Keele Open Research Network

This webinar provides a brief overview of Keele’s journey to enhance our Open Research practices. It also provides a roadmap of our next steps on this journey. As the criteria for the Research Excellence Framework 2029 assessment (REF 2029) becomes clearer, it is evident that Open Research will play a significant role. Dr Jim Grange discusses how we can position ourselves as individuals and as an institution.

This webinar unpacks the challenges of the current system and explores how Registered Reports can pave the way for a more open, transparent, and unbiased research ecosystem. Whether you're a seasoned researcher, an early-career academic, or someone interested in the intricacies of scientific publishing, this webinar promises insights that can shape the way you view and engage with the world of academic research and publishing.

This webinar ventured into the heart of Open Data, elucidating its significance, its relevance to quantitative and qualitative research disciplines, and the guiding principles that ensure data is not just open but also usable and impactful. It covers the myriad benefits of open data, from accelerating scientific discovery to promoting transparency and reproducibility in research. We demystify the notion that open data is solely a quantitative endeavour by exploring strategies and best practices for sharing qualitative data while preserving participant privacy and context. We also covered the guiding "FAIR" principles of open data, ensuring that data is Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable. We concluded by providing an overview of some tools for Open Data, including Keele's own data repository.

This webinar was hosted by the Keele Open Research Network (KORN) and led by Scott McGowan. Scott is the Head of Library Academic Services at Keele University, and is a member of the University’s Research Integrity & Improvement Committee. This webinar covered advice and practical help on research data management, with an emphasis on how research data can be archived through the current ePrints Keele Data Repository.

This webinar was led by Dr Susie Weller, a Senior Research Fellow in the Clinical Ethics, Law and Society research group, and a Fellow of the Centre for Personalised Medicine, University of Oxford. She is also a Visiting Fellow at the National Centre for Research Methods, UK. In the UK, the growth of data repositories and the opportunity to access a burgeoning amount of archived qualitative material offers researchers exciting possibilities for repurposing data. For the research institutions driving the open science agenda, the sharing of publicly-funded data is seen as essential to accountability and transparency, with researchers expected to make data available in a timely manner. Yet, how qualitative researchers feature – as data (co)creators and curators – within a process governed largely by quantitative data management strategies remains undocumented. To advance ethical practice in qualitative secondary analysis, data sharing policies and practices need to be re-framed to respect, value and care for the particularities of qualitative data and the emotional, intellectual and temporal investments made by qualitative researchers working in an increasingly pressurized Higher Education environment. To achieve this, an ethics of care is essential to making open qualitative data practical and ethical.

This webinar was led by Dr Samantha Pearman-Kanza & Dr Nicola Knight of the University of Southampton. The Physical Sciences Data Infrastructure (PSDI) Initiative is conducting research and developing services to mitigate this and to provide the physical sciences community with the knowledge, exemplars and tools to promote FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Re-useable) research and data.