I’m currently in the middle of preparing some training on Open Research for a few institutions and it got me thinking about the practicalities of practising open research.
I wrote myself a list of what was needed in order to practice open research in any field:
- A recognition of what counts as data in your project
- What licensing is appropriate for your work
- Digitising from the beginning of the project
- Create documentation of agreements with collaborators
- Setting standards for sources to be used early in the project
- Recording metadata
- How to use repositories
- What data should be shared and what shouldn’t
I don’t think that these are specific for any one field, they’re broadly relevant in any field.
A few of these made me stop to think about the misconceptions of Open Research. Open Research is, to me, research best practice. What it’s not about it sharing absolutely everything at every stage of your project. That would potentially negatively impact the researcher and in some cases be morally questionable to do so, especially when working with sensitive data or vulnerable people.
Open Research is about ensuring that your methods are clear, your work is well documented, and that you have been supported to disseminate the areas of your work that is able to be shared.
There shouldn’t necessarily be a moral quandry between satisfying the need to share work that has been funded by public institutions and the need to have a high-quality research. To suggest that these two things are mutually exclusive suggests that mis-understanding of Open Research. By going back to basics, any researcher could make sure that areas of their research could be shared.