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

Graphic from openaccessweek.org, photo by Greg Rakozy

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.

Photo by Sheetal Saujani, at a Citizen Science and Public Engagement workshop

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.

Graphic from gida-global.org/care

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.

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Guest post by Christine Daoutis, Copyright Support Officer

Welcome to the inaugural blog post of a collaborative series between the UCL Office for Open Science and Scholarship and the UCL Copyright team. In this series, we will explore important aspects of copyright and its implications for open research and scholarship.

Research ideas, projects, and their outcomes often involve using and producing materials that may be protected by copyright. Copyright protects a range of creative works, whether we are talking about a couple of notes in a notebook, a draft thesis chapter, the rough write-up of a data, a full monograph and the content of this very blog. While a basic knowledge of copyright is essential, particularly to stay within the law, there is much more to copyright than compliance. Understanding certain aspects of copyright can help you use copyright materials with more confidence, make use of your own rights and overall, enhance the openness of your research.

Image attribution: Patrick Hochstenbach, 2014. Available under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

This first post in our series is dedicated to exploring common questions that arise during research projects. In future posts, we will explore some of these questions further, providing guidance, linking to new resources, and signposting relevant workshops. Copyright-related enquiries often arise in the following areas:

Reusing other people’s materials: How do you GET permission to reuse someone else’s images, figures, software, questionnaires, or research data? Do you always need permission? Is use for ‘non-commercial, research’ purposes always permitted, or are there other factors to consider? How do licenses work, and what can you do when a license does not cover your use? It’s easy to be overconfident when using others’ materials, for example, by assuming that images found on the internet can be reused without permission. It’s equally easy to be too cautious, ending up not making use of valuable resources for fear of infringing someone’s rights. Understanding permissions, licenses, and copyright exceptions – what may be within your rights to do as a user – can help you.

Disseminating your research throughout the research cycle: There are open access options for your publications and theses, supporting access to and often, reuse of your work. How do you license your work for reuse? What do the different licenses mean, and which one is most suitable? What about materials produced early on in your research: study preregistrations, research data, preprints? How can you make data FAIR through licensing? What do you need to consider when making software and other materials open source?

Is your work protected in the first place? Documents, images, video and other materials are usually protected by copyright. Facts are not. For a work to be protected it needs to be ‘original’. What does ‘original’ mean in this context? Are data protected by copyright? What other rights may apply to a work?

Who owns your research? We are raising questions about licensing and disseminating your research, but is it yours to license? What does the law say, and what is the default position for staff and students at UCL? How do contracts, including publisher copyright transfer agreements and data sharing agreements, affect how you can share your research?

‘Text and data mining’. Many research projects involve computational analysis of large amounts of data. This involves copying and processing materials protected by copyright, and often publishing the outcomes of this analysis. In which cases is this lawful? How do licences permit you to do, exactly, and what can you do under exceptions to copyright? How are your text and data mining activities limited if you are collaborating with others, across institutions and countries?

The use of AI. Speaking of accessing large amounts of data, what is the current situation on intellectual property and generative AI? What do you need to know about legal implications where use of AI is involved?

These questions are not here to overwhelm you but to highlight areas where we can offer you support, training, and opportunities for discussion. To know more:

• Follow future posts on this blog.
• Register for an upcoming copyright session. If you cannot make those dates, please contact copyright@ucl.ac.uk to arrange a bespoke session.
• Visit our training and resources page for more ideas and links to online tutorials.
• Have a head start: visit our guidance on copyright and publications, copyright and research data and look out for upcoming guidance on text and data mining.

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

Guest post by Victor Olago, Senior Research Data Steward and Shipra Suman, Research Data Steward, in celebration of International Love Data Week 2024.

Credit: Sangya Pundir, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

The problem:

We all know sharing is caring, and so data needs to be shared to explore its full potential and usefulness. This makes it possible for researchers to answer questions that were not the primary research objective of the initial study. The shared data also allows other researchers to replicate the findings underpinning the manuscript, which is important in knowledge sharing. It also allows other researchers to integrate these datasets with other existing datasets, either already collected or which will be collected in the future.

There are several factors that can hamper research data sharing. These might include a lack of technical skill, inadequate funding, an absence of data sharing agreements, or ethical barriers. As Data Stewards we support appropriate ways of collecting, standardizing, using, sharing, and archiving research data. We are also responsible for advocating best practices and policies on data. One of such best practices and policies includes the promotion and the implementation of the FAIR data principles.

FAIR is an acronym for Findable, Accessible Interoperable and Reusable [1]. FAIR is about making data discoverable to other researchers, but it does not translate exactly to Open Data. Some data can only be shared with others once security considerations have been addressed. For researchers to use the data, a concept-note or protocol must be in place to help gatekeepers of that data understand what each data request is meant for, how the data will be processed and expected outcomes of the study or sub study. Findability and Accessibility is ensured through metadata and enforcing the use of persistent identifiers for a given dataset. Interoperability relates to applying standards and encoding such as ICD-10, ICDO-3 [2] and, lastly, Reusability means making it possible for the data to be used by other researchers.

What we are doing:

We are currently supporting a data reuse project at the Medical Research Council Clinical Trials Unit (MRC CTU). This project enables the secondary analysis of clinical trial data. We use pseudonymisation techniques and prepare metadata that goes along with each data set.

Pseudonymisation helps process personal data in such a way that the data cannot be attributed to specific data subjects without the use of additional information [3]. This reduces the risks of reidentification of personal data. When data is pseudonymized direct identifiers are dropped while potentially identifiable information is coded. Data may also be aggregated. For example, age is transformed to age groups. There are instances where data is sampled from the original distribution, allowing only sharing of the sample data. Pseudonymised data is still personal data which must be protected with GDPR regulation [4].

The metadata makes it possible for other researchers to locate and request access to reuse clinical trials data at MRC CTU. With the extensive documentation that is attached, when access is approved, reanalysis and or integration with other datasets are made possible.  Pseudonymisation and metadata preparation helps in promoting FAIR data.

We have so far prepared one data-pack for RT01 studies which is ‘A randomized controlled trial of high dose versus standard dose conformal radiotherapy for localized prostate cancer’ which is currently in review phase and almost ready to share with requestors. Over the next few years, we hope to repeat and standardise the process for past, current and future studies of Cancer, HIV, and other trials.

References:    

1. 8 Pillars of Open Science.
2. Digital N: National Clinical Coding Standards ICD-10 5th Edition (2022), 5 edn; 2022.
3. Anonymisation and Pseudonymisation.
4. Complete guide to GDPR compliance.

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!