserting control to ensure this can happen, by making knowledge open and accessible, is crucial.
Therefore, whilst publishers might want to monopolise knowledge to maximise profits, authors are increasingly retaining control over their knowledge thanks to Rights Retention policies. At UCL, the Publications Policy has been updated this year to include a Rights Retention statement, and our Head of Open Access services, Catherine Sharp, will be explaining this in more detail in another blog post this week.
Bridger Teton NF, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
It’s also important to consider who has ownership over the production of knowledge. If knowledge should be for the widest possible audience, then the production of this knowledge should involve the widest possible community. This is where Citizen Science and Co-Production come in. These initiatives open the doors of knowledge production to include people with a broad range of backgrounds and experiences, who might otherwise have been excluded from the process. To unpack this topic in more depth, our Citizen Science Coordinator, Sheetal Saujani, will be contributing a blog post later this week.
We are looking forward to the conversations and insights which this Open Access Week will generate, and we hope you end the week with a desire to delve even deeper into the complex question of ‘Who Owns Our Knowledge?’
Read along with our upcoming blog posts and join the conversation on social media!
The UCL Office for Open Science and Scholarship invites you to contribute to the open science and scholarship movement. Stay connected for updates, events, and opportunities.
Follow us on Bluesky, LinkedIn, and join our mailing list to be part of the conversation!
Open Science & Scholarship Award Winners 2025!
By Kirsty, on 6 October 2025
The UCL Open Science and Scholarship Awards are a joint programme between the UCL Office for Open Science and Scholarship (OOSS) and the local network chapter of UKRN, the UK Reproducibility Network. Together we are delighted to be running these awards for the third year and are proud to say that the quality and volume of applications has only continued to grow year on year.
We would like to invite you to join us in celebrating our award winners during the Open Access Week festivities. At the awards presentation on Wednesday 22 October we will be presenting all of the awards as well as hearing from a selection of winners and honourable mentions about their research. There will also be the opportunity to network with our winners at a reception sponsored by UCL Press.
And without further ado – our award winners! Each category has an overall winner and two honourable mentions.
Category – Activities led by non-academic staff
- Winner: Vassilis Sideropoulos, Senior Research Technical Professional, Department of Psychology and Human Development, IOE — Leading the IOE Open Research Practice Community and an open research training programme
- Honourable Mention: Nikoloz Sirmpilatze, Research Software Engineer, Sainsbury Wellcome Centre, Faculty of Life Sciences — Technical lead of ‘movement’, an open-source Python package for analysing animal body movements
- Honourable Mention: Samarth Pimparkar, Research Technician, Clinical and Movement Neuroscience, Faculty of Brain Science — Contributions to building open-source resources that preserve and share valuable patient-derived material
Category – Activities led by undergraduate or postgraduate students:
- Winner: Yinan Chen; Eric Chen; Adelina Xie undergraduate students at the Department of Statistical Science, Faculty of Mathematical and Physical Sciences — Developers of open peer-review system for statistical science undergraduate coding assignments
- Honourable Mention: Chaeyeon Lim, MSc student at the UCL Interaction Centre, Faculty of Life Sciences — Lead-developer of NatureNest
- Honourable Mention: Ka Ying Ivy Chan, MSc student at the Faculty of Brain Sciences — Introducing the OSF to fellow master’s students
Category – Activities by academic staff (including post-docs) or PhD students: Open-source software/analytical tools
- Winner: Deyu Ming, Lecturer in Mathematics and Data Analytics, School of Management, Faculty of Engineering — Lead developer of ‘DGPSI’
- Honourable Mention: Michal Ovadek, Lecturer in European Institutions, Politics and Policy, Department of Political Science, Faculty of Social and Historical Sciences — Lead developer of ‘eurlex’
- Honourable Mention: Pietro Lubello, Research Fellow, Energy Institute, Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment — Lead developer of the Kenya Power System Model and the Kenya Whole Energy System Model
Category – Activities led by academic staff (including post-docs) or PhD students: Open publishing
- Winner: Adam Crymble, Lecturer of Digital Humanities, Department of Information Studies, Faculty of Arts and Humanities — Co-founder and first chair of Programming Historian
- Honourable Mention: Anastasia Kokori, PhD student in the Astrophysics Group, Department of Physics and Astronomy, Faculty of Mathematical & Physical Sciences — Founder and coordinator of ExoClock
- Honourable Mention: Annabelle South, Principal Research Fellow in Research Impact and Communication, MRC Clinical Trials Unit, Faculty of Population Health Sciences — Innovating how results of clinical trials are shared with participants
Category – Activities by academic staff (including post-docs) or PhD students: Enhancing open science and reproducibility capacity in the academic community
- Winner: Martin Mokros, Lecturer in Earth Observation, Department of Geography, Faculty of Social and Historical Sciences — Chair of the COST Action 3DForEcoTech
- Honourable Mention: Dongyi Ma, PhD student in the Connected Environments Lab, Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment — Founder of UrbanHeatSense IoT initiative
- Honourable Mention: Lewis Jones, NERC Independent Research Fellow, Department of Earth Sciences, Faculty Mathematical & Physical Sciences— Founder of the Palaeoverse
The UCL Office for Open Science and Scholarship invites you to contribute to the open science and scholarship movement. Stay connected for updates, events, and opportunities.
Follow us on Bluesky, LinkedIn, and join our mailing list to be part of the conversation!
Looking Forward to Open Access Week 2025
By Naomi, on 29 September 2025
Graphic from openaccessweek.org, photo attributions: Row 1: Sydney Moore, Guzel Maksutova, Nubelson Fernandes
Row 2: Matt Benson, Greg Rakozy, Bhupathi Srinu
Row 3: Ama Journey, 150 Billi, Yuriy Vertikov
With only a few weeks to go until Open Access Week 2025 (20th-26th October), we are looking forward to what it will hold. This year’s theme is the vital question, ‘Who Owns Our Knowledge?’, which is guaranteed to provoke insightful discussions and provide a lot to reflect on. Whether from the perspective of Copyright, Open Access Publishing, Data Sharing or Citizen Science, the question of who owns knowledge underpins the ethos of Open Science, and we can’t wait to delve into this subject.
One way in which we will be doing this is through a webinar with four speakers from UCL who will be sharing their perspectives and considering how knowledge is created, shared and controlled.
The speakers are:
- Christine Daouti – Copyright Support Officer
- Catherine Sharpe – Head of Open Access Services
- Lauren Cantos – Research Integrity and Assurance Officer
- Muki Haklay – Professor of Geographical Information Science
It will be fantastic to have these UCL staff members in the same (virtual) room, and we are excited to hear from them. As well as a panel discussion, there will be opportunity for audience questions, so come ready to ask about anything you want further information or opinions on.
The webinar will take place on Wednesday 22nd October 11am – 12:30pm and will be hosted on Teams, so sign up today and it will be added to your outlook calendar.
Graphic from openaccessweek.org, photo by Greg Rakozy
We will also be exploring the question ‘Who Owns Our Knowledge?’ in different blog posts throughout the week. As well as a discussion of the theme, one will focus on Rights Retention, one on Copyright and another on Citizen Science and Research Data.
Written by staff working in these areas, these pieces promise to be informative and applicable. Watch this space!
Finally, a quick note to say we are delighted to be hosting the annual UCL Open Science and Scholarship Awards Ceremony during Open Access Week. Keep an eye out for our next blog post which will announce the award winners and provide all the details about the event and how you can attend.
Open Access Week 2025 will be a great opportunity to continue the conversation about making our research and knowledge open and accessible – we hope to see you there!
The UCL Office for Open Science and Scholarship invites you to contribute to the open science and scholarship movement. Stay connected for updates, events, and opportunities.
Follow us on Bluesky, LinkedIn, and join our mailing list to be part of the conversation!
