Save the Date! Open Science & Scholarship festival 2025

The library teams at LSE and the Francis Crick institute and the UCL Office for Open Science & Scholarship are proud to announce the first collaborative Open Science & Scholarship Festival in London. 

The festival will be taking place from 2-6 of June and will include a mixture of in person and hybrid events across all three institutions as well as a range of sessions purely held online. We have an exciting programme in development for you, including:

• Open Research in the Age of Populism
  Political shifts around the world, from the Trump administration in the US to Meloni’s government in Italy, are making it more important than ever to have reliable research freely available. However, these governments are also making it more risky to be a researcher openly sharing the results of research in many countries and disciplines. Alongside the political censorship of research in some countries there are also changes to research funding, research being misrepresented and used to spread misinformation online, and concerns about the stability of open research infrastructure which is funded by the state. In these circumstances we will consider the value of open knowledge, the responsibilities of individual researchers and institutions to be open and how you can protect yourself when making your research openly available?
• How open is possible, how closed is necessary? Navigating data sharing whilst working with personal data
  In the interests of transparency and research integrity, researchers are encouraged to open up more of their research process, including sharing data. However, for researchers working with personal data, including interview and medical data, there are important considerations for sharing. This event will bring together researchers from a range of disciplines to share their experiences and strategies for open research when working with personal data.
  The panel will discuss if and how this type of data can be made openly available, the balance between the work involved to anonymise data and benefits to research and society for making it available, and consider the legal frameworks researchers are working within in the UK.
• Authorship in the era of AI 
  With the rapid growth of AI tools over the past three years, there has been a corresponding rise in the number of academics and students using them in their own writing. While it is generally agreed that we still expect people to be the “authors” of their work, deciding how to interpret that is often a nuanced and subjective decision by the writer. This panel discussion will look at how we think about “authorship” for AI-assisted writing – what are these tools used for in different contexts? Where might readers and publishers draw their own lines as to what is still someone’s own work? And how might we see this develop over time?
• Creativity in research and engagement
  A session of making, sharing and storytelling. Speakers from across UCL share how they use creative methods to enrich their research, engage with people, and share their learning. Join us to discuss these methods, the benefits of creativity, and try creating a visual output based on your own work.   
  
• Professionalising data, software, and infrastructure support to transform open science
  Workshop in development where researchers and research technology professionals can come together to discuss challenges and opportunities to support research. This session will focus on skills and training needed in creating a culture of Open Science.
• Open Methods with Protocols.io
  Join the Francis Crick Institute and Protocols.io to talk about making your lab protocols and article methods sections open access. Improve replicability, re-use and gain credit for all those hours you spent at the bench. The session is open to all and will involve discussions of the value of open protocols alongside hands on training on how to use the protocols.io platform.
• Should reproducibility be the aim for open qualitative research? Researchers’ perspectives
  Reproducibility has been touted among quantitative researchers as a necessary step to make studies rigorous. To determine reproducibility, whether the same analyses of the same data produce the same results, the raw data and code must be accessible to other researchers. Qualitative researchers have also begun to consider making their data open too. However, where the analyses of these data do not involve quantification and statistical analysis, it is difficult to see how such analysis processes could be reproducible. Furthermore, for researchers in fields where cultural knowledge plays a key role in the analysis of qualitative data, openness of such data may invite misrepresentation by re-use of the data by researchers unfamiliar with the cultural and social context in which it was produced.  This event asks whether reproducibility should be the aim for open qualitative data, and if not, why should researchers make their qualitative data open and what are the other methods used to establish rigour and integrity in research? 

We are also developing sessions about:

• The Big Deal for Diamond Journals
• A networking coffee morning
• Openness and Engagement with Special Collections and Archives

More information will be shared and booking will be available as soon as we can, so watch this space and follow us on BlueSky and LinkedIn for updates!