Surrey Open Research Awards
Dr Marton Ribary, Eirini Martinou and Ashley Williams received recognition at the recent Open Research and Transparency Showcase Awards event that took place on 4 March 2021.
Open research practices can be used to make your whole research process transparent; from your workflow, to your data curation, to your analyses and finally your research paper.
These practices increase the number of outputs from your project (even your data can have a doi), giving credit to the enormous work that goes into each aspect of the research process. You can even go one step further, as Marton did, and publish a data paper, or publish the code to a tool that you have developed, as Eirini did. This directs attention to the resource itself and its reuse potential. By being open, you can increase the impact and visibility of your research, increase the public benefit of your research, increase the number and range of outputs per project, and the number of citations of your outputs, and open up numerous invitations, collaborations and opportunities for new avenues of research.
Professor Emily Farran, Professor of Developmental Psychology
Find out more about our open research
Dr Marton Ribary: Open Research case study award winner
Dr Ribary’s case study presented a pioneering change in research practice to the field of Roman legal scholarship. Marton won the award because he fully embraced open research practice at every stage of the research process, and because of the broad applicability of these open research processes across disciplines and career levels.
He presented his research strategy as a ‘pyramid of openness’, with the research paper as the tip of the pyramid. Within this strategy he detailed his open project repository of resource files and code, through to his open data, which included sample queries and a data manual, and finally how he published both a data paper and research paper (open access, with open peer review).
Marton reaped numerous benefits by being open. For example, by using open repositories, he was able to identify and easily correct a bug that a user had spotted and update with the same doi. Furthermore, his accessibility of his documentation means that it has reached users with no prior experience, leading to new collaborations, and his data paper lead to an invitation to present at a data forum about good practice, and to create a special collection advertising the benefits of data papers.
Find out more about Dr Ribary’s research
Eirini Martinou: Surrey Reproducibility Society recognition award winner
Across many fields, systematic reviews guide researchers' understanding of literature and research findings and they direct further advancements. However, conducting reviews in a systematic and unbiased way is challenging due to the lack of resources supporting the construction of systematic and reproducible search criteria.
Eirini Martinou worked closely with her collaborator Angeliki Angelidi to create a solution to this problem. They gained advanced knowledge on record cataloguing and search strategies in order to ensure that their own systematic review search will be fully reproducible. They decided to share their approach as it can be adapted and used across many fields for a diverse range of topics. This open tool will make the process of conducting systematic reviews more accessible and efficient for many researchers, potentially increasing the uptake of this important method across many fields. Most importantly, it will make systematic review search strategies fully reproducible, which is currently very uncommon, but crucial for conducting trustworthy and unbiased research.
The Surrey Reproducibility Society acknowledges the difficulties that may accompany conducting open and reproducible research, which is why we are so excited by Eirini’s efforts to make conducting systematic reviews easier, as well as more reproducible.
Ashley Williams: Surrey Reproducibility Society recognition runner up
In order to successfully facilitate the development of open and reproducible research practices, universities must know the basic knowledge of such approaches within their communities. Ashley Williams' contribution to the STORM project provides a great resource for this unmet need. She developed a questionnaire that assesses the knowledge, perceptions, awareness, and experiences of open and reproducible research in undergraduate psychology students. The resulting questionnaire can be used and adapted internationally for diverse areas of research and will support universities planning to adopt more open and reproducible practices.
In fact, the survey has already been distributed throughout the UK, with preliminary results already providing actionable insights. This survey is likely to be distributed yearly, and the insights gathered over time will provide longitudinal insight in the understanding and implementation of open science across the UK. This will contribute to our knowledge of how open science has (or hasn’t) spread throughout research institutions across the UK.
Developing this understanding will aid societies like the Surrey Reproducibility Society, who can then target their efforts at underserved populations and address unmet needs.
To find out more about open research, please contact Emily Farran at: e.farran@surrey.ac.uk