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.

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!

 

 

 

2 December: Nothing says Season’s Greetings like writing and sharing your data management plan!

 

 

 

3 December: Father Christmas has been collecting data again this year…But is his list protected by copyright? Take our online copyright Christmas quiz.

 

 

 

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.

 

 

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.

 

 

 

6 December: Retraction Watch is a searchable database of retracted, corrected, or concern articles with 40k+ entries. Search by author, title, or affiliation to ensure your research is based on trustworthy sources.

 

7 December: Looking to start or grow your Citizen Science project? UCL’s Resources Hub offers training, tools & support to help you succeed. Explore what’s available today!

 

 

8 December: Join UCL’s Copyright Literacy community channel for a virtual mince pie and the latest copyright news!

 

 

 

 

 

9 December: Refresh your Research Integrity training with the recently updated course which now includes guidance on Research Security and updates from the revised Concordat to Support Research Integrity.

 

10 December: Jingle all the way…to gaining ethical approval! The Research Ethics Team can help – book a drop-in session with one of the team.

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.

Find out more about UCL’s Research Publications Service and how to make your publications open access.

UCL Press

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.

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

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

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!

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Guest Post by Dominic Allington-Smith (Open Access Publications Manager)

UCL Discovery, UCL’s institutional repository, has hit another milestone! UCL Publications Board and the Open Access Team are excited to share that on Friday 18 July, the number of downloads reached the 60 million mark. 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 1,100 outputs in the repository every month (average figure for the current academic year).

The 60 millionth download was of the interim report ‘Young people & coastal communities: Local policymaker and practitioner perspectives’ produced by the UCL Coastal Youth Life Chances project led by Professor Avril Keating.  This research project examines how growing up in coastal communities in England impacts the life chances of young people. The report arises from the project team’s conversations with 50 policymakers and practitioners from around England about their perspectives on the challenges facing young adults aged 15-20.

At the time of writing, UCL Discovery hosts over 193,200 open access publications, comprising mostly self-archived copies of research outputs, but also including doctoral and research master’s theses (contemporary submissions and historic digitisations), and books published by UCL Press.  Since the 50 million downloads milestone in June 2024, the following titles are the highest-downloaded publications for each UCL Faculty, Institute or School. This list continues to reflect the diversity across UCL research:

• Faculty of Arts and Humanities: Цифровые гуманитарные науки Хрестоматия / Digital humanities: in search of definitions (book, 2017)
• Faculty of Laws: Artificial Intelligence, Education and Assessment at UCL Laws: Current Thinking and Next Steps for the UK Legal Education Sector (working/discussion paper, 2025)
• School of Slavonic and Eastern European Studies: The Gesta Hungarorum of Anonymus, the Anonymous Notary of King Béla: A Translation (journal article, 2009)*
• Faculty of Social and Historical Sciences: The Responsibility of Intellectuals: Reflections by Noam Chomsky and others after 50 years (UCL Press book, 2019)
• Faculty of the Built Environment (Bartlett): Space Syntax: Selected papers by Bill Hillier (UCL Press book, 2025)
• Faculty of Engineering Sciences: Mastering the game of Go without human knowledge (journal article, 2017)
• Faculty of Maths and Physical Sciences: The Traditional Four Steps Transportation Modeling Using a Simplified Transport Network: A Case Study of Dhaka City, Bangladesh (journal article, 2012)*
• Faculty of Brain Sciences: What is mentalization? The concept and its foundations in developmental research (book chapter, 2012)*
• Faculty of Life Sciences: FIP Global Pharmacy Workforce Report 2012 (report, 2012)
• Faculty of Medical Sciences: Textbook of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery (UCL Press book, 2016)*
• Faculty of Population Health Sciences: Global, regional, and national burden of stroke and its risk factors, 1990-2019: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019 (journal article, 2021)
• Institute of Education: Intelligence Unleashed: An argument for AI in Education (report, 2016)

* These publications are also the highest-downloaded of all time.

Hitting 60 million downloads highlights the reach and potential which comes from sharing research through UCL Discovery. There are a number of ways you can do this, primarily through sharing your research publications via UCL RPS and Profiles. You might also want to consider sharing other types of outputs such as data, code and software to further enhance the visibility and reproducibility of your work. UCL’s 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.

Another year of sharing research, and another incredible milestone – congratulations to everyone involved! Let’s keep it up and continue pursuing open access at UCL to ensure we are reaching the widest audience and having the greatest impact.

 

Get Involved!

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!

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Back at the end of April, UCL hosted its first-ever Replication Games thanks to a grant from the Research Culture Seed Fund awarded to Kirsty Wallis, Head of Research Liaison at UCL Library Services, and Sandy Schumann, Lecturer in Security and Crime Science and local network lead for the UK Reproducibility Network. The event was facilitated by Derek Mikola from the Institute for Replication (I4R).

Three teams worked together to try to reproduce the analysis and results of a published paper – all in one day. They used only the information provided by the authors’ descriptions of the methodology and analytical approach, as well as public datasets and, to the extent that this was available, code. The groups consisted of a mix of researchers at different career levels and from altogether nine different disciplines.

The day kicked off early with an introduction by Derek, who got everyone set up in their groups, well provisioned with coffee and snacks. The groups had already been working together in the lead up to the event itself, selecting a paper from a list compiled by the I4R and familiarising themselves with the materials the authors had shared. Throughout the day, the teams encountered several challenges. Some discovered that packages that were used to run the analysis were no longer supported, meaning, ultimately, that the core analysis could not be conducted. Others identified questionable procedures to re-code variables, which meant that once variables were treated appropriately, results were not reproduced. Only one of the teams came to the conclusion that the published findings were largely reproducible.

Overall, the replication games were a roaring success. Participants were able to connect with researchers from other disciplines and gain hands-on experience in the workflow of reproducing published work. They also reported that they developed a better understanding of how to present their own work in a manner such that it is detailed enough to be reproduced.

All teams will document their analyses in reports that will be published by I4R soon, so watch this space and we will share the final product!

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Get involved!

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, and join our mailing list to be part of the conversation!

Here in the Office for Open Science & Scholarship we like to start every new year by taking a look back over the last and sharing our highlights with you.

In 2024 the Open Access Team facilitated the Gold open access publication of 3,963 papers. UCL Discovery continued to go from strength to strength, with over 53 million downloads. The publications repository now boasts over 185,000 open access items, including 24,900 theses, with over 15,500 uploads in the preceding twelve months.

The Research Data Management Team has had an equally productive year, publishing over 230 items in the data repository which has now exceeded 230,000 views and a similar number of downloads. They have reviewed over 30 data management plans and held classes for over 70 people, both online and in person. There are still seats available for term 2 that can be booked online.

Updates and publications

Across all of the teams that make up the Office we have published a whole host of documents and updates such as:

• New version of research data policy
• New-look RDR website
• Newly launched principles for Citizen Science
• Co-created UCL Principles of Authorship
• Open Science Case Studies

Our blog highlights

The blog has been super busy throughout the year with one of our personal highlights being the brilliant series of posts by Christine Daoutis, UCL’s Copyright Officer that looked at a range of issues around copyright in open science including a deep dive across three posts into Copyright and AI, how copyright exceptions can support your research and how copyright applies to Text and Data mining.

We also had some great events throughout the year that you can catch up on, from our annual Open Science Conference, the second annual Open Science & Scholarship Awards, and our first ever Citizen Science Community Event.

We also had a great time working with the UCL Digital Accessibility team throughout the year, they have been a great support in improving the accessibility of everything we do. We were able to highlight their work in one of our Newsletters and we also interviewed Ben Watson, Head of Digital Accessibility, who was a great sport and is an overall inspirational guy!

Upcoming in 2025

We have a great year ahead in 2025, we have the imminent publication of our next Operational plan, designed to push the team to bigger and better things for the office. We are hoping to get that out in the first quarter of the year, its just going through various stages of internal feedback before we can get it out there! We will be continuing to grow our newest social media channels LinkedIn and BlueSky, and if you don’t subscribe to our newsletter, now’s your chance!

We will also be challenging ourself to bigger and better things when it comes to our conference. You all know that we like to change it up and this year we are reaching out to friends and colleagues to change our conference into our first festival!

We will also be continuing the brilliant series with Ilan Kelman on the Risks and Opportunities of Open Science. We have already shared the first two parts but keep an eye out for the last three parts coming soon!

As we conclude International Open Access Week, we have been inspired by a wealth of discussions and events across UCL! This week, we have explored balancing collaboration and commercialisation, highlighted the work of Citizen Science initiatives, discussed the role of open access textbooks in education, and addressed key copyright challenges in the age of AI to ensure free and open access to knowledge.

Today, we are excited to introduce the UCL Statement of Principles of Authorship. This new document, shaped through a co-creation workshop and community consultation, provides guidance on equitable authorship practices and aims to foster more inclusive and transparent research collaboration across UCL.

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The team at the UCL Office for Open Science & Scholarship is pleased to launch the UCL Statement of Principles of Authorship. These principles have been built up from a co-creation workshop and developed in consultation with our academic community and are now available for wider use, linked from our website.

In August 2023, the OOSS Team posted a discussion about the challenges of equity in authorship and the co-production workshop held during that year’s Open Science & Scholarship Conference. We outlined some preliminary considerations that led to the workshop, summarised the discussion and emerging themes, including the need to more widely acknowledge contributions to research outputs, the power dynamics involved in authorship decisions, and ways to make academic language and terminology accessible for contributors outside the academic ‘bubble’.

The outcomes of the workshop were then used as the basis for developing the new Statement of Principles of Authorship. This document provides general advice, recommendations and requirements for authors, designed to complement the UCL Code of Conduct for Research and align with existing published frameworks, such as the Technicians Commitment or CRediT. The document outlines four core principles and a variety of applications for their use across the broad range of subject areas and output types that are produced across the institution. It also proposes standards for affiliations and equitable representation of contributors.

While it is true that academic publishing is a complex and changing environment, these principles are intended as a touchstone for discussions around authorship rather than explicit expectations or policy. They can guide decision making, help understand how affiliations should be presented for best consistency and traceability in the long term, and empower people to request inclusion or make plans to include citizen scientists or other types of collaborators to their work.

We look forward to hearing the many ways that these principles can be used by the community!

For a full overview of our #OAWeek 2024 posts, visit our blog series page. To learn more about the Principles of Authorship and stay updated on open science initiatives across UCL, sign up for our mailing list.

 

We are approaching the end of International Open Access Week, and we have been enjoying a series of interesting insights and discussions across UCL!  Earlier this week, we explored the balance between collaboration and commercialisation, highlighted the important work of Citizen Science initiatives and the growing significance of open access textbooks.

Today, Christine Daoutis, UCL Copyright Support Officer, will build on our ongoing series about copyright and open science, focusing on how we can ensure free and open access to knowledge in the age of AI, by addressing copyright challenges, advocating for rights retention policies, and discussing secondary publication rights that benefit both researchers and the public.

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Open Access Week 2024 builds on last year’s theme, Community over Commercialisation, aiming not only to continue discussions but to take meaningful action that prioritises the interests of the scholarly community and the public. This post focuses on copyright-related issues that, when addressed by both individual researchers and through institutional, funder, and legal reforms, can help create more sustainable and equitable access to knowledge.

Retaining author rights

Broadly speaking, rights retention means that authors of scholarly publications avoid the traditional practice of signing away their rights to publishers, typically done through a copyright transfer agreement or exclusive licence. Instead, as an author, you retain at least some rights that allow you to share and reuse your own research as openly as possible. For example, you could post your work in an open access repository, share it on academic networks, reuse it in your teaching, and incorporate it into other works like your thesis.

Many funders and institutions have specific rights retention policies that address related legal issues. If such a policy applies, and publishers are informed in advance, authors typically need to retain rights and apply an open licence (usually CC BY) to the accepted manuscript at the point of submission.

Rights retention ensures that your research can be made open access without relying on unsustainable pay-to-publish models, and without facing delays or restrictions from publishers’ web posting policies. Importantly, rights retention is not limited to published research—it can be applied to preprints, data, protocols, and other outputs throughout the research process.

Secondary Publication Rights (SPRs)

Secondary publication rights (SPRs) refer to legislation that allows publicly funded research to be published in an open access repository or elsewhere, at the same time as its primary publication in academic journals. Some European countries already have SPRs, as highlighted by the Knowledge Rights 21 study conducted by LIBER, and LIBER advocates for #ZeroEmbargo on publicly funded scientific publications. There are ongoing calls to harmonise and optimise these rights across countries, ensuring that the version of record becomes immediately available upon publication, overriding contractual restrictions imposed by publishers.

SPRs can apply to different types of research output and are meant to complement rights retention policies. However, introducing SPRs depends on copyright reform, which is not an action individual researchers can take themselves, though it’s still useful to be aware of developments in this area.

Artificial Intelligence and your rights

The rise of Generative AI (GenAI) has introduced broader issues affecting researchers, both as users and as authors of copyrighted works. These include:

• Clauses in subscription agreements that seek to prevent researchers from using resources their institution has subscribed to for AI-related purposes.
• Publishers forming agreements with AI companies to share content from journal articles and books for AI training purposes, often without clear communication to authors. A recent deal between Taylor & Francis and Microsoft for $10 million has raised concerns among scholars about how their research will be used by AI tools. In some cases, authors are given the option to opt in, as seen with Cambridge Press.
• For works already licensed for reuse, such as articles under a CC BY licence or those used under copyright exceptions, questions arise about how the work will be reused, for what purposes, and how it will be attributed.

While including published research in AI training should help improve the accuracy of models and reduce bias, researchers should have enough information to understand and decide how their work is reused. Creative Commons is exploring ‘preference signals’ for authors of CC-licensed works to address this issue.

The key issue is that transferring your copyright or exclusive rights to a publisher restricts what you can do with your own work and allows the publisher to reuse your work in ways beyond your control, including training AI models.

Using Copyright exceptions in research

UK copyright law includes exceptions (known as ‘permitted acts’) for non-commercial research, private study, criticism, review, quotation, and illustration for instruction. As a researcher, you can rely on these exceptions as long as your use qualifies as ‘fair dealing’, as previously discussed in a blog post during Fair Dealing Week. Text and data mining for non-commercial research is also covered by an exception, allowing researchers to download and analyse large amounts of data to which they have lawful access.

Relying on copyright exceptions involves evaluating your purpose and, for some exceptions, making a decision around what is ‘fair’. This also involves some assessment of risk. Understanding copyright exceptions helps you exercise your rights as users of knowledge and make confident assessments as to whether and when a copyright exception is likely to apply, and when permission is necessary. [see links for UK legislation at the end of this article]

Engage with copyright at UCL

The conversations sparked during Open Access Week continue throughout the year at UCL as part of ongoing copyright support and education. To engage further with these issues, you can:

• Add your voice to how copyright literacy is shaped at UCL. Provide feedback on the draft UCL copyright literacy strategy and consider joining the new UCL copyright literacy community.
• Attend a copyright training session or email copyright@ucl.ac.uk to arrange a bespoke session. The newly introduced ‘Copyright, Open Science and Creativity’ game is a fun way of engaging with current debates and learning about recent developments. More dates for this will be released soon.
• Follow copyright news on the Open@UCL blog and the Copyright blog.

Useful Legislation

• Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, Section 29: Research and Private Study
• Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, Section 29A: Text and Data Mining for Non-Commercial Research
• Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, Section 30: Text and Data Mining
• Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, Section 32: Copying for non-commercial research

As we continue celebrating International Open Access Week, following our earlier post on balancing openness and commercialisation, we’re now turning our focus to Citizen Science initiatives. Sheetal Saujani, UCL’s Citizen Science Coordinator, highlights in her article below how community-driven research and open access are shaping the future of knowledge creation, empowering individuals to make meaningful contributions to global challenges.

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Did you know that ordinary citizens are making significant contributions to solving some of the world’s biggest challenges – from climate change to wildlife conservation?

This year’s International Open Access Week continues to focus on the importance of community in scholarly research and open access initiatives.

Definition of citizen science at UCL

UCL supports a broad approach to citizen science, recognising that there are different applications and functions of citizen science in research, whether they are community-driven research projects or global investigations.

Citizen science is characterised as research conducted by the public, often in collaboration with academic institutions, and is a diverse practice involving academic and community researchers from various disciplines.

At its most inclusive and most innovative, citizen science involves ordinary people as partners in the entire research process, including determining research themes, questions, methodologies and means of disseminating results. The involvement of people in participatory research can range from short-term data collection to intensive involvement in the research process, from technical contribution to genuine research, and from open collaboration to co-creation of knowledge.

Citizen science promotes community-driven collaboration over profit-driven research

Citizen science is a model for open access and collective participation in research, ensuring the benefits of knowledge creation are accessible to all.  It embodies community-driven collaboration because it is built on principles of openness, inclusivity, and shared ownership of knowledge. The focus is on addressing real-world problems and empowering communities to take part in research that benefits everyone – not on generating profit for a select few.

Why does open access matter?

Open access refers to the free, unrestricted access to research outputs like journal articles, data, and educational resources. It ensures that research reaches the widest possible audience, and that it can be used and shared easily.

Open access aligns with the values of community engagement and citizen science by making knowledge and data open to the public. This allows people to engage in research without the barriers of paywalls or proprietary information, unlike commercialised research, where data can be restricted for profit.

Citizen science as an open, community-driven approach

Citizen science is a community-driven approach that focuses on problem-solving and knowledge expansion, promoting open collaboration and ownership. Citizen science projects typically share their findings openly. Initiatives like Zooniverse and iNaturalist offer open access to tools, software, and platforms, democratising knowledge. By enabling people to participate in and shape real research based on publicly accessible data, this approach promotes accessibility and inclusivity. It builds trust between researchers and the public, strengthening the quality and impact of research by drawing on collective wisdom and diverse perspectives.

Case studies: open access in citizen science

Below are two examples of successful citizen science projects that embody this week’s theme.

Air quality monitoring by communities: In the Open AQ project, citizens use open-access, low-cost sensors to track air pollution in their neighbourhoods. The data collected is shared freely and openly, allowing communities to act and policymakers to respond. This contrasts with commercial entities that might charge for proprietary pollution data or sensor technology.

Biodiversity conservation: iNaturalist invites people to document plant and animal species in their area. The data is shared freely, benefiting researchers and conservationists worldwide. No one is excluded based on ability to pay or access to commercial tools – everyone has a stake in biodiversity protection.

Challenges and opportunities: advancing with community in mind

Challenges of commercialisation in citizen science do exist: some citizen science platforms are commercialised, locking data behind paywalls or limiting access to paying users. Profit-driven research models hinder knowledge access, distort priorities, exploit participants, and compromise objectivity. To benefit society and produce shared findings, it is important to prioritise the public good and fair access to research.

Promoting open access in citizen science can enhance participation, diversity, and openness. Because citizen science invites participation from all, it offers opportunities for underrepresented communities and developing countries to contribute to and benefit from research. This inclusive model breaks down barriers in commercialised research systems, ensuring marginalised voices are heard and valued in the research process.

We would encourage everyone to support open access movements and citizen science platforms and projects that rank community benefit over profit.

Empowering the public through open access and citizen science

Open access and citizen science align with the theme of “Community over Commercialization” by prioritising collaboration and transparency in research. Open access removes barriers, while citizen science empowers people to participate in research projects. This approach puts the interests of the public first and benefits the wider population.

Looking towards the future, prioritising community-driven approaches in research can lead to more equitable, inclusive, and impactful research. Citizen science and open access work together to resist commercialised research, leading to a more equitable, community-centred approach to research.

As we celebrate International Open Access Week, let’s remember that when we put community at the heart of research, we empower everyone to contribute to the knowledge that shapes our world and makes a lasting impact on society.

Today marks the start of International Open Access Week 2024! Throughout the week, we’ll be sharing insights from UCL staff on how open access is shaping research, collaboration, and scholarship across the university. To kick off the series, Kirsty Wallis explores the significance of this year’s theme and the challenges and opportunities of balancing openness with commercialisation in ways that benefit both research and society.

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The theme for this year’s International Open Access Week (OA Week), “Community over Commercialisation,” intends to provide a starting point for us to reflect on the importance of community in the work that we do relating to Openness, rather than letting financial or commercial interests take focus.

This is the second year focusing on this theme, which shows its significance in Open Science and Scholarship and the growing interest in these discussions.

The UNESCO Recommendations on Open Science highlight the issues of groups profiting from publicly funded research and advocate for non-commercial, collaborative publishing models.

This year’s OA Week invites reflection on critical questions around commercialisation, corporate control of knowledge and what we can do to encourage a shift towards more open practices. This post will focus on the progress in opening up research worldwide, but also bring to the fore some areas where commercialisation may be able to serve the public interest. Can commercialising research ever be for public good?

Last year in support of the theme, we launched our Citizen Science Community! It was the culmination of a lot of work from the team in the Office for Open Science and Scholarship. Our approach to Citizen Science at UCL foregrounds the need to prioritise community interests and aiming to make everything we do as inclusive as possible and integrate as many subject areas as we can.

We also explored how Creative Commons (CC) licences promote open, reusable research, making scholarly outputs accessible to a wider audience—from researchers to the general public.

International Open Access Week has created a list of profiles of global institutions showcasing how Open Science communities are embedding principles of shared knowledge and equitable access into their practices: visit the International Open Access Week list of Theme Profiles.

Continuing the Discussion in 2024:

As we move forward, OA Week 2024 offers the opportunity to build on the 2023 theme and further explore how community-based approaches can coexist with commercial interests in ways that serve both the research community and the public. Turning this dialogue into concrete action is essential for achieving the goals of Open Science—making knowledge accessible and equitable for everyone.

So, is there ever a scenario where commercialisation of research can work for community? After all, it is possible to share the outputs of research openly while also selling them as a product, for example in software. It is possible and even fairly common in some areas to make the underlying code open source but sell access to supported versions or additional features that can be used by companies and businesses that are unable to support products themselves. There are many examples of this, from the underlying code supporting Android phones and Chrome browsers to the Linux operating system and, also the ePrints repository software that we use here at UCL.

As another example, this time from within UCL itself is the Ventura CPAP Machine developed during 2020 at the height of the pandemic. The designs for the machine were made available free of charge via the UCLB licensing system. This enabled limitations to be put in place for who could use the designs, preventing companies from profiteering from the design while making it available to hospitals and other charitable organisations to build and test their own free of charge. It has always been UCL’s position that profit is not the end game, going back as far as Jeremy Bentham, the spiritual founder of UCL, who believed that education should be more widely available, a core underpinning value of UCL and the Office for Open Science and Scholarship today.

This year’s Open Access Week theme aligns with some of the behind-the-scenes work we’re doing to explore the relationship between openness and commercialisation and investigate scenarios where they may not be as much in conflict as the theme suggests. Keep an eye out for the report and recommendations coming later this academic year!

Guest post by Alan Bracey, UCL Open Access Compliance Officer

As we prepare for a full week of events and updates during International Open Access Week, the UCL Open Access team is sharing recent improvements to UCL’s Research Publications Service (RPS) and its public interface, UCL Profiles. Below is a summary of the key changes implemented, including new HTML text entry boxes for easier formatting, refined search and filtering options, and improvements in readability and accessibility. Check it out!

Overview text boxes are now html

We start with one of the most popular feature requests from colleagues at UCL and other institutions, and are very pleased to announce that this has now been added by the supplier.

The text entry boxes in RPS for entering Overview, Research interests, and Teaching summary are now HTML rather than text, and have controls to add formatting and links:

Any formatting added here is applied in Profiles.

Better searching and filtering in Profiles

The update brings several improvements to searching and filtering. Firstly, the search algorithm itself has been updated. This means that although users will see fewer results as they add terms, those results should be more relevant, particularly where users are searching for multiple terms or multi-word terms. The supplier is keeping the new algorithm under review, so we welcome feedback on how the search is performing.

Profiles also now highlights where the search terms have been matched to major sections within a profile, helping users to understand the relevance of their results:

Plus, the display of zero search results has also been improved:

A search has also been added to the top of the publication and activity pages, so that users can search a list for content within that list (e.g. search an academic’s publications for an article):

The list of filters is now collapsible, making the full list of available filters more prominent and easier to navigate. Highlights also remind users what filters have already been applied, making search results easier to refine:

Other changes in Profiles

We are pleased to announce that Profiles has a new font, with a stronger weight and wider spacing, that improves readability:

The option to add pronouns has been available in RPS for a while now, but previously they did not display in Profiles. This has been updated so that pronouns added in RPS (on the Account Settings page) show in Profiles, under your name:

The X/Twitter icon has also been updated.

Other improvements you might notice in RPS

The RPS Edit Profile page (RPS > Edit my Profile) is better spaced out, making it clearer and easier to read. Updates have been made to the overall layout and to profile and field-level privacy controls. Accessibility improvements have also been made, including to the photo uploader.

Note: ‘Position’ and ‘Department’ no longer show in the Edit page, only the RPS ‘View profile’ page, which will help avoid potential confusion as these fields are sourced from HR and cannot be edited in RPS. See our FAQs for details of how to request changes to those fields.

This page used to show embedded publications (and a related graph), professional activities, teaching activities and grants. These have been removed because they were found to be confusing for users. (These tabs are still on the RPS View profile page.)

This means there are no shortcuts to Manage publications/professional activities/teaching activities/grants from the Edit profile page. Use the home button (top left of RPS) to return to your home page to edit publications/professional activities/teaching activities. Grants are not editable in RPS, but this data will be improved before it is added to Profiles in future.

We’d love to hear your feedback on these updates and any other features you’d like to see in Profiles! To share your thoughts, please contact UCL’s Open Access Team.