A huge congratulations to all of the prize winners and a huge thanks to everyone that came to our celebration yesterday! It was lovely to hear from a selection of the winning projects and celebrate together. The OOSS team and the UKRN Local leads Sandy and Jessie had a lovely time networking with everyone.

Just in case you weren’t able to join us to hear the prize winners talk about their projects, Sandy has written short profiles of all of the winning projects below.

Category: Academic staff

Winner: Gesche Huebner and Mike Fells, BSEER, Built Environment

Gesche and Mike were nominated for the wide range of activities that they have undertaken to promote open science principles and activities in the energy research community. Among other things, they have authored a paper on improving energy research, which includes a checklist for authors, delivered teaching sessions on open, reproducible research to their department’s PhD students as well as staff at the Centre for Research Into Energy Demand Solutions, which inspired several colleagues to implement the practices, they created guidance on different open science practices aimed at energy researchers, including professionally filmed videos, as well as developed a toolkit for improving the quality, transparency, and replicability of energy research (i.e., TReQ), which they presented at multiple conferences. Gesche and Mike also regularly publish pre-analysis plans of their own research, make data and code openly available when possible, publish preprints, and use standard reporting guidelines.

Honourable mention: Henrik Singmann, Brain Sciences

Henrik was nominated for their consistent and impactful contribution to the development of free and open-source software packages, mostly for the statistical programming language R. The most popular software tool he developed is afex, which provides a user-friendly interface for estimating one of the most commonly used statistical methods, analysis of variance (ANOVA). afex, first released in 2012 and actively maintained since, has been cited over 1800 times. afex is also integrated into other open-source software tools, such as JASP and JAMOVI, as well as teaching materials. With Quentin Gronau, Henrik also developed bridgesampling, a package for principled hypothesis testing in a Bayesian statistical framework. Since its first release in 2017, bridgesampling has already been cited over 270 times. Other examples of packages for which they are the lead developer or key contributor are acss, which calculates the algorithmic complexity for short strings, MPTinR and MPTmultiverse, as well as rtdists and (together with their PhD student Kendal Foster) fddm. Further promoting the adoption of open-source software, Henrik also provides statistics consultation sessions at his department and uses open-source software for teaching the Master’s level statistics course.

Honourable mention: Smita Salunke, School of Pharmacy

Smita is recognised for their role in the development of the The Safety and Toxicity of Excipients for Paediatrics (STEP) database, an open-access resource compiling comprehensive toxicity information of excipients. The database was established in partnership with European and the United States Paediatric Formulation Initiative. To create the database, numerous researchers shared their data. To date, STEP has circa 3000 registered users across 44 countries and 6 continents. The STEP database has also been recognised as a Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2021 impact case study. Additionally, the European Medicines Agency frequently refer to the database in their communications; the Chinese Centre for Drug Evaluation have also cited the database in their recent guidelines. Furthermore, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have provided funds to support a further 10 excipients for inclusion in STEP. The development and evaluation of the STEP database have been documented in three open-access research papers. Last but not least, the database has been integrated into teaching materials, especially in paediatric pharmacy and pharmaceutical sciences.

Category: Professional Services staff

Winner: Miguel Xochicale, Engineering Sciences and Mathematical & Physical Sciences

Miguel hosted the “Open-source software for surgical technologies” workshop at the 2023 Hamlyn symposium on Medical Robotics, a half-day session that brought together experts from software engineering in medical imagining, academics specialising in surgical data science, and researchers at the forefront of surgical technology development. During the workshop, speakers discussed the utilisation of cutting-edge hardware; fast prototyping and validation of new algorithms; maintaining fragmented source code for heterogenous systems; developing high performance of medical image computing and visualisation in the operating room; and benchmarks of data quality and data privacy. Miguel subsequently convened a panel discussion, underscoring the pressing need of additional open-source guidelines and platforms that ensure that open-source software libraries are not only sustainable but also receive long-term support and are seamlessly translatable to clinic settings. Miguel made recording of the talks and presentations, along with a work-in-progress white paper that is curated by them, and links to forums for inviting others to join their community available on Github.

Honourable mention: Marcus Pedersen, PHS

The Global Business School for Health (GSBH) introduced changes to its teaching style, notably, a flipped classroom. Marcus taught academics at their department how to use several mostly freely available learning technologies, such as student-created podcasts, Mentimeter, or Microsoft Sway, to create an interactive flipped classroom. Marcus further collected feedback from students documenting their learning journey and experiences with flipped teaching to evaluate the use of  the tools. Those insights have been presented in a book chapter (Betts, T. & Oprandi, P. (Eds.). (2022). 100 Ideas for Active Learning. OpenPress @ University of Sussex) and in talks for UCL MBA and Master’s students as well as at various conferences. The Association of Learning Technology also awarded Marcus the ELESIG Scholar Scheme 23/24 to continue their research.

Category: Students

Winner: Seán Kavanagh, Chemistry

Séan was nominated for his noteworthy contribution to developing user-friendly open-source software for the computational chemistry/physics research community. They have developed several codes during their PhD, such as doped, ShakeNBreak and vaspup2.0 for which they are the lead developer, as well as PyTASER and easyunfold for which they are a co-lead developer. Séan not only focuses on efficient implementation but also on user-friendliness along with comprehensive documentation and tutorials. They have produced comprehensive video walkthroughs of the codes and the associated theories, amassing over 20,000 views on YouTube and SpeakerDeck. It is important to note that software development is not the primary goal of Séan’s PhD research (which focuses on characterizing solar cell materials), and so their dedication to top-quality open-source software development is truly commendable. Additionally, Séan has consistently shared the data of all his publications and actively encourages open-access practices in his collaborations/mentorship roles, having assisted others in making their data available online and building functionality in their codes to save outputs in transferable and interoperable formats for data.

Honourable mention: Julie Fabre, Department of Neuromuscular Diseases

Julie is recognized for developing the open-source toolbox bombcell, that automatically assesses large amounts of data that are collected simultaneously from hundreds of neurons (i.e., groups of spikes). This tool considerably reduces labour per experiment and enables long-term neuron recording, which was previously intractable. As bombcell has been released under the open-source copyleft GNU General Public License 3, all future derived work will also be free and open source. Bombcell has already been used in another open-source toolbox with the same licence, UnitMatch. The toolbox’s code is extensively documented, and Julie adopted the Open Neurophysiology Environment, a standardised data format that enables quick understanding and loading of data files. In 2022, Julie presented bombcell in a free online-course. This course was attended by over 180 people, and the recorded video has since been viewed over 800 times online. Bombcell is currently regularly used in a dozen labs in Europe and the United States. It has already been used in two peer-reviewed publications, and in two manuscripts that are being submitted for publication with more studies underway.

Honourable mention: Maxime Beau, Division of Medicine

Maxime is recognized for leading the development of NeuroPyxels, the first open-source library to analyze Neuropixels data in Python. NeuroPyxels, hosted on a GitHub public repository and licensed under the GNU general public license, is actively used across several neuroscience labs in Europe and the United States (18 users have already forked the repository). Furthermore, NeuroPyxels relies on a widely accepted neural data format; this built-in compatibility with community standards ensures that users can easily borrow parts of NeuroPyxels and seamlessly integrate them with their application. NeuroPyxels has been a great teaching medium in several summer schools. Maxime has been a teaching assistant at the “Paris Spring School of Imaging and Electrophysiology” for three years, the FENS course “Interacting with Neural Circuits” at Champalimaud for two years, and the UCL Neuropixels course for three years where NeuroPyxels has been an invaluable tool to get students started with analysing neural data in Python.

Honourable mention: Yukun Zhou, Centre for Medical Image Computing

Yukun was nominated for developing open-source software for analysing images of the retina. The algorithm, termed AutoMorph, consists of an entire pipeline from image quality assessment to image segmentation to feature extraction in tabular form. A strength of AutoMorph is that it was developed using openly available data and so its underlying code can be easily reproduced and audited by other research groups.Although only published 1 year ago, AutoMorph has already been used by research groups from four continents and led to three new collaborations with Yukun’s research group at UCL. Moreover, AutoMorph has been run on the entire retinal picture dataset in the UK Biobank study with the features soon being made available for the global research community. Yukun has been complimented on the ease with which any researcher can immediately download the AutoMorph tools and deploy on their own datasets. Moreover, the availability of AutoMorph has encouraged other research groups, who are conducting similar work, to make their own proprietary systems openly available.

Category: Open resources, publishing, and textbooks 

Winner: Talia Isaacs, IOE, UCL’s Faculty of Education and Society

Talia is recognized for their diverse and continuous contributions to open access publishing. As Co-Editor of the journal Language Testing, they spearheaded SAGE’s CRediT pilot scheme, requiring standardized author contribution statements; they approved and supported Special Issue Editors’ piloting of transparent review for a special issue on “Open science in Language Testing”, encouraged authors to submit pre-prints, and championed open science in Editor workshops and podcasts. Additionally, in 2016, Multilingual Matters published Talia’s edited volume as their first open access monograph. Talia also discussed benefits of open access book publication in the publisher’s blog. As a result, the publisher launched an open access funding model, matching funding for at least one open access book a year. Further showcasing their dedication to open science, Talia archived the first corpus of patient informed consent documents for clinical trials on UK Data Service and UCL’s research repository, and delivered a plenary on “reducing research waste” at the British Association for Applied Linguistics event. They have also advocated for the adoption of registered reports at various speaking events, Editorial Board presentation, in a forthcoming article, editorial, and social media campaign. 

Honourable mention: Michael Heinrich and Banaz Jalil, School of Pharmacy

Banaz and Michael were nominated for co-leading the development of the ConPhyMP-Guidelines. Ethnopharmacology is a flourishing field of medical/pharmaceutical research. However, results are often non-reproducible. The ConPhyMP-Guidelines are a new tool that defines how to report the chemical characteristics of medicinal plant extracts used in clinical, pharmacological, and toxicological research. The paper in which the guidelines are presented is widely used (1613 downloads / 8,621 views since Sept 2022). An online tool, launched in August 2023 and accessible via the Society for Medicinal Plant and Natural Product Research (GA) website, facilitates the completion of the checklist. Specifically, the tool guides the researchers in selecting the most relevant checklists for conducting and reporting research accurately and completely.

Honourable mention: Talya Greene, Brain Sciences 

Talya is recognized for leading the creation of a toolkit that enables traumatic stress researchers to move toward more FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) data practices. This project is part of the FAIR theme within the Global Collaboration on Traumatic Stress. Two main milestones have so far been achieved: 1) In collaboration with Bryce Hruska, Talya has collated existing resources that are relevant to the traumatic stress research community to learn about and improve their FAIR data practices. 2) Talya also collaborated with Nancy Kassam-Adams to conduct an international survey with traumatic stress researchers about their attitudes and practices regarding FAIR data in order to identify barriers and facilitators of data sharing and reuse. The study findings have been accepted for publication in the European Journal of Psychotraumatology. Talya has also presented the FAIR toolkit and the findings of the survey at international conferences (e.g., the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies annual conference, the European Society for Traumatic Stress Studies Biennial Conference).

Are you interested in citizen science?

Would you like to connect with others to share your stories about citizen science?

Are you wondering whether a citizen science approach might work for your project?

Would you like to collaborate with colleagues across UCL and exchange ideas or work together on participatory projects under a joint mission?

Do you want to hear about citizen science as an approach or would you just like to expand your network?

If so, please join our informal UCL citizen science community and get involved! Whether you are new to citizen science or whether you have run projects before, this is your community. We are bringing everyone together to share their knowledge, discuss good practices and talk about their experiences of citizen science.  The community is strictly for UCL members only but is open to all staff and students at all levels.

You might call it participatory research, community action, crowdsourcing, public engagement, or something else. UCL supports a broad approach to “citizen science”, recognising that there are different applications and functions of this approach in research, whether they are community-driven research projects or global investigations.

Through this community, we would really like to hear your feedback on what you would like to see from a potential citizen science support service at UCL including any ideas you might have for events, training, resources or anything else. Join here or search “UCL Citizen Science Community” on Teams.

We also have brand new and improved Citizen Science web pages on the UCL’s Office for Open Science and Scholarship website which includes an introduction to citizen science at UCL including definitions, history, types and levels, and information about the UCL Citizen Science Certificate, you can browse through the various types of citizen science projects at UCL and learn about what your colleagues are doing in this exciting area!

On our new citizen science support and training page, you will find links to relevant training courses currently delivered by different UCL teams both online and in person, a variety of useful resources about citizen science, links to interesting blogs/news and citizen science platforms and projects outside UCL. We will be improving and expanding this content within the coming months.

 If you have any questions, would like further information or would like to tell us what you need, please contact us!

Open Access Week is almost upon us!

Keep your eyes open for a series of blog posts on Creative Commons, citizen science, the recent activities of UCL Press and an exciting review of a year in open access.

This year’s theme is Community over Commercialisation. Creative Commons licences sit at the heart of this discussion. To this end, we invite you to a drop-in session on Tuesday the 24th of October to address questions around creating and using Creative Commons materials. The session is on Teams and you can join at any time. Bring along your questions or just join to discuss how CC supports equitable access to a wide range of works, from scholarly publications to open and FAIR data to images and music.

We have already announced our wonderful winners of the Open Science and Scholarship awards. UCL colleagues can also join us on Wednesday to celebrate and network with the winners, tickets are still available!

We will be posting and tweeting regularly throughout the week about the services and support available to researchers and I hope that we can get some good discussions going!

See you there!

We’re getting excited again for the upcoming Open Access Week!

We have our usual range of blog posts lined up for you to enjoy, including an exciting roundup of the last year, our latest newsletter and a post on this year’s OA Week theme – Open for Climate Justice.

If that wasn’t enough, we have an online event for our ERC academics and a brand-new resource being released, so watch this space!

Featured event: Open Access for Horizon & ERC Researchers

Are you a UCL researcher whose publications acknowledge EU grants? Then you need to know about the new Horizon Europe and ERC open access requirements.

Register now for our online Open Access Week Horizon Briefing, on Monday 24 October, 13:00-13:50.

This session will set out the relevant open access policies, and explain where you can publish and what funding is available. We’ll also be joined by colleagues from F1000, to show you the Open Research Europe platform, which offers rapid publishing, open peer-review and compliance with the Horizon open access and open data policies.

The team at the UCL Office for Open Science & Scholarship are pleased to be able to share two brand new resources for the 2022-23 academic year!

Open Science & Scholarship video

The first, a new video giving an overview of Open Science at UCL. Dr Paul Ayris, Pro-Vice Provost for Library, Culture, Collections & Open Science (LCCOS) opens the discussion and outlines the context, before local experts delve into each of the core areas that we support. It is accompanied by a short quiz to affirm your new understanding of each area.

This video was created with the support of grants from Research England and Horizon 2020. It was produced by Scientific Knowledge Services (SKS).

After watching the video, you can take the quiz! If you are interested in learning more about anything you heard, visit the OOSS training and support pages for this and further resources.

Guide to Open Science for PhD students

The second resource is entitled Open Science – a practical guide for PhD students. This guide has been designed especially for UCL’s community of PhD students, aiming to introduce the principles of Open Science, but linking them directly to stages of the PhD journey and showing the benefits of embracing Open from the start of their academic journey.

This guide is developed from the original which was published by the French Ministry of Higher Education and Research.

This and other resources to help and support you in your Open Science journey can be found on our website.

 

Guest post by James Houghton, Research Data Support Officer

It is always essential to protect the personal identity of participants or information that could jeopardise the safety of a building, an endangered species, or similar. Deleting data at the end of a project is often necessary to guarantee privacy and security. But this data is sometimes of immense value. The potential usefulness of data could be weighed against the likelihood of an accidental release and the risk of harm if an unintentional release did occur.

There are options for archiving data with access controls for researchers who feel strongly that their data should be preserved. Some repositories have built-in access controls that ensure sensitive data can only be accessed by specific persons who have undergone an application process. Only a few data repositories offer this feature and will still have a remit controlling what data they can accept. Here are some examples.

• ReShare (UK Data Service) – This site is a social data research repository created to share data for the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)-funded projects but is open for submissions from other sources!

• ICPSR, the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research – The ICPSR provide scientific data management and curation services. They have more than 250,000 files of research files in the social and behavioural sciences!

• The European Genome-phenome Archive (EGA) – The EGA offers service for permanent archiving and sharing of personally identifiable clinical data generated for biomedical research projects or in the context of research-focused healthcare systems

The UK Data Service, which runs the ReShare archive, provides functional on-data access control and explains how to implement it.

If you are concerned about storing the data live, even with access controls, consider storing the raw data offline. The existence of the data can be advertised online by creating an entry in a repository that announces the data’s presence and explains how to access it. The repository record will also assign a DOI to cite the dataset properly. Making sure the offline information is stored securely can be challenging, however. There needs to be a specific process to ensure the data is secure and accessible on request.

Dealing with the long-term archiving of sensitive data is complicated. The UCL Research Data Management Team can assist with this. Get in touch if you need support!

• Email: lib-researchsupport@ucl.ac.uk
• Website: www.ucl.ac.uk/library/open-science-research-support/research-data-management

Guest post by Petra Zahnhausen-Stuber, Open Access Team, UCL Library (LCCOS)

In recent years, ‘Gamification’, the use of game elements in non-gaming settings to improve user experience, has been embraced by Research Support Services at Higher Education Institutes. Research Support Games cover various topics including research data management, copyright and/or open access and address an audience ranging from early career researchers and academics to support staff.

For the organisers of the Research Support Games Days (RSGD), games can be an effective tool to communicate with scholars about often complex concepts. In its third instalment since 2019, this event promotes the use of game-based learning among Research Support Services by presenting games, online tools and platforms that could be beneficial for training purposes. Here it was also highlighted, that most of these games were designed to be played in person. However, the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 was a catalyst for developing more virtual games as a way of continuing the engagement with researchers when face-to-face training was not possible. Despite any the challenges of creating digital games, their advantage of reaching a wider audience outside the physical environment of research institutions becomes apparent in the following examples of Open Access themed online games.

The Publishing Trap (UK Copyright Literacy), this game about scholarly communication focuses on helping researchers understand the effect of different publishing models, copyright and finances on the dissemination of their research. First launched as a board game in 2017, in response to the pandemic a digital version was created in 2020. In both versions participants form up to 4 teams representing four scholars in different career scenarios and make decisions about how to best publish their research. Retaining most of the original features, the online version uses interactive PowerPoint slides and can be played via any virtual classroom software with a break-out room functionality, so that the element of team discussions from the board game is being replicated.

Similarly, in 2020, the role-playing Open Access Mystery game developed by Katrine Sundsbo uses downloadable slides. It was also designed for online platforms (i.e. Zoom) to allow for immediate verbal interaction between players who are tasked with finding the culprit responsible for a global lockdown of all research. The Open Access Escape Room, also by the same author, was originally created in 2018 as a physical game and digitally adapted in 2020 under the name The Puzzling Hunt for Open Access. Both versions follow the narrative of all research being locked away by a villain and are aimed at academic staff to gain an understanding of the concepts of Open Access. The players have to find clues and solve various Open Access themed puzzles in order to unlock research. Despite not replicating the original escape room format, where participants interact with each other in teams, the online game offers more flexibility as the mixed media-based puzzles can be completed by a single player at their own pace. Like most Research Support Games, all materials are published under a CC BY licence resulting in both versions having been played and adapted further in and outside the UK.

The single-player Open Axis: The Open Access Video Game (UCLA) was always designed for a remote learning environment intending to reach a worldwide audience of graduates and undergraduates. Created in 2020, this “choose your own adventure” can be played in a web browser, is predominantly text based but features classic 8-bit video games. The player chooses between several characters portraying scholars of various backgrounds. Following a non-linear narrative, the player’s decision impact the course of the in-game stories around themes of open access, scholarly publishing and research practices.

Choosing another approach of getting scholars interested in Open Access, the team at Robert Gordon University developed five online puzzles in 2021, including memory, crosswords and a scavenger hunt. Since puzzles can be played quicker than games, it makes them suitable for bite-sized learning during icebreakers or coffee breaks.
These games form by no means an exhaustive list and it is worth delving into the manifold resources of the Research Support Games Day Proceedings (below), where the benefits and challenges involved in taking games online are further explored.

For more information on Research Support Games Days and Gamification:

• Research Support Games Day – Notes (2019)
• Proceedings of the 2nd Research Support Games Day (RSGD #2)
• Proceedings of the 3rd Research Support Games Day (RSGD #3)
• Sebastian Deterding, Miguel Sicart, Lennart Nacke, Kenton O’Hara, and Dan Dixon. 2011. Gamification using game-design elements in non-gaming contexts. In CHI ’11 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA ’11). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 2425–2428. 10.1145/1979742.1979575

Adaptions of the “Open Access Escape Room”:

• Virtual Open Science Escape Room
• Escape Room sobre Acceso Abierto. Instrucciones y materiales

Welcome to Love Data Week!

While you have probably heard of the work of the Research Data Management Team, who support you with decisions made during the research lifecycle to handle the data you work with, use or generate, from the planning stage of your project up to the long-term preservation of your data. Good data management practices are essential to meet UCL standards of research integrity.

To summarise, planning Research Data Management effectively helps you to ensure data quality, minimise risks, save time and comply with legal, ethical, institutional and funders’ requirements. The RDM team can guide you in the creation of your Data Management Plan, read and assess your plans when complete as well as advise you throughout the research process.

Contact: lib-researchsupport@ucl.ac.uk.

Outside the RDM team, there are a range of teams across the university that can support you.

The Data Protection and Freedom of Information Team are responsible for providing advice to UCL on data protection issues and handling statutory data protection and freedom of information requests. UCL’s Data Protection Officer leads the team, which sits in the Office of the General Counsel, and we work very closely with the Legal Services team and the Information Services Group.

All research proposals that involve personal data must be registered with the data protection office before processing begins. Further information, including FAQs and guidance notes are also available.

Contact: data-protection@ucl.ac.uk.

The UCL Research Ethics Committee (REC) and Research Ethics Officers facilitate an important function in the assessment of all applications submitted for ethical review and approval. The research ethics team must ensure that all applications have rigorously considered any ethical implications arising from proposed research design, methodology, conduct, dissemination, future use and data sharing and linkage, and how this will be managed should be carefully explained within a research plan. Ethical review of data management and security is a fundamental component of the ethical review procedure and researchers must demonstrate a strategy for data storage, handling of sensitive data, data retention and sharing. The following points are frequently requested:

1. What type of data will you collect and how will you describe them?
2. How will you store and keep your data secure?
3. Will you be allowed to give access to your data once the project is completed? Who will be able to access them, under what conditions and for how long?

More information about research ethics, data protection for researchers and data management tools for handling sensitive and personal/special category data is available online.

Contact: ethics@ucl.ac.uk

The Research Contracts Team sits within Research and Innovation Services. Research Contracts assists Academics by putting in place appropriate agreements for sponsored research on behalf of UCL. This includes reviewing, drafting and providing advice to Academics and Departments and negotiating acceptable terms. This includes material transfer agreements of which data, including personal and pseudo-anonymised data are part. There are current exceptions to our remit which include: Clinical Trial Agreements and EU grants & contracts, procurement agreements and consultancy.

For queries please contact:

• SLMS: SLMSresearchcontracts@ucl.ac.uk
• BEAMS: BEAMSresearchcontracts@ucl.ac.uk
• IOE/SLASH: IOESLASHresearchcontracts@ucl.ac.uk

Visit their website for more information.

The Information Governance & Compliance team are a part of the UCL Information Security Team, with a focus on research compliance. They provide support for compliance aspects of data applications, such as DARS and CAG for NHS data, also the Department for Education. They also have experience with a wide range of requirement sets ranging from commercial organisations through to public services. However, for data that falls outside of formal external agreements, for example directly collected, they can offer suitable information governance advice that aligns with the Information Commissioner’s Office accountability Framework. Most requirements can be met by using the UCL Data Safe Haven (DSH).

For research that cannot use the DSH, we can help determine suitable technical and organisational measures. We also manage access to the ONS Secure Research Service (see the process section on the left hand side of linked page).

Contact: infogov@ucl.ac.uk

The UCL/UCLH Joint Research Office (JRO) provides research management and governance support for clinical research studies that take place across University College London and/or UCL Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (UCLH). Support and guidance are provided to researchers wishing to conduct clinical research which recruits NHS patients and/or uses their tissue or their data.

This includes any clinical research that requires a formal ‘Sponsor’ as defined by the UK Policy Framework for Health and Social Care Research (2017), the Medicines for Human Use (Clinical Trials) Regulations 2004 and subsequent amendments and the Medical Devices Regulations. Sponsor authorisation for these studies are provided by the JRO or one of the UCL clinical trials units (CTU).

The JRO consists of specialist teams who interface with colleagues across UCL/UCLH to support researchers through the research process. This includes guiding researchers through the approvals processes (e.g. NHS REC/MHRA), research contracting, research finance, regulations and compliance, study set-up and conduct, and data management.

More information about the JRO and how to get in touch can be found on the website.

And finally, the Research Integrity Team oversees and supports a broad set of research integrity initiatives at UCL to ensure compliance with the Concordat to Support research integrity support UCL to ‘Pursue a responsible research agenda (UCL 2019 Research Strategy – Cross-cutting Theme A). This includes coordinating periodic audits of UCL’s adherence with research integrity standards, leading on policy matters relating to research integrity, and frameworks for supporting integrity in research, such as the Statement on Research Integrity, the Framework for Research Integrity and the Code of Conduct for Research.  The team also led on the development of training for staff and students and provide advice and advocacy across UCL.

Who knew there were so many wonderful places to get support, and information to support your research data journey! If you are reading this during Love Data Week, don’t forget that we are hosting a Research Data Clinic with members of these teams to answer your questions! Thursday 17th February 2022 at 10.30am – register your interest on the form and we will send you all the information. After Love Data Week, get in touch with the teams directly, comment below or get in touch on Twitter!

Did you intend to make new year resolutions but did not get round to it? Why not resolve to take some time this year to further develop your library research skills and ensure you are following best practices for research? UCL Library Services provides training and support to enable you to carry out your research effectively, including online guidance and self-paced tutorials, live online training sessions, tailored and individual training and specialist enquiry services.

Here are our top 5 suggested resolutions for researchers looking to enhance their library research skills and research practices:

Be FAIR

The principles of FAIR are designed to help lower barriers to research outputs and help other researchers find and understand them in order to reuse and repurpose them. This will in turn build further research opportunities and maximise the potential benefit of resources.

Findable – making research outputs discoverable by the wider academic community and the public.
Accessible – using unique identifiers, clear metadata, use of language and access protocols.
Interoperable – applying standards to encode and exchange data and metadata.
Reusable – enabling the repurposing of research outputs to maximise their research potential.

• Guides to Research Data Management and self-paced online training can help you understand and build the FAIR Principles into your work.
• Learn more about UCL’s current Research Data Policy

Practise open publishing

The goal of Open Access is to make all research material openly available online without restriction, to all readers, free from the barriers imposed by subscriptions. Open access is now required by many research funders and for the REF but it also has its own intrinsic benefits such as more exposure for your work, more citations, broader reach and wider readership worldwide.

• Find out about the different routes to Open Access and how you can get funding and support to do the same for your research
• Search for Open Access Research online

Get searching

Refine your literature searching skills for reliable, relevant and comprehensive results. Whether you are searching for references to inform your research, as background reading, to scope your research topic, for a literature review or a systematic review, a robust search strategy is essential to ensure you find all the relevant research without having to wade through excessive irrelevant results. Our support for literature searching includes a range of options to support you at every stage of your research:

• Introductory guides and self-paced online tutorials to help you refresh your knowledge of the essential skills.
• Advanced online guidance and support, including our guide to searching for systematic reviews.
• Live online sessions covering essentials of literature searching skills and searching particular online databases.

Organise your references

Get the most out of reference management software such as EndNote, Mendeley or Zotero, which enable you to gather and organise references and full text documents relevant to your research and to insert references in a Word document automatically, generating a reference list in the citation style of your choice. We provide support in using EndNote, Mendeley and Zotero to help you use the software more effectively and to troubleshoot your queries:

• Live online and face to face training sessions to get you started and for questions and answers.
• Online guides including suggested activities to get to know the software and frequently asked questions to help resolve your queries.

Understand bibliometrics

Bibliometrics is concerned with the analysis of research based on citation counts and patterns. The individual measures used are also commonly referred to as bibliometrics, or citation metrics.

• Our bibliometrics guidance to UCL authors and colleagues demonstrates the best way to approach bibliometric measures, and how to interpret and use the findings in relation to UCL’s bibliometrics policy and the wider context.
• Explore further with our live online bibliometrics training sessions and self-paced online tutorials.

 

UCL Publications Board and the Open Access Team are delighted to announce that on Friday 19 November UCL’s institutional repository, UCL Discovery, reached the milestone of 30 million downloads! UCL Discovery is UCL’s open access repository, showcasing and providing access to UCL research outputs from all UCL disciplines. UCL authors currently deposit around 1,750 outputs in the repository every month (average figure January-October 2021).

Our 30 millionth download was of a journal article:
Huber, LR; Poser, BA; Bandettini, PA; Arora, K; Wagstyl, K; Cho, S; Goense, J; Nothnagel, N; Morgan, AT; van den Hurk, J; Müller, AK; Reynolds, RC; Glen, DR; Goebel, R; Gulban, OF; (2021) LayNii: A software suite for layer-fMRI. NeuroImage, 237, Article 118091. 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2021.118091.

This article introduces a new software suite, LayNii, to support layer-specific functional magnetic resonance imaging: the measurement of brain activity by detecting changes associated with blood flow. The software itself, which is compatible with Linux, Windows and MacOS, is also open source via Zenodo, DockerHub, and GitHub. The authors also made a preprint version of the article available via BioRxiv in advance of formal publication in NeuroImage. This demonstrates the combined value of open source software and open access to research publications.

The author of the article based at UCL, Dr Konrad Wagstyl, deposited the article in UCL Discovery in May 2021. Dr Wagstyl is a Sir Henry Wellcome Research Fellow at the Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging, UCL, and co-leads the Multicentre Epilepsy Lesion Detection project, an open science collaboration to develop machine learning algorithms to automatically subtle focal cortical dysplasias – areas of abnormal brain cell development which can cause epilepsy and seizures – in patients round the world.

The UCL Office for Open Science and Scholarship recommends that researchers make any software or code they use available to aid others in reproducing their research. The Research Data Management team maintain a guide on best practice for software sustainability, preservation and sharing, and can give further support to UCL researchers as required.