Open Research

This statement sets out Royal Holloway’s commitment to the aims and principles of Open Research. Recommendations on this area were adopted by the General Conference of UNESCO in November 2021. Open Research matches well with the values of Royal Holloway, namely:

• Excellence – Open Research has now been identified as a practice that improves the quality, reproducibility and impact of research.
• Creativity – Open Research is based on employing techniques for working in the 21st century and hence enables innovation.
• Collaboration – Open Research is predicated on the assumption that research faces increasingly complicated and multi-faceted challenges where researchers work in a deeply collaborative fashion. Its methods and approaches are hence deeply rooted in a culture of collaboration.
• Fairness – Open Research enables access to research, namely publications, data and software. This enables access to research for the public and researchers from low- and middle-income countries.
• Freedom – Open Research focusses on enabling transparency and integrity in research, as well as equality of access to materials and equality of opportunity.  

Principles   

Royal Holloway supports the principles of Open Research and researchers are encouraged to apply these throughout the research lifecycle. These principles are:

• Pre-registration of research.
• Transparency in research methodology.
• Public availability and reusability of research data and analysis code.
• Public accessibility and transparency of research communication.
• Data described according to FAIR Data Principles, ensuring that it is Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable and publicly available where possible.
• Using digital tools to facilitate collaboration.  

Royal Holloway recognises that engagement with the principles will differ across disciplines and projects and may be determined by a variety of factors, (e.g., commercial potential, industry partnerships, human participant data, publisher requirements, best practice of individual research communities, and relevant legal and ethical frameworks).  However, the College expects researchers to act in accordance with funder mandates regarding Open Research and with the broader principles of Research Integrity.