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OOSS Annual Recap 2023

By Rafael, on 17 January 2024

As we step into a new year, let’s reflect on the collective achievements and milestones of the UCL Office for Open Science & Scholarship (OOSS) and our associated teams in 2023. This year witnessed the growth and integration of OOSS within the institutional culture of UCL, offering pivotal support to academic staff, researchers, and students. From the successful return to in-person events with our annual conference to pioneering initiatives and awards, let’s revisit the highlights that shaped our work last year!

Annual Conference & Open Access Celebrations

Poster for the Open Science Conference: 'The Case for Social Justice'

In April 2023, we successfully organized our annual conference, marking our first return to in-person events. Themed Open Science and the Case for Social Justice, the conference fostered important discussions on sustainability in research practices, addressing critical issues such as gender, language, authorship, and geographical disparities. Recordings of these insightful discussions are available. Notably, a workshop during the conference addressed equity in authorship, contributing to a forthcoming UCL statement on Authorship. Additionally, October saw the celebration of our Open Access week, themed Community over Commercialisation. This included a series of blog posts, activities, and discussions, emphasizing equitable access to a wide range of works.

Honouring Excellence: Inaugural Open Science and Scholarship Awards:Group photo of the 12 Winners of the inaugural Open Science and Scholarship Awards standing together in front of a white wall.

Another highlight was the inaugural Open Science and Scholarship Awards at UCL in collaboration with the UK Reproducibility Network. These awards aimed to recognize and celebrate the efforts of UCL students and staff who champion open science practices. Learn more about the winners and their innovative work!

Open Access: Profiles & Transformative Agreements

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The Open Access Team played a pivotal role in ensuring the open availability of UCL academics’ research outputs throughout 2023. A major achievement was the successful introduction of the new Profiles platform, replacing the outdated IRIS. Profiles acts as UCL’s public search and discovery tool, significantly improving the visibility of academic profiles, publication lists, research and teaching activities, and collaborations with UCL colleagues. The team also facilitated the Gold open access publication of 3,383 papers in 2023, contributing to the thriving UCL Discovery with over 44 million downloads. The repository now boasts over 166,000 open access items, including 23,400 theses, with over 18,500 uploads in the preceding twelve months.

Aligned with the UKRI and Wellcome open access policies, the Open Access Team provided robust support for UCL researchers. This included facilitating compliance through publishing in fully open access journals, making use of transformative agreements with publishers encompassing over 12,000 journals, and using funders’ language to secure the right to make accepted manuscripts freely accessible upon publication under the CC BY license.

Research Data: Enhancing Support to Researchers

The Research Data team introduced a more user-friendly version of the UCL Research Data Repository, incorporating enhanced features and a comprehensive user manual. The repository saw a significant influx of 193 new items, including data sets, media items, and software applications. Engaging with researchers, the team provided substantial assistance, reviewing 32 data management plans and conducting successful training sessions for 61 researchers. Additionally, the team expanded and refined frequently asked questions (FAQs) for better user support.

Citizen Science: New website and initiatives

Word cloud image featuring key terms related to citizen science

The Citizen Science Team expanded its reach and impact in 2023 through new Citizen Science website pages and an enhanced list of citizen science projects at UCL, fostering a greater understanding of the breadth of such initiatives across the university. The creation of a unifying definition of citizen science at UCL, accompanied by an inclusive word cloud, provided clarity on the diverse subject areas and disciplines covered by citizen science projects.

The development of the UCL Citizen Science Certificate, in collaboration with the UCL Citizen Science Academy, marked a significant milestone and underscored our commitment to fostering collaborative initiatives. A new Citizen Science community on MS Teams was launched, providing a dedicated space for discussions and updates. Get involved!

Bibliometrics: Measuring Research Impact

The Bibliometrics Team, in collaboration with the Open Access Team, played a crucial role in implementing the new Profiles system. Their research confirmed the citation advantage associated with open access practices. After a detailed analysis of UCL publications over recent years, the study demonstrated that open access materials are utilised and cited more extensively, and confirmed the place of the institution as leading organisation in making material available in open access.

Additionally, the team introduced new courses, including an introduction to altmetrics and the Overton database, aiming to assess the broader impact of published research in the wider world and cover policy documents and official documents. Another training provided an overview of understanding and demonstrating research impact, further supporting UCL’s researchers. The Bibliometrics Team’s dedication to understanding and demonstrating research impact through various courses and collaborations reinforced UCL’s position as a leader in research output accessibility.

Stay connected and Informed

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The combined efforts of OOSS teams in 2023 exemplify UCL’s commitment to open and accessible research practices across diverse disciplines. As we move forward, the OOSS remains dedicated to fostering an inclusive culture of open science and scholarship, shaping a transformative academic environment at UCL.

Join us in 2024 for updates and insights, and follow us on X, formerly Twitter, to find out more about open science and scholarship at UCL!

Open Science & Scholarship Awards Winners!

By Kirsty, on 26 October 2023

A huge congratulations to all of the prize winners and a huge thanks to everyone that came to our celebration yesterday! It was lovely to hear from a selection of the winning projects and celebrate together. The OOSS team and the UKRN Local leads Sandy and Jessie had a lovely time networking with everyone.

Just in case you weren’t able to join us to hear the prize winners talk about their projects, Sandy has written short profiles of all of the winning projects below.

Category: Academic staff

Winner: Gesche Huebner and Mike Fells, BSEER, Built Environment

Gesche and Mike were nominated for the wide range of activities that they have undertaken to promote open science principles and activities in the energy research community. Among other things, they have authored a paper on improving energy research, which includes a checklist for authors, delivered teaching sessions on open, reproducible research to their department’s PhD students as well as staff at the Centre for Research Into Energy Demand Solutions, which inspired several colleagues to implement the practices, they created guidance on different open science practices aimed at energy researchers, including professionally filmed videos, as well as developed a toolkit for improving the quality, transparency, and replicability of energy research (i.e., TReQ), which they presented at multiple conferences. Gesche and Mike also regularly publish pre-analysis plans of their own research, make data and code openly available when possible, publish preprints, and use standard reporting guidelines.

Honourable mention: Henrik Singmann, Brain Sciences

Henrik was nominated for their consistent and impactful contribution to the development of free and open-source software packages, mostly for the statistical programming language R. The most popular software tool he developed is afex, which provides a user-friendly interface for estimating one of the most commonly used statistical methods, analysis of variance (ANOVA). afex, first released in 2012 and actively maintained since, has been cited over 1800 times. afex is also integrated into other open-source software tools, such as JASP and JAMOVI, as well as teaching materials. With Quentin Gronau, Henrik also developed bridgesampling, a package for principled hypothesis testing in a Bayesian statistical framework. Since its first release in 2017, bridgesampling has already been cited over 270 times. Other examples of packages for which they are the lead developer or key contributor are acss, which calculates the algorithmic complexity for short strings, MPTinR and MPTmultiverse, as well as rtdists and (together with their PhD student Kendal Foster) fddm. Further promoting the adoption of open-source software, Henrik also provides statistics consultation sessions at his department and uses open-source software for teaching the Master’s level statistics course.

Honourable mention: Smita Salunke, School of Pharmacy

Smita is recognised for their role in the development of the The Safety and Toxicity of Excipients for Paediatrics (STEP) database, an open-access resource compiling comprehensive toxicity information of excipients. The database was established in partnership with European and the United States Paediatric Formulation Initiative. To create the database, numerous researchers shared their data. To date, STEP has circa 3000 registered users across 44 countries and 6 continents. The STEP database has also been recognised as a Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2021 impact case study. Additionally, the European Medicines Agency frequently refer to the database in their communications; the Chinese Centre for Drug Evaluation have also cited the database in their recent guidelines. Furthermore, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have provided funds to support a further 10 excipients for inclusion in STEP. The development and evaluation of the STEP database have been documented in three open-access research papers. Last but not least, the database has been integrated into teaching materials, especially in paediatric pharmacy and pharmaceutical sciences.

Category: Professional Services staff

Winner: Miguel Xochicale, Engineering Sciences and Mathematical & Physical Sciences

Miguel hosted the “Open-source software for surgical technologies” workshop at the 2023 Hamlyn symposium on Medical Robotics, a half-day session that brought together experts from software engineering in medical imagining, academics specialising in surgical data science, and researchers at the forefront of surgical technology development. During the workshop, speakers discussed the utilisation of cutting-edge hardware; fast prototyping and validation of new algorithms; maintaining fragmented source code for heterogenous systems; developing high performance of medical image computing and visualisation in the operating room; and benchmarks of data quality and data privacy. Miguel subsequently convened a panel discussion, underscoring the pressing need of additional open-source guidelines and platforms that ensure that open-source software libraries are not only sustainable but also receive long-term support and are seamlessly translatable to clinic settings. Miguel made recording of the talks and presentations, along with a work-in-progress white paper that is curated by them, and links to forums for inviting others to join their community available on Github.

Honourable mention: Marcus Pedersen, PHS

The Global Business School for Health (GSBH) introduced changes to its teaching style, notably, a flipped classroom. Marcus taught academics at their department how to use several mostly freely available learning technologies, such as student-created podcasts, Mentimeter, or Microsoft Sway, to create an interactive flipped classroom. Marcus further collected feedback from students documenting their learning journey and experiences with flipped teaching to evaluate the use of  the tools. Those insights have been presented in a book chapter (Betts, T. & Oprandi, P. (Eds.). (2022). 100 Ideas for Active Learning. OpenPress @ University of Sussex) and in talks for UCL MBA and Master’s students as well as at various conferences. The Association of Learning Technology also awarded Marcus the ELESIG Scholar Scheme 23/24 to continue their research.

Category: Students

Winner: Seán Kavanagh, Chemistry

Séan was nominated for his noteworthy contribution to developing user-friendly open-source software for the computational chemistry/physics research community. They have developed several codes during their PhD, such as doped, ShakeNBreak and vaspup2.0 for which they are the lead developer, as well as PyTASER and easyunfold for which they are a co-lead developer. Séan not only focuses on efficient implementation but also on user-friendliness along with comprehensive documentation and tutorials. They have produced comprehensive video walkthroughs of the codes and the associated theories, amassing over 20,000 views on YouTube and SpeakerDeck. It is important to note that software development is not the primary goal of Séan’s PhD research (which focuses on characterizing solar cell materials), and so their dedication to top-quality open-source software development is truly commendable. Additionally, Séan has consistently shared the data of all his publications and actively encourages open-access practices in his collaborations/mentorship roles, having assisted others in making their data available online and building functionality in their codes to save outputs in transferable and interoperable formats for data.

Honourable mention: Julie Fabre, Department of Neuromuscular Diseases

Julie is recognized for developing the open-source toolbox bombcell, that automatically assesses large amounts of data that are collected simultaneously from hundreds of neurons (i.e., groups of spikes). This tool considerably reduces labour per experiment and enables long-term neuron recording, which was previously intractable. As bombcell has been released under the open-source copyleft GNU General Public License 3, all future derived work will also be free and open source. Bombcell has already been used in another open-source toolbox with the same licence, UnitMatch. The toolbox’s code is extensively documented, and Julie adopted the Open Neurophysiology Environment, a standardised data format that enables quick understanding and loading of data files. In 2022, Julie presented bombcell in a free online-course. This course was attended by over 180 people, and the recorded video has since been viewed over 800 times online. Bombcell is currently regularly used in a dozen labs in Europe and the United States. It has already been used in two peer-reviewed publications, and in two manuscripts that are being submitted for publication with more studies underway.

Honourable mention: Maxime Beau, Division of Medicine

Maxime is recognized for leading the development of NeuroPyxels, the first open-source library to analyze Neuropixels data in Python. NeuroPyxels, hosted on a GitHub public repository and licensed under the GNU general public license, is actively used across several neuroscience labs in Europe and the United States (18 users have already forked the repository). Furthermore, NeuroPyxels relies on a widely accepted neural data format; this built-in compatibility with community standards ensures that users can easily borrow parts of NeuroPyxels and seamlessly integrate them with their application. NeuroPyxels has been a great teaching medium in several summer schools. Maxime has been a teaching assistant at the “Paris Spring School of Imaging and Electrophysiology” for three years, the FENS course “Interacting with Neural Circuits” at Champalimaud for two years, and the UCL Neuropixels course for three years where NeuroPyxels has been an invaluable tool to get students started with analysing neural data in Python.

Honourable mention: Yukun Zhou, Centre for Medical Image Computing

Yukun was nominated for developing open-source software for analysing images of the retina. The algorithm, termed AutoMorph, consists of an entire pipeline from image quality assessment to image segmentation to feature extraction in tabular form. A strength of AutoMorph is that it was developed using openly available data and so its underlying code can be easily reproduced and audited by other research groups.Although only published 1 year ago, AutoMorph has already been used by research groups from four continents and led to three new collaborations with Yukun’s research group at UCL. Moreover, AutoMorph has been run on the entire retinal picture dataset in the UK Biobank study with the features soon being made available for the global research community. Yukun has been complimented on the ease with which any researcher can immediately download the AutoMorph tools and deploy on their own datasets. Moreover, the availability of AutoMorph has encouraged other research groups, who are conducting similar work, to make their own proprietary systems openly available.

Category: Open resources, publishing, and textbooks 

Winner: Talia Isaacs, IOE, UCL’s Faculty of Education and Society

Talia is recognized for their diverse and continuous contributions to open access publishing. As Co-Editor of the journal Language Testing, they spearheaded SAGE’s CRediT pilot scheme, requiring standardized author contribution statements; they approved and supported Special Issue Editors’ piloting of transparent review for a special issue on “Open science in Language Testing”, encouraged authors to submit pre-prints, and championed open science in Editor workshops and podcasts. Additionally, in 2016, Multilingual Matters published Talia’s edited volume as their first open access monograph. Talia also discussed benefits of open access book publication in the publisher’s blog. As a result, the publisher launched an open access funding model, matching funding for at least one open access book a year. Further showcasing their dedication to open science, Talia archived the first corpus of patient informed consent documents for clinical trials on UK Data Service and UCL’s research repository, and delivered a plenary on “reducing research waste” at the British Association for Applied Linguistics event. They have also advocated for the adoption of registered reports at various speaking events, Editorial Board presentation, in a forthcoming article, editorial, and social media campaign. 

Honourable mention: Michael Heinrich and Banaz Jalil, School of Pharmacy

Banaz and Michael were nominated for co-leading the development of the ConPhyMP-Guidelines. Ethnopharmacology is a flourishing field of medical/pharmaceutical research. However, results are often non-reproducible. The ConPhyMP-Guidelines are a new tool that defines how to report the chemical characteristics of medicinal plant extracts used in clinical, pharmacological, and toxicological research. The paper in which the guidelines are presented is widely used (1613 downloads / 8,621 views since Sept 2022). An online tool, launched in August 2023 and accessible via the Society for Medicinal Plant and Natural Product Research (GA) website, facilitates the completion of the checklist. Specifically, the tool guides the researchers in selecting the most relevant checklists for conducting and reporting research accurately and completely.

Honourable mention: Talya Greene, Brain Sciences 

Talya is recognized for leading the creation of a toolkit that enables traumatic stress researchers to move toward more FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) data practices. This project is part of the FAIR theme within the Global Collaboration on Traumatic Stress. Two main milestones have so far been achieved: 1) In collaboration with Bryce Hruska, Talya has collated existing resources that are relevant to the traumatic stress research community to learn about and improve their FAIR data practices. 2) Talya also collaborated with Nancy Kassam-Adams to conduct an international survey with traumatic stress researchers about their attitudes and practices regarding FAIR data in order to identify barriers and facilitators of data sharing and reuse. The study findings have been accepted for publication in the European Journal of Psychotraumatology. Talya has also presented the FAIR toolkit and the findings of the survey at international conferences (e.g., the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies annual conference, the European Society for Traumatic Stress Studies Biennial Conference).

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.

Open Science & Scholarship Newsletter – June 2021

By Kirsty, on 2 June 2021

Welcome to the third 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 or by leaving a comment below.

In this issue:

  • Editorial
  • Update from the Head of the Office for Open Science & Scholarship
  • Community voice – Reliability and Reproducibility in Computational Science
  • Special Feature – Open Science in Horizon Europe
  • Deep Dive – Top posts from our blog
  • News and Events

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.”

Upcoming Reproducibility seminars from Leiden University

By Kirsty, on 1 April 2021

Leiden University Libraries (UBL) are hosting a series of online seminars on the challenges involved in achieving reproducibility in research.

The seminars aim to identify best practices that can help to overcome central challenges around reproducibility, and to convey several concrete guidelines that can help researchers during their attempts to make their own research transparent and verifiable. While discussions of crucial theoretical concepts will get ample attention, the seminars will also showcase experiences gained during various case studies.

The seminars will be held on Thursday 22 April, 29 April and Wednesday 12 May. For more information and to book visit their website.

These events were recorded and written up after the fact, so if you couldn’t make it, take a look now on their website.

UCL Open Science Conference 2021 – Programme now available

By Kirsty, on 26 March 2021

Thank you once more to everyone that submitted their ideas to the Call for Papers – we had so many and are so grateful that we have been able to create a packed programme.

All of the information about our Keynotes was revealed back in January, but we can now reveal the full programme and our 4 panels!

Day 1: Monday 26th April

Time Title
13:00 – 13:10 Welcome, housekeeping
13:10 – 13:40 Open Science – looking to the future
Jean-Claude Burgelman
13:40 – 13:55 Open Science at UCL – looking to our future
Paul Ayris
13:55 – 14:10 Q&A Discussion
  Break
14:20 – 15:00 Future of Open Science panel
15:00 – 15:15 Panel Q&A
  Break
15:25 – 16:05 Technical solutions panel
16:05 – 16:20 Panel Q&A
16:20 – 16:30 Summary and close

Day 2: Tuesday 27th April

Time Title
13:00 – 13:10 Welcome, housekeeping
13:10 – 13:30 Count-erproductive? The role of metrics in the advancement of Open Science
Lizzie Gadd
13:30 – 13:40 Q&A
13:40 – 14:00 Toolkit for Transparency, Reproducibility & Quality in Energy Research
Gesche Huebner & Mike Fell
14:00 – 14:10 Q&A
  Break
14:20 – 15:00 Reproducibility, Transparency & Metrics panel
15:00 – 15:15 Panel Q&A
  Break
15:25 – 16:05 Citizen science panel
16:05 – 16:20 Panel Q&A
16:20 – 16:30 Summary and close

Download the Draft Programme and details of all of our panellists (pdf)

Get your tickets now!

UCL Open Science Conference 2021 update – Keynotes and tickets!

By Kirsty, on 22 January 2021

As part of the Focus on Open Science programme, jointly organised by SKS, UCL and LIBER, the team in the UCL Office for Open Science & Scholarship recently announced their Spring conference, taking place on the afternoons of the 26th and 27th April 2021 and we are pleased to announce tickets are available now!

Don’t forget also that you can be a part of the conference by submitting a proposal to our call for papers, open until 28th February 2021. We welcome applications for lightning talks across a number of themes related to the 8 pillars of Open Science. The aim of the Open Science events is to add to a global community of practice in Open Science activity so please do share your insights into and use of Open Science policy and practice with the wider scholarly community.

We are also delighted to be able to confirm the Keynote speakers for each day:

Day 1: 

Jean-Claude Burgelman

Jean-Claude Burgelman is professor of Open Science Policies and Practices at the Free University of Brussels (Faculty of Social Science and Solvay Business School) He retired on 1-3-2020 from the EC as Open Access Envoy. Until 1-8-2019 he was the head of Unit Open Science at DG RTD and his team developed the EC’s polices on open science, the science cloud, open data and access.

He joined the European Commission in 1999 as a Visiting Scientist in the Joint Research Centre (the Institute of Prospective Technological Studies – IPTS), where he became Head of the Information Society Unit. In January 2008, he moved to the Bureau of European Policy Advisers (attached to the president of the EC) as adviser for innovation policy. Since 1-10-2008, he joined DG RTD, as advisor and then Head of Unit in charge of top level advisory boards like the European Research and Innovation Area Board, the Innovation for Growth Group and the European Forum for Forward Looking Activities.

Until 2000 he was full professor of communication technology policy at the Free University of Brussels, as well as director of its Centre for Studies on Media, Information and Telecommunication and was involved in science and technology assessment. He has been visiting professor at the University of Antwerp, the European College of Bruges and the University of South Africa and sits on several academic journals. He chaired the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Innovation and was a member of its Science Advisory Committee. He recently joined the Board of Directors of DONA

Keynote title: Open Science – looking to the future.

Open Science is here to stay and will become the standard way of doing science this decade. Sooner than we thought (due to CORONA) and much more needed than we assumed (in view of the large issues we face as societies).

Dr Paul Ayris

Dr Ayris is Pro-Vice-Provost (UCL Library Services & the UCL Office for Open Science and Scholarship). He joined UCL in 1997.

Dr Ayris was the President of LIBER (Association of European Research Libraries) 2010-14. He was Chair of the LERU (League of European Research Universities) INFO Community, finishing 10 years in office in December 2020. He is now the LERU observer in the EOSC Association and UCL’s Open Science Ambassador in the LERU Open Science Ambassadors Policy Group.

He also chairs the OAI Organizing Committee for the Cern-Unige Workshops on Innovations in Scholarly Communication. He is a member of the UUK High-Level Strategy Group on E-Resource purchasing for the Jisc community. On 1 August 2013, Dr Ayris became Chief Executive of UCL Press. He is a member of the Provost’s and President’s Senior Management Team in UCL. On 1 October 2020, Dr Ayris launched the UCL Office for Open Science and Scholarship, of which he is head.

He has a Ph.D. in Ecclesiastical History and publishes on English Reformation Studies. In 2019, he was made a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

Keynote title: Open Science at UCL – looking to our future.

Dr Ayris will follow the opening keynote with a discussion of how the future of Open Science will directly affect universities and what the future of developments of Open Science will be at UCL.

Day 2: 

Dr Lizzie Gadd

Elizabeth (Lizzie) Gadd is a scholarly communications specialist working as a Research Policy Manager (Publications) at Loughborough University, UK.

She chairs the International Network of Research Management Societies (INORMS) Research Evaluation Working Group which has developed the ‘SCOPE’ model for responsible research evaluation and a set of principles and assessment tool for responsible University Rankings. In 2010 she co-founded and now chairs the LIS-Bibliometrics Forum for HE bibliometrics specialists. Under this umbrella she founded The Bibliomagician Blog which provides advice and guidance ‘by practitioners, for practitioners’. She also is co-Champion for the ARMA Research Evaluation SIG.  In 2020 she was the recipient of the INORMS Award for Excellence in Research Management Leadership.

She holds a PhD in copyright ownership and scholarly communication and regularly writes, researches and speaks on scholarly communication topics relating to copyright ownership, open access, bibliometrics and research evaluation.

Keynote title: Count-erproductive? The role of metrics in the advancement of open science.

Lizzie will talk about where metrics can be helpful and unhelpful, and what alternative forms of evaluation we might use to incentivise, monitor, promote and reward open research practice.

Gesche Huebner & Mike Fell

Dr Gesche Huebner is a Lecturer at the UCL Institute for Environmental Design and Engineering and a Senior Research Fellow at the UCL Energy Institute. Her research is focused on understanding drivers of energy consumption and temperatures in home and on assessing links between the built environment, health, and wellbeing.

Dr Michael Fell is a Senior Research Fellow at UCL Energy Institute. His research (on home energy use) employs quantitative and qualitative methods, and includes both original data collection and systematic review approaches. He has previously worked on secondment in the Open Science Team at the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. Mike and Gesche are both working on promoting research practices for greater transparency, reproducibility and quality in applied energy research, and have given presented, published, and taught on this topic.

Keynote title: Toolkit for Transparency, Reproducibility & Quality in Energy Research

The talk will draw on a recent paper considering the use of open science approaches in applied, multidisciplinary research areas. It will set out some of the key barriers we have noted in the case of energy research, and then present our new “TReQlist” (or checklist for transparency, reproducibility and quality) covering tools that we suggest are applicable in multidisciplinary research areas. We also show at what stages those tools help to improve research practices. We focus on the benefits to researchers of employing these approaches, countering the narrative that following good practice on open science is either burdensome or in opposition to career progression incentives.

Open Access Week: the first ReproHack ♻ @ UCL

By Kirsty, on 17 November 2020

The Research Software Development Group hosted the first ReproHack at UCL as part of the Open Access Week events run this year by the Office for Open Science and Scholarship. This was not only the first event of this type at UCL, but the first time a reprohack ran for a full week.

What’s a Reprohack?

A ReproHack is a hands-on reproducibility hackathon where participants attempt to reproduce the results of a research paper from published code and data and share their experiences with the group and the papers authors.

As it normally happens on hackathons, this is also a learning experience! During a Reprohack the participants, besides contributing to measure the reproducibility of published papers, also learn how to implement better reproducibility practices into their research and appreciate the high value of sharing code for Open Science.

An important aspect of the Reprohacks is that the authors themselves are the ones who put forward their papers to be tested. If you’ve published a paper and provided code and data with it, you can submit your papers for future editions of Reprohack! Your paper may be chosen by future reprohackers and provide you with feedback about the reproducibility of your paper! The feedback form is well designed so you get a complete overview of what went well and what could be improved.

Reprohacks are open to all domains! Any programming language used in the papers are accepted, however papers with code using open source programming languages are more likely to be to chosen by the participants as it may be easier to install it on their computers.

In this particular edition, the UCL Research Software Development Group was available throughout the week to provide support to the reprohackers.

What did I miss?

This was the first Reprohack at UCL! You missed all the excitement that first-time events bring with them! But do not worry, there will be more Reprohacks!

This event was particularly challenging with the same difficulties we have been fighting for the last nine months trying to run events online, but we had gain some experience already with other workshops and training sessions we run so everything went smoothly!

The event started with a brief introduction of what the event was going to be like, an ice-breaker to get the participants talking and a wonderful keynote by Daniela Ballari entitled “Why computational reproducibility is important?”. Daniela provided a great introduction to the event (did you know that only a ~20% of the published literature has only the “potential” of being computationally reproduced? and that most of it can’t be because either the software is not free, the data provided is incomplete, or it misses which version of the software was used? [Culina, 2020]), linking to resources like The Turing Way and providing five selfish reasons to work on reproducibility. She put these reasons in context of our circles of influences like how these practices benefits the author, their team, the reviewers and the overall community. The questions and answers that followed the talk were also very insightful! Daniela is a researcher in Geoinformation and Geostatics and never trained as a software developer, so she had to learn her way to make her research reproducible and her efforts in that front were highlighted in the selfish reasons she proposed in her talk.

The rest of the event consisted on ReproHacking-hacking-hacking! We separated into groups and started to choose papers. We then disconnected from the call and each participant or team worked as they preferred over the next days to try to reproduce the paper(s) they chose. At the end of the week we reconvened together to share how far we’d got and what we learned on the way.

In total we reviewed four papers, only one participant managed to reproduce the whole paper, the rest (me included) were stuck on the process. We found that full reproducibility is not easy! If the version of a software is not mentioned, then it becomes very difficult to find why something is not working as it should. But we also had a lot of fun and the participants were happy that there is a community at UCL that fights for reproducibility!

This ReproHack also counted with Peter Schmidt interviewing various participants for Code for thought, a podcast that will be published soon! Right now he’s the person running RSE Stories on this side of the Atlantic, a podcast hosted by Vanessa Sochat.

What’s next?

We will run this again! When? Not sure. We would like to run it twice a year, maybe again during the Open Access week and another session sometime between March-April. Are you interested in helping to organise it? Give me a shout! We can make a ReproHack that fits better for our needs (and our researchers!)

Thanks

Million thanks to Daniela Ballari, her talk was very illustrative and helpful to set the goals of the event!

Million thanks to Anna Krystalli too, a fellow Research Software Engineer at the University of Sheffield as she was the creator of this event and provided a lot of help to get us ready! She’s a Software Sustainability Institute Fellow and the SSI gave the initial push for this to exist. We also want to thank the RSE group at Sheffield as we were using some of their resources to run the event!

I also want to thank the organisers of ReproHack in LatinR (thanks Florencia!) as their event was just weeks before ours and seeing how they organised was super helpful!

Reproducibility events and initiatives from the UKRN

By Kirsty, on 11 November 2020

Improve your workflow for reproducible science: We recently hosted this workshop on reproducible data analysis in R Markdown and Git, led by data scientist Mine Cetinkaya-Rundel. The recording can be found here and the materials here.

Open science in covid-19 research, ReproducibiliTea journal club (Dec 2nd):Dr Lonni Besançon will present his paper ‘Open Science Saves Lives: Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic’. Further details and registration can be found here.

Funding for activities to develop data skills/software: UCL are offering £3000 for projects (£600 each) that support community-based activities which either contribute to the development of software and data skills, foster interdisciplinary research through the reuse of tools and resources (e.g. algorithms, data and software) or strengthen positive attributes of the community. The aim is also to provide PhD students, research and professional service staff opportunities to develop their leadership and advocacy skills. Deadline to apply is the 23 November 2020 (noon). Further details can be found here. 

 

Upcoming events – Focus Open Science and Reproducibility

By Kirsty, on 13 October 2020

Focus Open Science events open for booking

This years Focus on Open Science programme of events is taking shape and the first sessions have been launched for booking. The programme this year will all be virtual so all sessions are free and open to all!

The aim of the Focus on Open Science Workshops is to address the challenges posed by Open Science, using the 8 pillars of Open Science identified by the European Commission in its Open Science Policy Platform.

Improve your workflow for reproducible science (10th November 2020)

Join a 2-hour virtual workshop on reproducible data science using R, led by data scientist and lecturer Dr. Mine Çetinkaya-Rundel. Open to all and free to join.

Details and registration on Eventbrite.