Open Research

What is open research?

Open research encourages/advocates openness throughout the research cycle, through collaborative working and sharing and making research methodology, software, code and equipment freely available online, along with instructions for using it. Open research includes making publications freely available online (open access), in addition to the underlying research data (open data). 

Basic principles

Research should be “as open as possible, as closed as necessary”. Some research outputs cannot be openly available due to ethical, legal or commercial restrictions.

The basic principles of open research are to:

• make publications available open access 

• make underlying data relating to publications openly available

• share protocols and methodologies 

• share software and code

• share negative results to prevent unnecessary repetition of research

• establish rights for (archival) source material to be digitised and shared where possible

• apply appropriate licences to your open material e.g.  Creative Commons 

• use persistent identifiers consistently throughout your workflow e.g. DOI and ORCID

• exploit online tools to aid collaboration including blogging, social media, altmetrics, pre-print servers