28 June saw the second Festival of Open Research at our university. The Festival of Open Research will celebrates the open research taking place here at the University of Southampton. This face-to-face event will introduce staff and postgraduate students to vital themes in open research, and is the perfect place to learn about the increasing focus placed on open practices across all disciplines. Our Senior Vice-President, Professor Phillip Wright, opened the festival, after which Professor Dorothy Bishop from the University of Oxford gave a keynote on ‘Open science in a world of fake research’. After this, short 5-minute lightning talks were given by several attendees on a variety of topics.
After lunch we enjoyed talks about from Tim Fellows about the Octopus initiative and Ruth Fleet from F1000 on the Open Research Europe. We concluded the day with a debate with the three distinguished guests and one of the reproducibiliTea leads. The format covered three relevant ‘open research themes’ panel members responded to with 3-5 minutes of their view, after which 10-15 mins discussion with the audience ensued. The three themes were:
- How do we create the best incentives for open research? What are the biggest challenges for the open research community?
- How do we prevent all these new initiatives from overwhelming an already strained profession? How do we make sure efforts are not duplicated and we collectively improve?
- How can we make sure that the relation between open research initiatives and ‘publisher models’ becomes or remains healthy?
Finally, we networked at the reception. If you are interested in helping with next year’s third instalment of the festival, please get in touch with us.