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.

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 Sheetal Saujani, Citizen Science Coordinator, and Christiana McMahon, Research Data Support Officer

This year’s theme for International Open Access Week 2025, “Who Owns Our Knowledge?”, asks us to reflect on how knowledge is created, shared, and controlled, and whose voices are included in that process. It’s a question that aligns closely with UCL’s approach to citizen science, which promotes openness, collaboration and equity in research.

Citizen science provides a powerful lens to examine how knowledge is co-produced with communities. It recognises that valuable knowledge comes not only from academic institutions but also but also from lived experience, community knowledge, and shared exploration.

Through initiatives like the UCL Citizen Science Academy and UCL Citizen Science Certificate, we support researchers and project leads to work in partnership with the public, enabling people from all backgrounds to take part in research that matters to them. These programmes are designed to be inclusive and hands-on, helping to build confidence, skills and shared responsibility.

For those of us working in academia, this theme reminds us that open access isn’t just about making papers free to read – it’s about changing how research is produced. Involving citizen scientists in forming research questions, collecting data, and interpreting findings opens up the research process itself, not just access to its outputs.

The Principles for Citizen Science at UCL emphasise respectful partnerships, transparency, and fair recognition. They reflect our belief that citizen scientists are co-creators whose insights – rooted in everyday experience and local knowledge – bring depth and relevance to academic work.

In particular, the fifth principle for Citizen Science at UCL states that CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance should be considered when working with marginalised communities and Indigenous groups. These principles are: Collective Benefit, Authority to Control, Responsibility, and Ethics, which remind researchers that creating knowledge from Indigenous data must be to the benefit of Indigenous Peoples, nations and communities. These Principles support Indigenous Peoples in establishing more control over their data and its use in research. The Research Data Management Team encourage staff and students to engage with the CARE Principles in addition to the FAIR principles.

So, who owns our knowledge? At UCL, we believe the answer should be: everyone. Through citizen science and its principles, we’re building a future where knowledge is created collectively, shared responsibly and made openly accessible – because it belongs to the communities that help shape it.

The UCL Office for Open Science and Scholarship invites you to contribute to the open science and scholarship movement. Stay connected for updates, events, and opportunities.

Follow us on Bluesky, LinkedIn, and join our mailing list to be part of the conversation!

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With only a few weeks to go until Open Access Week 2025 (20th-26th October), we are looking forward to what it will hold. This year’s theme is the vital question, ‘Who Owns Our Knowledge?’, which is guaranteed to provoke insightful discussions and provide a lot to reflect on. Whether from the perspective of Copyright, Open Access Publishing, Data Sharing or Citizen Science, the question of who owns knowledge underpins the ethos of Open Science, and we can’t wait to delve into this subject.

One way in which we will be doing this is through a webinar with four speakers from UCL who will be sharing their perspectives and considering how knowledge is created, shared and controlled.

The speakers are:

• Christine Daouti – Copyright Support Officer
• Catherine Sharpe – Head of Open Access Services
• Lauren Cantos – Research Integrity and Assurance Officer
• Muki Haklay – Professor of Geographical Information Science

It will be fantastic to have these UCL staff members in the same (virtual) room, and we are excited to hear from them. As well as a panel discussion, there will be opportunity for audience questions, so come ready to ask about anything you want further information or opinions on.

The webinar will take place on Wednesday 22nd October 11am – 12:30pm and will be hosted on Teams, so sign up today and it will be added to your outlook calendar.

We will also be exploring the question ‘Who Owns Our Knowledge?’ in different blog posts throughout the week. As well as a discussion of the theme, one will focus on Rights Retention, one on Copyright and another on Citizen Science and Research Data.

Written by staff working in these areas, these pieces promise to be informative and applicable. Watch this space!

Finally, a quick note to say we are delighted to be hosting the annual UCL Open Science and Scholarship Awards Ceremony during Open Access Week. Keep an eye out for our next blog post which will announce the award winners and provide all the details about the event and how you can attend.

Open Access Week 2025 will be a great opportunity to continue the conversation about making our research and knowledge open and accessible – we hope to see you there!

The UCL Office for Open Science and Scholarship invites you to contribute to the open science and scholarship movement. Stay connected for updates, events, and opportunities.

Follow us on Bluesky, LinkedIn, and join our mailing list to be part of the conversation!

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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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It has been a couple of weeks since our debut collaboration with our friends at LSE and the Francis Crick Institute and I can safely say that the festival was a roaring success. We all would like to extend a huge thank you to everyone that came to any of the events, in person or online, it was great to see so many people engaging with Open Science!

In case you missed it, the festival ran from 2 – 6 June and included an exciting array of sessions including creative workshops, informal networking, case studies, online and in person panel discussions and technology demonstrations. The full programme is still available online, or keep scrolling for links, recordings and upcoming content!

Monday 2 June

Open Methods with Protocols.io

This workshop introduced the benefits of publishing your methods and protocols as a separate open access output. As an in person event, there is no available recording, but you can access Protocols.io and their excellent free help and support guidance online.

Creativity in research and engagement

This session of making, sharing and storytelling has its own blog post – read it now!

Tuesday 3 June

Co-producing research with Special Collections: Prejudice and Power case study

UCL Special Collections presented their experiences of using co-creation to engage with rare book and archive collections especially as applied to the recent Prejudice in Power project, that consisted of a range of co-creation, community and academic initiatives that focussed on our holdings to respond to the university’s historic role in promoting eugenics. It also briefly discussed wider co-creation activity in UCL Special Collections, the lessons learned and how these are being embedded in practice.

Resources:

• Prejudice in Power Project
• Project outcomes, including co-created works

Scaling up Diamond Open Access Journals

Diamond open access (OA) is championed as a more open, equitable and inclusive, community-driven journal publishing model, especially when compared against other commercially owned, author pay and subscription models. Demand is rapidly growing but there is a lack of capacity and funding for journals to sustainably meet it. There are many barriers to solving these complex challenges, but one new initiative called the Open Journals Collective aims to disrupt the current landscape by offering a more equitable, sustainable and alternative solution to the traditional and established payment structures.

During this interactive session we heard from the conveners of the collective to learn about why and how it came about, what it offers and why it is needed. We also heard about the experiences with various OA journal models, as well as perspectives from a journal Editor who resigned from a subscription journal and successfully launched a new and competing diamond open access journal.

Access the recording below or on the UCL Press website.

Professionalising data, software, and infrastructure support to transform open science

This workshop focused on the needs of both researchers and technical support, seeking to understand the answers to some fundamental questions: If you are a researcher – what do you need in terms of technical support and services? If you are a research technology professional – what skill and training do you need to be able to offer this support?

The team in ARC behind this fascinating session have shared a write-up about it which you can read on their blog page.

Wednesday 4 June:

Should reproducibility be the aim for open qualitative research? Researchers’ perspectives

Reproducibility is often 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. However, 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 asked 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?

Access the recording below or on the LSE Library YouTube Channel.

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 brought together researchers from a range of disciplines to share their experiences and strategies for open research when working with personal data.

Access the recording below or on the LSE Library YouTube Channel.

Thursday 5 June: Open Research in the Age of Populism

Political shifts around the world, from the Trump administration in the US to Orban’s government in Hungary, are making it more important than ever to have reliable research freely available. However, these governments are also making it more risky to openly share 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 this session the panellists considered 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.

Access the recording below or on the LSE Library YouTube Channel.

Friday 6 June

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 in-depth panel discussed how we think about “authorship” for AI-assisted writing.

This session was so in-depth that the panel and the chair have worked together to create a summary of the discussion, complete with the resources and themes shared, which you can read on a separate blog post.

Guest post by Dr Christiana McMahon, Research Data Support Officer

Since launching in June 2019, the UCL Research Data Repository has now received over 1million views from over 190 countries and territories across the world! Plus, we have published over 1000 items and facilitated over 800,000 downloads!

This is a huge milestone and demonstrates how far reaching the Research Data Repository has become.

To date, the:

• most viewed record is:

Heenan, Thomas; Jnawali, Anmol; Kok, Matt; Tranter, Thomas; Tan, Chun; Dimitrijevic,  Alexander; et al. (2020). Lithium-ion Battery INR18650 MJ1 Data: 400 Electrochemical Cycles (EIL-015). University College London. Dataset. https://doi.org/10.5522/04/12159462.v1

• most downloaded record is:

Steinmetz, Nicholas A; Zatka-Haas, Peter; Carandini, Matteo; Harris, Kenneth (2019). Distributed coding of choice, action, and engagement across the mouse brain. University College London. Dataset. https://doi.org/10.5522/04/9970907.v1

• most cited record is:

Pérez-García, Fernando; Rodionov, Roman; Alim-Marvasti, Ali; Sparks, Rachel; Duncan, John; Ourselin, Sebastien (2020). EPISURG: a dataset of postoperative magnetic resonance images (MRI) for quantitative analysis of resection neurosurgery for refractory epilepsy. University College London. Dataset. https://doi.org/10.5522/04/9996158.v1

What is the UCL Research Data Repository?

From the Research Publications Service for published manuscripts and theses, to MediaCentral for all things media, UCL staff and students can access different places to store their research outputs – and the UCL Research Data Repository is a perfect place for research data, posters, presentations, software, workflows, data management plans, figures and models.

Key features:

• Available to all current staff and research students
• Supports almost all file types
• All published items can have a full data citation including a DOI (unique persistent identifier)
• Items can be embargoed where necessary
• Helps provide access and data sharing
• Preserves and curates outputs for 10+ years
• Facilitates discovery of research outputs
• Helps researchers to meet UCL / funders’ requirements for FAIR data

More information about the service can be found on our website.

Access our user guide.

Why use the Research Data Repository?

With communities across UCL being actively encouraged to engage with the FAIR principles, it was important to give staff and research students even greater means to do so. The FAIR principles: Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable, refer to a set of attributes research outputs should have to enable secondary researchers to find, understand, repurpose and reuse these without major technical barriers​. Subsequently, there are many advantages to having FAIR research outputs including:

• Greater accessibility of research outputs
• Enhanced transparency of the research process
• Greater potential to replicate studies and verify findings
• Enhanced potential for greater citation and collaboration
• Encourages members of the public to become involved in research projects and become citizen scientists
• Maximises research potential of existing research resources by reusing and repurposing them

Hence, we developed and launched the Research Data Repository to support staff and research students wanting to further engage with the FAIR principles here at UCL.

Collaboration is key

The Research Data Management team in Library Services and the Research Data Stewardship team from the Centre for Advanced Research Computing, collaborate to provide both administrative and technical support – helping users to upload, publish and archive their research outputs.

You can reach us using researchdatarepository@ucl.ac.uk or join us at one of our online or in-person drop-in sessions.

What does the future hold?

Over the past year, the Research Data Repository team participated in a series of workshops as part of the FAIR-IMPACT Coordination and Support Action  funded by the European Union. This work was led by Dr Socrates Varakliotis and supported by Dr Christiana McMahon, Kirsty Wallis, Dr James Wilson and Daniel Delargy.

The aims of these workshops were to:

• firstly, enhance the trustworthiness of the repository; and
• secondly, to enhance the semantic metadata (documentation) made publicly available online

During the first project, we conducted a thorough self-assessment of the information we provide about the repository service with a view to highlighting how we demonstrate trustworthiness. Consequently, we made a series of improvements to our documentation including the publishing of a new, more accessible website.

Over the course of the second project, we focused on improving the standardised metadata we make available to search engines indexing repository information globally. In this project, we were able to demonstrate how having validated metadata is important to supporting the trustworthiness of repository services.

The next step is to further explore how the repository’s trustworthiness may be enhanced even further to formally meet international standards and expectations.

Final thoughts

Having over 1million views truly is a fantastic achievement and testament to the hard work and dedication of those working behind the scenes to provide this brilliant service, and the wonderful users across UCL who have published with us.

Next stop, 2million views – and until then…

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!

Guest post by Preeti Matharu, Jack Hindley, Victor Olago, Angharad Green (ARC Research Data Stewards), in celebration of International Love Data Week 2025

Research data is a valuable yet vulnerable asset. Research data is a valuable yet vulnerable asset. Researchers collect and analyse large amounts of personal and sensitive data ranging from health records to survey responses, and this raises an important question – whose data is it anyway?

If data involve human subjects, then participants are the original owners of their personal data. They grant permission to researchers to collect and use their data through informed consent. Therefore, responsibility for managing and protecting their data, in line with legal, regulatory, ethical requirements, and policies lie with researchers and their institution. Hence, maintaining a balance between participant rights and researcher needs.

Under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the UK and EU, participants have the right to access, update and request deletion of their data, whilst researchers must comply with the law to ensure research integrity. However, under the Data Protection Act, research data processed in the public interest must be retained irrespective of participant rights, including the rights to erase, access and rectify. UCL must uphold this requirement while ensuring participant confidentiality is not compromised.

Information governance consists of policies, procedures and processes adopted by UCL to ensure research data is managed securely and complies with legal and operational requirements.

Support for information governance in research is now provided by Data Stewards within ARC RDM IG. That’s a long acronym, let’s break it down.

• ARC: Advanced Research Computing – UCL’s research innovative centre and provides 1. Secure digital infrastructure and 2. Teaching software.
• RDM: Research Data Management – assist researchers with data management.
• IG: Information governance – advise researchers on compliance for managing sensitive data.

Data Stewards – we support researchers with data management throughout the research study, provide guidance on data security awareness training, data security requirements for projects, and compliance with legal and regulatory standards, encompassing the Five Safes Framework principles. Additionally, we advise on sensitive data storage options, such as a Trusted Research Environment (TRE) or the Data Safe Haven (DSH).

Furthermore, we emphasise the importance of maintaining up-to-date and relevant documentation and provide guidance on FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) data principles.

As stated above, data can be vulnerable. UCL must implement strong security controls including encryption, access control and authentication, to protect sensitive data, such as personal health data and intellectual property. Sensitive data refers to data whose unauthorised disclosure could cause potential harm to participants or UCL.

UCL’s Information Security Management System (ISMS) is a systematic approach to managing sensitive research data to ensure confidentiality, integrity, and availability. It is a risk management process involving people, processes and IT systems. The key components include information management policy, identifying and assessing risks, implementing security controls to mitigate identified risks, training users and continuous monitoring. The ISMS is crucial in research:

1. It protects sensitive data; without stringent security measures, data is at risk of being accessed by unauthorised individuals leading to potential theft.
2. It ensures legal and regulatory compliance i.e. GDPR and UCL policies. Non-compliance results in hefty fines, legal action and reputational damage.
3. Research ethics demand participant data is handled with confidentiality. The ISMS ensures data management practices, data anonymisation, and controlled access whilst reinforcing ethical responsibility.
4. It reduces the risk of phishing attacks and ransomware.
5. It ensures data integrity and reliability – tampered or corrupted data can lead to invalid research and waste of resources.

UCL practices for Information Governance in research:

• Data security – Use encrypted storage, access controls and secure platforms like TRE or DSH.
• Ethical responsibility – Data protection office and Ethics obtain informed consent from participants and ensure they fully understand how their data will be used.
• Data Security Awareness training – Ensure researchers have completed and regularly review their training.
• Information Security Group – Conduct regular audits, identify vulnerabilities and mitigate potential risks.
• Contract Services – Review all research related contracts.

In response to the question, whose data is it anyway? Data may be generated by participants, but the overall responsibility to use, process, protect, ethically manage lies upon the researchers and UCL. Additionally, beyond compliance and good information governance, it is about ensuring research integrity and safeguarding the participants who make research possible.

Announcement from Paul Ayris, Pro-Vice Provost, UCL Library, Culture, Collections and Open Science

How can Open Science/Open Research support career progression and development? How does the adoption of Open Science/Open Research approaches benefit individuals in the course of their career?

The UCL Open Science Office, in conjunction with colleagues across UCL, has produced a series of Case Studies showing how UCL academics can use Open Science/Open Research approaches in their plans for career development, in applications for promotion and in appraisal documents.

In this way, Open Science/Open Research practice can become part of the Research Culture that UCL is developing.

The series of Case Studies covers each of the 8 pillars of Open Science/Open Research. They can be found on a new webpage: Open Science Case Studies 4 UCL.

It is only fair that academics should be rewarded for developing their skills and adopting best practice in research and in its equitable dissemination. The Case Studies show how this can be done, and each Case Study identifies a Key Message which UCL academics can use to shape their activities.

Examples of good practice are:

• Publishing outputs as Open Access outputs
• Sharing research data which is used as the building block of academic books and papers
• Creating open source software which is then available for others to re-use and develop
• Adopting practices allied to Reproducibility and Research Integrity
• The responsible use of Bibliometrics
• Public Engagement: Citizen Science and Co-Production as mechanisms to deliver results

Contact the UCL Open Science Office for further information at openscience@ucl.ac.uk.

Guest post by Dr Christiana McMahon,  Research Data Support Officer

In June 2019, the Research Data Management team from Library Services and the Research Data Group from the Centre for Advanced Research Computing embarked on an exciting journey: the launch of the UCL Research Data Repository. As we approach our fifth anniversary, we find ourselves reflecting on the progress we’ve made, what we’ve achieved and what could be improved. To better understand the impact and gather insights from our UCL community, we invite you to complete this survey here. Join us in celebrating this important milestone!

Since its inception, the Research Data Repository has been a pivotal tool for openness and accessibility, offering UCL staff and research students a platform to archive, publish, and share their research outputs as widely and openly as possible. From datasets to figures, presentations to software, the repository has become a hub of scholarly exchange and collaboration. The journey thus far has been marked by significant milestones. Since 2019, we’ve seen over 385,000 downloads and 610,000 views, underscoring the repository’s impact and reach within the academic community.

The Research Data Repository enables users to:

• archive and preserve research outputs on a longer-term basis at UCL;
• facilitate the discovery and sharing of work by publishing metadata records;
• assign a digital object identifier (DOI) to permanently link to and identify a record in the online catalogue as part of a full data citation enabling others to reference published works;
• comply with the UCL Research Data policy and other applicable research policies.

Three highlights from the Research Data Repository:

The most viewed record is: Silvester, Christopher; Hillson, Simon (2019). Photographs used for Structure from Motion 3D Dental model generation Part 2. University College London. Figure. https://doi.org/10.5522/04/9939419

The most downloaded record is: Acton, Sophie; Kriston-Vizi, Janos; Singh, Tanya; Martinez, Victor (2019). RNA seq – PDPN/CLEC-2 transcription in FRCs. University College London. Dataset. https://doi.org/10.5522/04/9976112.v1

The most cited record is: Manescu, Petru; Shaw, Mike; Elmi, Muna; Zajiczek, Lydia; Claveau, Remy; Pawar, Vijay; et al. (2020). Giemsa Stained Thick Blood Films for Clinical Microscopy Malaria Diagnosis with Deep Neural Networks Dataset.. University College London. Dataset. https://doi.org/10.5522/04/12173568.v1

These milestones demonstrate the repository’s impact and reach within the academic community, serving as a testament to the collaborative efforts of our dedicated researchers and staff.

Why is the Research Data Repository essential to supporting academic communities across UCL?

It mostly stems from wanting researchers to manage and share their outputs in line with the FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable)  and embrace open science and scholarship practices. Essentially, by depositing outputs into the Research Data Repository and creating associated metadata records, other researchers and members of the public are better placed to find, understand, combine, and reuse the outputs of our research without major technical barriers. In turn, this can help to enhance transparency of the research process, promote enhanced research integrity, and ultimately maximise the value of research findings.

Going forward:

To continue building and developing the service, we are asking staff and research students to tell us what they think. What works well? What could be improved? Which functionalities would you like to see added or enhanced?

 

The survey closes on Friday, March 22nd, so get in touch and tell us what you think!

Survey link: https://forms.microsoft.com/e/U20yJPAi0W

More information about the Research Data Repository can be found in Open Science & Research Support dedicated webpage.

Any questions or queries about the Research Data Repository can be sent to: researchdatarepository@ucl.ac.uk.

General research data management queries can be sent to: lib-researchsupport@ucl.ac.uk.

Any questions or queries about open science can be directed to: openscience@ucl.ac.uk.

 

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