The Pro-Vice-Provost’s View

UCL Open Science Workshop

25 June saw the first UCL Open Science Workshop take place in Chancellor’s Hall, Senate House. 60+ people attended the sessions, a mixture of library staff, academic colleagues and external visitors.

The day was opened with a welcome from Professor David Price, Vice-Provost (Research), a great supporter of UCL’s emerging Open Science agenda. I then followed with an analysis of the LERU Roadmap for Open Science from the League of European Research Universities. We were then treated to a masterly view of Open Science from the point of view of a publisher, led by Dr Catriona MacCallum from Hindawi. Professor James Wilsdon from the University of Sheffield ended the session with an overview of the responsible use of metrics in an Open Science environment.

After the break, we heard from Simon Hettrick on Open Source software and an academic, Dr Emily Sena from the University of Edinburgh, on how Open Science approaches can help in pre-clinical work.

The morning’s plenaries set the scene for a lot of detailed discussion of Open Science issues by those attending. In the afternoon, we had 5 Breakout Groups:

• How do we make Open the default at UCL?
• How to make your data Open and FAIR
• UCL Press: engaging in Open Peer Review
• Open Education: Introducing OpenEd@UCL
• Citizen Science

The feedback from the audience in each of these 5 areas was great and will seed lots of development work in the coming 12 months. A UCL Panel – Dr Paul Ayris (Pro-Vice-Provost, UCL Library Services), Professor David Bogle (Pro-Vice-Provost, UCL Doctoral School), and Clare Gryce (Director of Research IT Services, UCL ISD) – then fielded questions from the audience about the emerging role of Open Science in UCL. The day ended with a final plenary from Rebecca Lawrence from F1000 on embedding Open Science in university culture.

This was the first Open Science Workshop organised by UCL, with financial support from UCL HR. It will certainly not be the last. Open Science, which embraces all academic disciplines including the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, has the power to transform the way that research, teaching, learning and outreach are undertaken, and how their outputs are disseminated, made available and curated for all members of an enquiring Society. UCL has an ambition to be a leader in Open Science across Europe and the holding of this first Workshop was an important step towards achieving that goal.

Paul Ayris

Pro-Vice-Provost

UCL Library Services