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Have you seen our new UCL Citizen Science website pages?

By Harry, on 15 August 2023

Guest post by Sheetal Saujani, Citizen Science Coordinator

We are pleased to launch our new and improved Citizen Science web pages on UCL’s Office for Open Science and Scholarship website. You can now access the updated content and browse what UCL is doing in this fast-growing and exciting area!

Citizen science includes a wide range of activities, and it is gaining increasing recognition among the public and within the area of research. UCL recognises citizen science as a diverse practice, encompassing various forms, depths and aims of collaboration between academic and community researchers and various disciplines.

workshop meeting
Check out our new website pages:

  • Defining Citizen Science: whether you call it participatory research, community action, crowdsourcing, public engagement, or anything else, have a look at our word cloud showing various activities and practices falling under one umbrella. UCL teams are collaborating on different projects and working together under a joint mission to strengthen UCL’s activities. This fosters stronger connections and more collaborative solutions.
  • Citizen Science projects: discover the broad range of innovative projects at UCL (grouped by discipline) showcasing various ways to use a citizen science approach in research. If you have a citizen science project to feature or have any questions, please contact us.
  • History of Citizen Science: explore the exciting history of citizen science, early definitions, and three relevant periods in modern science. Learn about one of the longest-running citizen science projects!
  • Types and levels of Citizen Science: read about the growth of citizen science, which has led to the development of three broad categories: ‘long-running citizen science’, ‘citizen cyberscience’, and ‘community science’. Citizen science practices can be categorised into a continuum using the ‘Doing It Together Science’ escalator model. This model focuses on individual participation levels, allowing individuals to choose the best level for their needs, interests, and free time.
  • UCL Citizen Science Certificate: find out about this high-quality, non-academic certification awarded to individuals who complete a training programme as part of the UCL Citizen Science Academy. The Certificate recognises research abilities through participation in active projects, enabling citizen scientists to influence local decisions.

The Office for Open Science and Scholarship is working to raise awareness of citizen science approaches and activities to build a support service and a community around citizen science.  We are bringing together colleagues who have run or are currently running citizen science projects, to share experiences and encourage others to do the same.

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

‘Challenges of Equity in Authorship’ co-production workshop initial discussions

By Harry, on 4 August 2023

Post by Kirsty Wallis, OOSS Coordinator/ Harry Ortiz Venegas, OOSS Support Officer

Those of us that actively support Open Science initiatives often recognise that there is a way to go and in some places there are big changes that may need to be made in order to succeed. Being UCL, a research-intensive university, we recognise and embrace the role of higher education institutions within this transformation and commit to facilitating the necessary dialogues inside the academic field, our student and staff body, and the wider community.

The Office for Open Science & Scholarship (OOSS) team, part of the Library, Culture, Collections and Open Science (LCCOS) department, is one of the crucial actors inside our institution in embracing Open Science values and promoting and advocating for these complex transitions to happen.

We propose that one of the changes that needs to happen is around the concept of authorship and what it means to all of the actors involved in research. We recognise that there are already a number of changes happening in this area, with initiatives like CRedIT, and rights retention for authors, but we wanted to look at it from a different angle. In the OOSS, we focus very heavily on the diversity and inclusiveness of our support services and the research we have at UCL, and so we work hard to allow the participation of diverse stakeholders in the design of open, accessible and inclusive research practices.

Resonating with the UCL Open Science Conference 2023 theme ‘Open Science and the Case for Social Justice’, the team proposed facilitating a workshop at the end of the day to discuss some of the long-standing issues concerning credit and authorship in research practice.

As the invitation to the final activity from the conference said, ‘Often, participants in research projects do not get credit for their significant contributions in the process, but what role should they have? People involved in a research project can hold a plethora of roles, from community leaders, patients, and citizen scientists outside the academy, to academics, research assistants, technicians, librarians, data stewards and coders within. How can we promote fairer practices and encompass all of these roles in our research outputs?’

With a clear idea in mind, it was necessary to design a participatory workshop that included researchers, but also the less-heard voices and collaborators who do not often figure in academic reports. In this session, two outstanding teams from UCL joined the adventure, the Co-Production Collective, a diverse and growing community of people from various backgrounds who come together to learn, connect, and champion co-production for lasting change. Providing consultancy, delivering training and presentations, and participating in the design and implementation of research projects, all with community members involved. And The Institute for Global Prosperity (IGP), part of The Bartlett, UCL Faculty for the Built Environment. Focused on redesigning prosperity for the 21st century, changing how we conceive and run our economies, and reworking our relationship with the planet. IGP’s vision is to build a prosperous, sustainable, global future, underpinned by the principles of fairness and justice, and allied to a realistic, long-term vision of humanity’s place in the world. As they both state on their web pages.

All teams circulated the invitation with their networks to ensure participation from a range of people, not only from academic backgrounds. Ending up in a hybrid event with around 60 participants. To promote the discussion, the workshop team prepared the ground with the case study ‘Co-Producing Prosperity Research in Informal Settlements in Tanzania’, an IGP project. Raising questions around how crucial it is to acknowledge all the contributions to knowledge production and language barriers in current publishing models. Followed by lived experience cases presented in first person by three members of the Co-Production Collective. Involving diverse perspectives, engagement levels, and roles in research projects.

The facilitators divided the in-person assistants around circular tables and the online people into break-out rooms to discuss ‘What challenges and opportunities need to be addressed to create equitable conditions in relation to authorship?’.

Each table were asked to summarise their conversations, sharing some of their ideas at the end of the session. People from the conference committee took notes to share with the OOSS team and report the workshop’s principal outcomes. These outcomes will be folded into the wider work being undertaken at UCL currently around preparing a statement on authorship for our community.

There were a number of themes that came out of the discussions and what was the most interesting for the facilitators was the extent of the consensus on many of the core points.

There was widespread agreement that all contributors to research should be acknowledged, and that they should be credited in any publications they take an active part in. There was also agreement that decisions about roles in the project and its outputs should be discussed and agreed at the outset of the project, with non-academic participants such as technicians, librarians, citizen scientists and other types of participants being given enough information to make an informed decision about what role they would like to take in publications and if that takes place, if and how they would like to be credited.

As we described at the outset of this post, we realise that this is not easy to unpick and the real value in these discussions will come from the challenges identified and opportunities we can pursue. It is easy to see the benefits that creating more equitable conditions in authorship can provide, allowing knowledge to be more granular and diversifying the opinions that can be represented, but the workshop also allowed us to dig into some real practical issues, some of which are presented below.

One major theme that emerged was in relation to research culture and the institutional inertia with regards to publishing. The lingering ‘publish or perish’ attitude in some subject areas leads to a very rapid turnaround on papers, and a perceived unwillingness to dilute credit with other names, especially in subject areas where positionality in the author list has value. There were also issues raised around the power dynamics associated with authorship and where control lies over this process, with the people who wrote the article, or the PI/research team leader who has ultimate control.

Another theme was more practical in nature and was related to systems and affiliations. In many cases it is very difficult to include an unaffiliated author, both in some publisher systems and even in some metadata schema. Also being able to give access to institutional systems and tools is also often associated with an affiliated email address. Lastly, in many cases, it is assumed all authors of a paper are able to take equal responsibility for it (CReDiT is changing this, by allowing people to be associated with the role they played, but it is early days), but in the case of a controversial topic, an unaffiliated author may be at risk as they are unable to access the support that the university will provide for its community, such as access to legal support or a press office.

The final significant theme was around language, style and terminology. Some groups pointed out that some of the understanding inherent to academia has very little meaning outside of the bubble of the university, and while external team members associated with a project will be trained to work to the integrity and ethical standards of the project, they may not be able to commit to the academic language, theoretical structures or terminology required to be involved in publications.

The good news is that all of these themes (and a lot of the other points we weren’t able to cover here) can be turned into opportunities. The first theme around research culture I think we are already addressing by starting this conversation and committing to including these findings in UCL statements and associated guidance on authorship. We will be consulting widely among the academic community and beyond throughout the process and hopefully this will allow us to challenge some of the issues raised about power dynamics and point out where people can and should be opening up their author lists to new individuals.

Another opportunity that came up in the sessions was around other types of publication. The discussion was framed around the traditional article/book, but the point was raised that there are a wide range of outputs that can come out of a project that can acknowledge different individuals, from the technical such as data, software or code, to presentations and posters, giving new individuals the chance to represent the research they have done in a new environment, and even media such as videos or exhibitions. There are definitely opportunities outside the traditional and this needs to be reflected and tied into the wider Open Science movement where we are shifting the focus onto new forms of output. It is also important that in this, space is given to the participants and citizen scientists to express what would be the most effective way of communicating the research results back to the community they effect.

This is just a very short summary of what was an intense and very nuanced conversation across around ten separate breakout groups and we were immensely grateful to the whole community for engaging with the workshop and being so open and honest about their experiences to allow us such insight to take forward into our explorations of authorship in the OOSS. The Co-Production Collective shared some interesting reflections about the workshop discussions on their webpage, exposing how participants contributing from the live-experience field are commonly left out in credits, authorship and contribution acknowledgements.

The April 24th conference resonated among members of their collective to take take a step forward, telling, one of them commented that “it made me pluck up the courage to ask to be an author on a project I set up and did the initial work on, and the professor received it really well and said well done for getting in touch and rightfully asking as these things can be daunting and missed…”

 

 

Announcing: the inaugural UCL Open Science & Scholarship Awards!

By Kirsty, on 17 July 2023

Red and gold fireworks, captured against a black skyUCL 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.
  • 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:

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.”

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! 

Love Data Week 2023 #LoveData23

By Harry, on 7 February 2023

Guest post by Christine Buckley, Research Data Support Officer

This year from Monday, 13 February – Friday, 17 February, we will be celebrating your data!

Here at UCL, we’ve been reviewing the year and loving what we’ve found. Follow us on Twitter and our blog to get your daily dose of heart-warming stats, our lovely training, and our blossoming repository.

This year the theme for Love Data Week is: “Data: Agent of Change”. Leave us a comment below if this describes your work.

Office for Open Science & Scholarship 2022 review

By Harry, on 18 January 2023

A new exciting year is starting, and what better way to give the initial kick than celebrating the achievements and milestones of the multiple teams linked to the UCL Office for Open Science & Scholarship (OOSS). We are proud to see how the OOSS kept growing and consolidating itself inside UCL’s institutional culture, supporting academic staff, researchers and students.

One of last year’s highlights was undoubtedly the UCL Open Science Conference, reuniting people from all over the world in sessions discussing Citizen Science, Open data and code, Open and the Global South and more. You can still watch the recordings of day one and day two on our blog! And get ready to participate in the 2023 version in late April. You will hear about it soon on our pages and social media. We are working to make the event hybrid to facilitate participation across territories, do not miss your spot!

After various months of revisions and collaborative work, we published new Open Science Resources for 2022-2023. The first is the video ‘Open Science and Scholarship as part of UCL Research Culture’ and ‘Open Science – a practical guide for PhD students’.

Our office connects to several other teams inside UCL that make an exquisite blend of services, skills and expertise, and we want to celebrate their achievements and news.

The UCL Open Access team has grown their range of transformative publisher agreements and upgraded Research Publications Services (RPS). Users will notice a refreshed look and feel, differences to the Homepage layout, and a new menu structure and navigation. Check the step-by-step guide if you missed it!

UCL Press has proven the importance of open-access scholarly publishers, reaching six million downloads last May (and close to seven million now!), reaching 246 countries and territories, and publishing 272 titles since its launch in 2015.

The Bibliometrics team now is able to support Altmetric, which will be useful for anyone interested in public engagement or research impact, as well as individual researchers looking at the response to their work online. Altmetrics are “alternative metrics” – measuring the impact of research beyond scholarly literature. Helping to get a wider sense of the impact of papers that might otherwise be missed were we to focus on traditional academic citations.

Our Research and Data Management team upgraded their webpages, reviewed dozens of data management plans, and created brand new online Data Management Plan Templates with DMP online. Their services and the Bibliometrics team were both classified as excellent regarding the user’s experience of our online support service. We are proud of such a hard-working and supportive team!

During the second half of 2022, the OOSS gained two additional members: a Citizen Science Coordinator and a Support Officer. Both new team members are currently working with the Office Coordinator on ambitious projects that will see the light later this year, aiming to diversify the support and resources of our virtual office for wider audiences.

Undoubtedly, the diversity of professionals, backgrounds and interests made our small office inside Library, Culture, Collections & Open Science (LCCOS) a prosperous place to develop services, ideas and projects for wonderful audiences inside and outside our university.

Last year’s achievements were only possible due to the support of the university to embrace an open culture, thanks to the collaborative work between the teams, and always supporting each other and the office users. We will keep working together to democratise knowledge and keep UCL one of the Open Science & Scholarship leaders worldwide.