Improving Research Community Builder Award

25th February 2025, King’s College London

Ze Freeman & Pippa Sterk

In February, we held the first in an exciting series of interdisciplinary meetings on open research at King’s College London. The meeting brought together a wide range of early career perspectives, with attendees from the departments of Geography, Global Health & Social Medicine, Psychology, Neuroscience, Medical Biosciences, War Studies, and Education, Communication & Society joining to consider open research approaches in different fields. We had a particular interest in moving the discourse in open research away from a focus on quantitative methods, and together we spoke about what it would mean to apply open research concepts more widely.

The initial discussion, over lunch, focused around participants’ personal experiences of open research. Across disciplines, open and transparent data use were frequently brought up as the most straightforward point of connection between disparate topics. There was general agreement that sharing data is necessary, not just for topics where open data is required, but also for enabling the ability to check the credibility of research processes and to enable high quality meta-analytic work. Data and code sharing as a central part of reproducibility, statistical reliability, and trustworthiness of research was considered, as well as specific concerns around sharing qualitative, interview-based data which has a higher likelihood of identifying study participants. Positionality of researchers seemed important here – where qualitative work is concerned, sharing who the researcher is and how they are in relationship with their work is common practice. Conversation was about whether greater disclosure of personal positionality would be useful for appraising quantitative research, too, or whether more transparent and justified argumentation for research choices is sufficient.

Lightning talks on in-progress and personal experiences focused on specific ways that our different disciplines prescribe and limit what is possible in our research practice. In particular, the focus on publishing as a measurement of academic value and academic progression was discussed as inhibiting change. We talked about the prevalence of ‘bogus’ authorship within multi-authored papers - e.g. someone being presented as an author on a paper that they did not meaningfully contribute to - and whether tools like CRediT (Contribution Roles Taxonomy), recently endorsed by the college, would help or hinder.

Attendees spoke in depth about how their precarious employment positions as early career researchers informs how they feel able to take up open research practices, and whether the additional labour involved is worthwhile. There was much conversation about publishing for career development, ways of team-working, and long-held research practice norms as components in the uptake of open research practices. We also shared experiences of how the drive to do or frame our work as novel, or seemingly-socially engaged, can stifle productive criticism of methodological rigour across fields. It is these discussions which are shaping our preparations for the next session, where we will be looking more in-depth at the ways we can practically support each other in implementing open research principles.