Open Research at Flinders
The goal of open research is to facilitate transparent, rigorous, reproducible and accessible research.
Open research (also known as open science) includes numerous research practices, such as sharing data, research materials and/or code, preregistering data collection and data analytic plans, making your research outputs freely available, and conducting replication studies. Open research also encompasses other initiatives including open peer review, Registered Reports, and efforts to increase inclusivity and diversity.
Flinders University encourages researchers to learn about, adopt and encourage open research practices, where relevant or possible. When relevant we will update this page with additional information, resources, and opportunities as they become available to ensure that the Flinders’ research community can easily stay up-to-date with recent developments.
Open Science webinar with Prof Brian Nosek
Have you heard of open science, but aren’t sure what it is or why it’s important? Join us for a thought-provoking session with Professor Brian Nosek from the Center for Open Science.
Improving openness, rigor, and reproducibility in research is less a technical challenge and more a social challenge. Current practice is sustained by dysfunctional incentives that prioritize publication over accuracy and privacy over transparency. The consequence is unnecessary inefficiency in research progress. Successful culture change requires coordinated policy, incentive, and normative changes across stakeholders to improve research credibility and accelerate progress. Some stakeholder groups and disciplines are making more progress than others. We can change the system, but if we do not act collectively we will fail.
Let’s not fail.
Flinders' Open Research Intensive 14-16 June 2022
A Flinders' initiative to support open, rigorous and reproducible research.
To support and inform the Flinders’ research community, Research Development and Support ran a three-day researcher training intensive on open research practices. This Open Research Intensive included a mix of online workshops with face-to-face information sessions and panel discussions. These sessions were designed to inform and support open, rigorous and reproducible research at Flinders.
If you would like to find out more about open research (in general or at Flinders) please contact Dr Jen Beaudry, Manager, Researcher Training, Development and Communication.
Session recordings
Over the past decade, researchers, institutions and organisations have developed research practices to increase open, rigorous and reproducible research.
In this recording, Dr Jen Beaudry (Manager, Researcher Training, Development and Communication) provides an introduction to all things open research.
She discusses the replication crisis and give an overview of research practices designed to increase the openness and transparency of your work, including:
- preregistration,
- Registered Reports,
- preprints
- open data, code, and materials
She also provides a number of resources to help you embrace and promote open science practices.
Staff from the Library discussed the fundamentals of open access publishing and discussed different strategies you can use to make your research outputs more accessible and discoverable.
They discussed:
- The basics of Open Access
- How Open Access Publishing benefits the research community
- Strategies for Open Access publishing
- How to find open material
- How to find metrics of openness
Presenters included Dr Danny Kingsley, Josephine McGill and Peter Mason.
Access session slides here.
The movement toward openness is not limited to research. You can also be more open in your teaching using Open Educational Resources (OERs). Tim Ormsby from Flinders Library and Dr Gerti Szili from Geography discussed how OERs can help your teaching and research.
This session covered:
- What OERs are
- The benefits of OERs to students, teachers and academic authors
- How to find OERs to use in your teaching
- How Flinders Library is supporting the use and production of OERs
Access session slides here.
Adopting open research practices is not without its challenges; however, there are a number of myths about open research that make these challenges seem insurmountable.
Facilitated by Dr Jen Beaudry, this panel provided an open discussion about the myths and challenges of open research practices. The panel included:
- Dr Rhys Williams, Research Data Specialist, Australian Research Data Commons
- Dr Danny Kingsley, Associate Librarian, Content and Digital Library Strategy
- Dr Melissa de Vel-Palumbo, Lecturer, CBGL
- Dr Vera Weisbecker, Associate Professor, CSE
- Hendryk Flaegel, Manager, Research Ethics and Compliance
- Dr Erin Morton, Operations Director, Health Data Science and Clinical Trials, CMPH
Jenny Fewster from the Australian Research Data Commons discussed how to increase openness and transparency in the HASS disciplines. The ARDC is leading the development of a national Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (HASS) Research Data Commons and is focused on building Indigenous Research Capability.
In this session, Jenny covered:
- the Language Data Commons of Australia
- Integrated Research Infrastructure for Social Sciences
- the Trove Research Platform
- Improving Indigenous Research Capability
- Secure Authorisation for Groups
- The Gazetteer of Historical Australian Place Names
- HASS in the 2021 National Research Infrastructure Roadmap
Access session slides here.
Hendryk Flaegel (Manager, Research Ethics and Compliance), Peter Mason (Flinders Library), and Rhys Williams (Australian Research Data Commons) led a session all about research data.
They covered:
- The ethical issues you need to consider when sharing your data
- How to apply the FAIR Principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reproducible) to your research data
- How to use metadata
- How to use ROADS to share your data
- The data storage options available on a national scale.
Access session slides here.
Dr Paula Andrea Martinez from the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) covered how to make your research code more visible by following the FAIR Principles for Research Software.
The FAIR principles are:
- Findable
- Accessible
- Interoperable
- Reproducible
Dr Martinez discussed:
- How to apply the FAIR principles to research software
- Four recommendations to make research code more visible (and citable)
Access session slides here.
Eric Olson from the Center for Open Science (USA) gave a hands-on, virtual workshop to increase the reproducibility of your research methods and your data analyses.
In this workshop recording, you will:
- Find reproducible protocols and study methods for research
- Select reporting guidelines for research
- Learn how to create unique identifiers for your materials and tools
- Check a protocol or manuscript for transparency
- Compare and select repositories to suit a research project
- Curate the metadata of a research project to improve adherence to the FAIR data principles
Access session slides here.
Open Research resources
Links to other relevant resources at Flinders:
- Introductory presentation by Dr Jen Beaudry, Manager, Researcher Training, Development and Communications
- ReproducilbiliTea introductory reading list
- Seven easy steps to open science: An annotated reading list (Crüwell et al., 2019; psychology)
- ReproducibiliTea grassroots journal club
- FAIR Principles
- FAIR means that it is Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable
- Open Scholarship Knowledge Base
- Collaborative initiative to curate and share knowledge about the what, why, and how of open scholarship
- Framework for Open and Reproducible Research Training (FORTT)
- Provides support and resources for the teaching of open and reproducible science
- FOSTER Open Science
- Brings together the best open science training resources to contribute to lasting behaviour change of European researchers
- Open Science Framework
- Data and materials storage
- Version control
- Preregistration
- Integration with other platforms (e.g., GitHub, figshare)
- Preprint server
- Center for Open Science
- Developer of the Open Science Framework
- Resources
- Opportunities
- YouTube channel
- Riot Science Club
- Led by early career researchers, this YouTube channel is regularly updated with new talks about open science and relevant research developments.
- General preregistration resources
- ReproducilbiliTea preregistration reading list
- Preregistration forms and templates
- Preregistration for qualitative research
- Preregistering qualitative research (Haven & Van Grootel, 2019)
- Center for Open Science qualitative preregistration template and process
- Registered Reports
- This new format of journal article moves peer-review earlier in the process before data collection so editors and reviewers can offer advice when you can act on it. If they grant in-principle acceptance, the journal will publish your manuscript regardless of the results, provided you followed the agreed upon research plan.
- This page includes resources to find out if your journals are participating
- Resources for editors and reviewers
- Peer Community In Registered Reports
- A new community dedicated to receiving, reviewing, and recommending Registered Reports. Accepted Registered Reports will have the option of publishing in PCI RR-friendly journals without further peer review.
- Data sharing
- Moving toward ethically sharing data (Meyer, 2018)
- Explicitly state what you have done with the 21-word solution (Simmons, Nelson, & Simonsohn, 2012, p. 4–12)
- Make sure your work is reproducible
- Five simple ways to make your research more reproducible (Conroy, 2019; chemical sciences)
- A beginner’s guide to conducting reproducible research (Alston & Rick, 2021; ecology)
- Error detection
- Check for errors in your reported results with Statcheck
- Share your materials, data and/or code for peer-review (Open Science Framework)
- Use the Open Science Framework to create view-only, anonymous links for your materials, data and/or code so reviewers can check your work without violating blind peer review
- Specify everyone’s contribution on the project using the CRediT taxonomy
- Use this tenzing shiny app to make it easy to record contributions and produce a simple contributor statement in multiple formats
- Documenting contributions to scholarly articles using CRediT and tenzing (Holcombe et al., 2020)
- Different approaches to make your data FAIR
- Preprint archives
- You will want to find the preprint archives that are most used in your discipline (e.g., see the list on the Open Science Framework)
- Explore journal policies around sharing your work using SHERPA/RoMEO
- How different are preprints from their published versions? (Miller, 2022)
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