Opening the research lifecycle

The creation of a public record of your rationale, hypotheses and methodology before any research has started. The record is time stamped and publicly available on a registry or repository.

A journal article in which the background, study, design, methods, and analysis plan of a project are peer reviewed before any data is collected. Once accepted, the journal will publish the projects results regardless of the outcome, if at this second stage it also goes through peer review and is accepted.

Similar to preregistration, but protocols are for health-related research and are quite often mandated. The MRC requires that protocols are made publicly available before the start of funded studies. Protocols are not the same as review protocols which are part of the systematic review process.

Also called electronic research notebooks (ERNs) or electronic lab notebooks (ELNs). ERN/ELNs are not necessarily open. They are first and foremost good digital tools for note taking and collaboration.

Digital notebooks address many of the limitations of paper lab notebooks. It is easier to add or associate content, and manage processes across teams. It is an indelible record of the research process and mitigates issues related to sharing results and single points of truth.  

Making and using open code encourages collaboration. It enables others to understand how and where they can contribute to further development. It can result in enhanced functionality of software and more efficient code. 

Openly available code helps others follow the steps taken to achieve a project’s results. This facilitates reproduction, collaboration and interaction amongst those who want to extend and enhance the code.

In opening your data, you need to manage your data effectively.

This is a flexible concept and it can be adopted and applied to different types of projects and disciplines. Citizen science projects provide an opportunity for members of the public to take an active role in research. This has the potential to bring together scientists, policy makers and society as a whole.

Two citizen science projects were presented at Open Research Week 2024 in the session ‘Citizen science: unleashing the possibilities of research for and with everyone’. The projects are ‘The Essex BioBlitz: Photographing the fingerprints of climate change in Essex’ and ‘Looking up: Astronomy and young citizens’.

An early version of a scholarly article, which has not undergone peer review. Preprints can be discipline or community specific. They can include changes that result from either open or closed community commenting.

A preprint can be the same as the version of work submitted to a journal. However, a preprint may not be submitted to a journal for publication at all.

A preprint server is a service that allows authors to upload, describe and disseminate their work/preprint. The works are usually available under open access creative commons licences, so there are no barriers to access.  A preprint service is usually supported by an institution or a user community, but there are examples of servers operated by commercial companies.

This makes the peer review process open and publicly available before or after publication. In traditional peer review the reviewers are not known to the author. In double blind reviews, the author and the reviewers are not disclosed to each other. None of the reviews/responses are published. Open peer review models support the transparency and integrity of open research.

Open access is the immediate online publication of academic research with no access fees and free from most copyright and licensing restrictions.