Open research
Whether you're an academic, researcher or student, you have the power to foster an open research culture through your research practices. As an advocate of open research, you can help to establish norms and best practice to influence your colleagues, students, peers and collaborators.
UOW's open access principles further the University’s strategic goals for a better future through education, research and partnership. These principles demonstrate University and researcher commitment to sharing our research as broadly as possible.
Open research supports the University of Wollongong's commitment to address the UN Sustainable Development Goals as a collective roadmap towards creating a better and more sustainable future for all. The Australian Code for the Responsible Conduct of Research, 2018 is a framework for responsibility and openness that provides a foundation for high-quality research, transparency, credibility and community trust.
What is open research?
Open research widens the principles of open access from publications into the whole research lifecycle. It incorporates making research methodology and protocols, published works and preprints, peer review, open education resources (OER), data, software and code openly available, leading to greater impact for you and your research outputs and helping to solve some of the world’s greatest challenges.
Open research, sometimes referred to as open science, is inclusive of all disciplines and research types. It centres on being as open as possible and as closed as necessary.
This video (1:26) describes open research:
Video transcript: What is open research?
For researchers, their networks are invaluable, sharing data, code and materials. Helping each other to discover insights, and advance their research. What if your network, though, could be part of something bigger?
Recently, a new way of working has been gaining momentum. It’s called Open Research.
For our example topic, we'll focus on "fostering collaboration in online learning at University." At the search screen, input your search strategy.
You'll notice that we have used quotation marks for common phrases, asterisks to find variations in word endings, and or to include synonyms.
Researchers around the world, in all disciplines,store, share and reuse their outputs with the wider community, so everyone can access insights and knowledge much sooner, helping to advance their work and support reproducibility.
Open Research is already raising the profiles of researchers and increasing their ability to tackle some of society’s biggest issues.
Of course, there are challenges, like promoting equitable access and protecting confidential data.
But as a wider community, we can tackle these together – working out how to be as open as possible, but as closed as necessary.
Because when we all work together, openly, we can achieve so much more.
Open Research. Be open to something bolder.
End transcript.
Benefits to researchers
The transparency and increased engagement with your work, both within academia and society more broadly, has many benefits:
- Increased collaboration opportunities, both within and outside academia
- Increased efficiency through reproducibility of your work
- Increased access and usage
- Increased access outside academia, reaching practitioners
- Compliance with funder mandates and institutional requirements
- Increased transparency, leading to increased trust in research
- Aligned to the Principles of Research Integrity.
