Open Research
The aim of open research is to make knowledge openly available, accessible, and reusable for everyone.
We support researchers at Edge Hill in improving the discoverability and accessibility of their work.
As a term, open research is interchangeable with open scholarship and open science (commonly used elsewhere in the world).
Benefits of open research
Sharing publications, software, code, data and protocols benefits research and society in the following ways:
- Improves research integrity, preventing data manipulation or misrepresentation, and giving greater confidence in published findings.
- Increases citation rates by enabling researchers’ work to reach the widest audience and removing cost barriers.
- Enhances collaboration opportunities.
- Enables greater efficiencies (and value for money) as research does not need to be repeated.
- Maximises research impact.
- Increases researchers’ profiles and visibility both within and outside their discipline.
- Compliance with funder policies can enhance future funding opportunities and career opportunities.
Edge Hill is a partner in the annual Open Research Week (ORW), a series of events celebrating new, developing and current practice in Open Research.
Open Research Week Sessions
Open research explained
Open research is much more than open access and data sharing, important as they are. All aspects of the research life cycle can be made open from the research question, methodology, data gathering, interview questions. Find out how you can be more open.
A comic to help researchers understand the principles and practices of open research from Kelsey Bezaire and Dr Helen Gray (Newcastle University, CC BY-ND).
Creative Commons Licences
In order to make your output open and tell everyone how they can use it, you should add a Creative Commons (CC) licence to it. Find out more about CC licences.
UK Reproducibility Network
The UKRN was launched in 2019 to unite and support a growing community of researchers already engaged with reproducibility issues. The aim of this national peer-led consortium, with a broad disciplinary representation, is to develop approaches that improve the trustworthiness and quality of research and to empower this grassroots movement to bring about lasting change.
Edge Hill’s Institutional Lead is Professor Nik Bessis.
Our Local UKRN Lead is Dr Michel Belyk.
The UKRN is a very useful source of information about open research practices and resources, such as open research across disciplines.
Open Educational Resources (OER)
Open Educational Resources are learning, teaching and research materials in any format and medium. They are either available via the public domain or under open licence and permit no-cost access, reuse, re-purpose, adaptation and redistribution by others. Find out more about OERs on the UNESCO website.
An OER can take many forms and formats and can cover learning, teaching and research, either together or separately. Issues in e-book and textbook supply and rising costs have resulted in increased interest in open access textbooks and resources.
The University of Leeds has recently launched its own OER Policy and webpages with advice on how to create an OER as well as platforms to make work accessible and discoverable.
At Edge Hill University, we have supported the development and growth of the National Teaching Repository.
Further support
For support in implementing open research or with any other questions about open access publishing or open data, please contact the Open Research Team.