Announcing: the inaugural UCL Open Science & Scholarship Awards!

By Kirsty, on 17 July 2023

UCL Office for Open Science and Scholarship and the local chapter of the UK Reproducibility Network are excited to announce the first Open Science and Scholarship Awards at UCL. UCL has been a pioneer in promoting open science practices, which include Open Access Publishing, Open Data and Software, Transparency, Reproducibility and other Open Methodologies, as well as the creation and use of Open Educational Resources, Citizen Science, Public Involvement, Co-production and Communication.

With these awards, we want to recognise and celebrate all UCL students and staff who embrace, advance, and promote open science.

Who is eligible?

All UCL students (undergraduate, postgraduate taught, and postgraduate research) and staff from any department/discipline, including professional services staff, can apply or be nominated.

Application and Nomination

You can apply or nominate someone else for the award by completing this form. We have kept the form as simple as possible to encourage as many applications as possible. You will be asked to (i) briefly describe the activity (max 200 words) and (ii) explain how the activity has promoted open science (max 300 words) for example by implementing open science practices, enhancing their adoption or impact, using open access resources in research and teaching, or any improvements to open practices.

Examples of activities include (but are not limited to):

• applying open science practices in research
• organising open science training/workshops locally or for a wider audience
• building and coordinating a community around open research practices
• supporting researchers with data management to promote reproducibility
• developing open software and analytical tools
• leading or supporting citizen science initiatives
• authoring or co-authoring open research guidelines, standards, and policies
• designing templates to enable open research practices
• developing open datasets or databases that are used by other researchers
• revise a module’s reading list to rely predominantly on open access resources/textbooks

Award categories

• Use of open access resources, including textbooks
• Activities by students
• Activities by academic staff
• Activities by professional services staff

Prizes

• Winners in each category will be awarded 100GBP as a cash prize as well as a certificate. All winners will be invited to briefly present their research at the Awards ceremony.
• Each category will also name up to two Honourable Mentions that will receive a certificate.

Timeline

Application deadline: Sunday 27 August 2023

Results communicated: Friday 29 September 2023

An award ceremony will take place during the Open Access Week in the third week of October 2023.

Welcome to the new Training and Support Resources for Research site!

By Harry, on 11 July 2023

Since the UCL’s Office for Open Science and Scholarship founding, the team has been gathering resources to support researchers, academic staff, students, and everyone interested in learning and developing their skills and understandings about Open Science and the transition towards more democratic models to produce and share knowledge in equitable and inclusive ways.

The fast growth of Open practices and their translation into renewed local, regional, and global policies made necessary systematic resource realignments. During the last months, we have committed to re-organise those assets based on the myriad of users and their backgrounds far beyond the academic field, creating our new user-friendly website, ‘Training and Support Resources for Research’. Organised in the following up-to-date categories:

• Advanced Research Computing: practical, hands-on training for various IT skills related to research, including high-performance computing, research software engineering and programming.

• Citizen Science: our brand-new site with information about what UCL is doing in Citizen Science, innovative projects, and UCL’s Citizen Science Academy. Keep an eye on the Open@UCL Blog, where we will soon expand and go deep into the world of Citizen Science!

• UCL Copyright advice: information and assistance by the UCL’s Library Services Copyright Team offers a wide range of copyright issues to UCL students and staff.

• Creating Accessible Content: a compendium of simple steps to make your content more accessible and provide a more inclusive experience for all.

• Doctoral Students Resources: a place for rigorous academic and non-academic creative researchers. Explore the resources and expand your skills to support your research, professional development and employability.

• Information Governance: this site is for all members of UCL who manage highly confidential research information, including principal and chief investigators, staff, students, senior managers, and even those who just supervise people who directly handle confidential information and support staff who do not have direct access to data.

• Bibliometrics support and training: information on training sessions at UCL and external training resources relating to bibliometrics.

• Open Access: designed to help UCL researchers understand how to make publications open access, meet open access requirements, use UCL’s Research Publications Service (RPS) and take advantage of open access funding.

• Research Data Management and Planning: from the initial planning of a project through to archiving and sharing, the research data management team advises the UCL community on managing research outputs – across the research data lifecycle – in line with UCL’s expectations and external funding agencies’ requirements.

• Research Funding Management: learn more about post-award processes through the online training course of the Fundamentals of Research Funding Management.

• Research Integrity: summary of training opportunities currently available for staff and students. This list is not exhaustive and is intended to provide guidance as to options available. It will also be updated so do re-visit this page.

• Research Transparency: research transparency covers how we ensure our research is responsible, reproducible, open and evidence-based.

If you scroll down the website, you will also find UCL’s Organisational Development training, Short Courses and some of UCL’s Communities and Forums that you can join to share your research, get advice and learn something new. We also collated an overview of the Research Support Teams!

Stay tuned to our news, events and training opportunities by subscribing to our mailing list,  following us on Twitter @UCLopenscience, or getting in touch with the Office for Open Science, and one of our teammates will answer as soon as we can!

UCL Open Science Conference 2023 – Recordings now available!

By Kirsty, on 22 May 2023

Thank you so much to everyone that joined our recent conference, whether on campus or online – we had a wonderful time and we hope you did too! We will be posting a report of the workshop portion of the conference soon, as well as some pictures and some responses to your questions that we didn’t get to on the day, but we thought that the recordings should take precedence!

Session 1

View the recording on UCL Media Central

Session 2

View the recording on UCL Media Central

Session 3

View the recording on UCL Media Central

Getting ready for this year’s Open Science Conference!

By Kirsty, on 20 April 2023

There are only a few days now until this year’s UCL Open Science Conference and I hope you are looking forward to it as much as we are!

We have closed the ticket sales, placed the food order and started counting the chairs to make sure that we have enough for everyone that is coming to join us in person. We have also been briefing the committee and preparing to welcome our online audience to our first fully hybrid event!

As you get ready to join us on the day, there are a few things you can do:

• Download a copy of the programme!
  We will have QR codes available on the day but we are actively trying to keep the carbon footprint of the conference down so we will only have the session overview available on the day. This longer version of the programme outlines all of our talks and introduces all of our speakers.
• Familiarise yourself with the conference code of conduct
  The organisational committee of the UCL Open Science Conference are committed to providing a safe, welcoming, and inclusive experience for participants. Participants, including organisers, speakers, volunteers, and attendees are expected to abide by the Code of Conduct which can be found on p12 of the programme for this event.
• Join our new mailing list!
  Find out about events, receive our newsletter right into your inbox, and most importantly, get notified when we upload the recordings from the conference!
• Get ready to tell us what you think!
  As with everything we do, we are always keen to grow and improve and while we know that everyone is constantly asking for feedback and for you to fill out forms, but it really does help us improve the work that we do. We will have this link available on the day, but here it is along with everything else you will need, for your bookmarking convenience!

We are very much looking forward to meeting you all on the day, see you there!

Office for Open Science & Scholarship Newsletter – Issue 8

By Harry, on 19 April 2023

Welcome to the eight issue of the Open Science and Scholarship Newsletter!

This termly newsletter has updates across the 8 Pillars of Open Science and contributions from colleagues across the university. If you would like to get involved, give feedback or write something for a future issue, please get in touch using the details at the end of the newsletter.

In this issue:

• Editorial
• Short update from the Head of the Office for Open Science & Scholarship
• Community voice – Supporting interdisciplinary learning through community-based learning and teaching – the value of open science at UCL East
• Special Feature – UCL Press reaches 7 million downloads!
• Deep Dive – Highlights from the Blog
  • Open Science Conference 2023 – tickets now available!
  • How understanding Copyright helps you open up your research
  • What might a Citizen Science approach in your research project look like?
• News and Events
  • We have a Training & Support Resources for Researchers new page!
  • Indicators of Open Research – UKRN Call for priorities open until the end of April.
  • Hidden in Plain Sight: Liberating our Library Collections. Visit the new exhibition in UCL Main Library.
• Contact and community call for content

Go to the newsletter on Sway, or view it below. If you use the version below, we recommend clicking the ‘full screen’ button to get the full experience!

When viewing a Sway, you can turn on Accessibility view. This view displays a high-contrast style for easier reading, disables any animations, and supports keyboard navigation for use with screen readers.

To turn on Accessibility view:

• If you’re using a mouse or touchscreen, on the More options menu (shown as three dots on the Sway toolbar), choose Accessibility view.
• If you’re using a screen reader, on the More options menu, when Accessibility view is selected, you hear “Displays this Sway in a high contrast design with full keyboard functionality and screen reader access to all content.”

What might a Citizen Science approach in your research project look like?

By Harry, on 27 March 2023

Guest post by Sheetal Saujani, Citizen Science Coordinator

Have you thought about including members of the public in your research?  Would you like to connect and collaborate with the community around you? Alternatively, would you like to work with project leaders to answer real-world questions and gather data?

Broadly defined, citizen science is research undertaken by members of the public, often in collaboration with academic or research institutions or similar. Citizen science is a diverse practice involving various forms and aims of collaboration between academic and community researchers and a broad range of disciplines.

What are the great things about Citizen Science?

Working together as part of a community with professionals, citizen scientists can play an important part in genuine discovery, experiments, data collection and analysis. Through citizen science, any one of us can take part in extraordinary research!

We can improve our community whilst at the same time helping to provide answers to some of the big questions about the world we live in.  Whether we participate in projects that measure air quality, monitor damage from storms, or track where our rubbish is going, we can help solve problems and influence a better future for our society.

The Office for Open Science and Scholarship advocates a broad approach to citizen science, so whether you call it citizen science, participatory research, community action, co-production, public engagement, or anything else, we’re all working together to strengthen UCL activities in this area!

What do Citizen Science projects look like?

Take a look at some of the exciting citizen science projects at UCL run by various research groups and departments at UCL. Some of these projects have now been completed.

And below are a few newer ones (this list is not exhaustive):

• Take part in the Big Repair Project!
• Read about the 100 Cyclists Project!
• Learn more about Eyes on Eyes!

Also, if you’re interested, there are many platforms and projects happening outside of UCL (below are just a few):

• Thousands of people across the country take part in the Natural History Museum’s crowdsourced science projects.
• On the SciStarter website you can join and contribute to science through thousands of amazing research projects and events.
• With more than one million volunteers, Zooniverse is one of the biggest citizen science platforms in the UK.
• If you’re interested in Biology, Ecology or Earth Science, check out the citizen science projects run by the National Geographic Society.
• The InSPIRES Open Platform is an online collaborative and crowdsourced database featuring many citizen-led participatory research and innovation projects.
• Patientslikeme is an online platform where patients can share and learn from real-time, outcome-based health data and contribute to the scientific conversation surrounding thousands of diseases.
• The Globe at Night project aims to raise awareness about light pollution and its impacts on communities. You can report your night sky brightness observations daily.

What is UCL doing around Citizen Science?

Our Office is working to raise awareness of citizen science approaches and activities, with the aim of building a support service and a community around citizen science.  The plan is to bring together colleagues who’ve run or are currently running citizen science or participatory research projects to share good practices and experiences with each other and support and encourage others to do the same!

If you are interested in citizen science, we would really like to hear from you, so please get in touch with us via email at openscience@ucl.ac.uk and tell us what you need.

How understanding Copyright helps you open up your research

By Harry, on 14 March 2023

Guest post by Christine Daoutis, Copyright Support Officer

“Can use this image I found free online?”

“I’m not sure how much of a book or an article it’s OK to copy”.

“This is my article; surely I can post it anywhere I want?”

These questions, and quite a few others, often come up in everyday research practice. They are all related to copyright. Whether you are reusing others’ materials (documents, figures, photos, video, software, data) or creating and sharing your own, understanding copyright ensures not only that you can respect others’ rights and stay within the law, but also that you can open up your research.

But understanding copyright is much more than a legal compliance issue. It is also more than an academic integrity issue. In short, it’s not just about following the rules, but also about understanding your own rights and using the rules flexibly. You can use your copyright knowledge as a tool to open up, rather than restrict, your research. For example, relying on copyright exceptions[1], and knowing how to find, reuse and acknowledge openly licensed materials[2], can give you much more freedom in how you can reuse others’ works. Crucially, knowing your rights as authors also allows you to share your research openly and, through licensing, determine how others may reuse it. Open Science practices – open access to publications, open data, open source software and hardware, co-creation projects – rely on an understanding of copyright.

To help you increase your knowledge and confidence around copyright, you can do any of the following:

1. Complete the 3-minute UCL copyright support survey to rate your confidence and tell us what support you need. If you are not sure what you need to know, the survey gives you some ideas to choose from. Currently open until 31 March 2023.
2. Complete the 20-minute Copyright Essentials online module. You will learn the basics at your own pace, using quizzes, short videos and academic-based scenarios.
3. Book a training session delivered the copyright support team. These can be in person or online, and offer you the chance to ask questions.
4. Visit the UCL copyright website for guidance on specific copyright topics.
5. Follow the copyright blog for topical articles and updates.
6. Contact the UCL copyright support team if you have a specific question, or would like to arrange bespoke training.

[1] https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/copyright/2023/02/24/fair-dealing-week-2023-part-2-three-fair-dealing-exceptions/

[2] https://creativecommons.org/faq/

UCL Open Science Conference 2023 – tickets now available!

By Kirsty, on 23 February 2023

We are pleased to announce that the annual UCL Open Science Conference is now Open for booking!

This year we are going fully hybrid and invite you to join us for free 10am – 4.00pm on 24th April, either on campus in Bloomsbury or online for a day-long conference with the theme: Open Science and the Case for Social Justice.  

Book your tickets now! Ticket sales have now closed

We are also going to use the theme to end the day with a facilitated citizen science workshop on the theme of authorship.  

Indicative programme  

Morning sessions: 

1. Open Leaders – this session will highlight some of the state of the art in Open Science & Scholarship in the form of two keynotes that look at distinctly different large-scale projects that are led by communities, followed by a discussion on the topic of the future of Open Science.
   
2. Sustainable futures – Openness comes with challenges. It’s one thing to share publications, code, and potentially very large datasets freely, but there are still costs associated with this sharing, and those costs grow over time. This session will consider these challenges from multiple angles, looking at who should bear these costs and how, with regards to equitability.  

Afternoon sessions: 

1. Challenges of equity in Open Science – Open Science and Scholarship are new ways of looking at the world. This session sets the scene by looking at the issue of Equality in Open Science practice. Topics such as gender, language, authorship, and geographical differences will be covered in this session, which is designed to introduce these overarching themes and set the scene for the workshop. 
2. Co-production workshop – Often, participants in research projects do not get credit for their significant contributions in the process, from community leaders, patients, and citizen scientists; to academics, research assistants, technicians, or coders. But how to promote fairer practices? Join us in this interactive workshop, ‘Challenges of Equity in Authorship’, and have your say in setting the baseline for future developments and better practices towards authorship justice and beyond! 

UCL Research Data Repository: Publishing research outputs for staff and PhD students across in 2022

By Harry, on 17 February 2023

Dr Christiana McMahon & Christine Buckley – Research Data Support Officers

At UCL, we have a dedicated Research Data Repository. This can be used by staff and research students to archive and preserve research outputs. This can be anything from your datasets to a poster you presented at a conference.

What have we published?

In total, we published 162 items!

Total number of views in 2022: 172059

Total number of downloads in 2022: 117830

What is a Data Management Plan (DMP)?

By Harry, on 15 February 2023

Dr Christiana McMahon & Christine Buckley – Research Data Support Officers

A Data Management Plan or DMP is an essential part of research data management and is usually completed in the first stage of any research project. It can help you think clearly about what data you will collect and how to store, curate, back up, archive and share this data.

You’ll find that many funders include a DMP as part of their grant applications, and we are more than happy to help review these.

You can check our recently updated webpage to learn how to create your DMP. 

How do I get support?

Just email us a copy of your plan to lib-researchsupport@ucl.ac.uk, or you can create your plan in DMPonline and request feedback.

How many DMPs have we reviewed?

Over the course of 2022, we reviewed a total of 39 plans, most of which supported grant applications submitted by researchers here at UCL.

The most popular months for sharing plans for feedback with the Research Data Management team were… April, June and October!