11 Steps to Open Research

The following are general tips for good practice which are likely to be required by research organisations, funders and publishers: 

1. Make your research publications Open Access. This can be done either via the publisher (Green, Gold or Diamond Open Access) or through depositing in a relevant repository. Pure is the College’s research information system and the publication repository as well. The College’s Open Access policy requires authors to deposit the Author’s Accepted Manuscripts into Pure. The AAMs will be made OA in line with the publisher’s OA policy. It is essential that authors follow any relevant funder and REF OA policies. 

Preprints are versions of articles before peer review. Publishing on a preprint server allows you to get your research findings into the public domain as soon as possible. A catalogue of preprint repositories can be found at ASAPbio. If you are using a preprint server make sure that your journals of choice allow posting of preprints: you can check journal/publisher policies at SHERPA RoMEO. Please ensure that the text of the preprint states that the paper has been submitted to a specific peer-reviewed journal.  Monographs and Creative Outputs, as well as articles, can be published by Open Access means.  

2. Make it FAIR. If you collect or create primary data that support your research findings, make them FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Re-usable) by depositing them and use your identifier from there in papers under an open licence, in usable formats and with appropriate documentation and metadata, and cite the data using the DOI or other unique identifier in your publications. Register yourself on ORCID and use your identifier from there in papers.  

3. Release your code. If you create research software or write code to perform data analysis, develop it using revision control platforms such as GitHub, under an open source licence. Document and comment your code and consider accepting updated versions of your code from other researchers (so-called ‘pull requests’). Store major releases (e.g. versions for, or to accompany, publications) in repositories such as Figshare or Zenodo and provide a link to the code in your publications, identified by version and using a DOI or another unique identifier where possible. Further guidance can be found here. 

Guidance on uploading your data to Royal Holloway's Figshare repository is available in an online training session recording available here.

4. Archive web resources for long-term preservation and use. If you create an open web resource, such as an online database or a digital collection, implement it using open standards (e.g. following Text Encoding Initiative Guidelines) and sustainable infrastructure to optimise its usability, and archive the content and resource documentation to a suitable data repository for long-term preservation. 

5. Engage with open peer review. You can do this either by submitting to journals/publishers that operate an open peer review process, or by reviewing for these journals and posting your reviews online. 

6. Pre-register your research plans. If you undertake empirical research, pre-register your hypotheses, study design and materials using a public registration platform such as the Open Science Framework and consider publishing your study as a registered report (an empirical journal article in which methods and proposed analyses are peer-reviewed and the results accepted for publication prior to research being conducted). 

7. Treat all data and software as first-class research outputs. If you create a dataset or software that is a substantial output in its own right and has the potential to be re-used, publish a peer-reviewed data paper or a software paper to advertise its value as a research resource and garner citations. Correspondingly, cite the data and analysis software that you have used in your research, either as data or software papers or if they have their own individual DOIs.  

8. Share your methods and materials. Explore the potential of online workflow and collaboration tools, such as Electronic Lab Notebooks and citizen science platforms (e.g. Zooniverse), which can enable you to share your methods and materials, open up new research possibilities, and allow stakeholders – including those from outside the College – to contribute to the design and implementation of research. 

9. Teach Open Research. If you are responsible for teaching, introduce your students – undergraduates as well as graduates – to the concepts and practices of Open Research. For example: explain why Open Access, and data and code sharing are important; use open data in your teaching and exercises; ask students undertaking experimental projects to pre-register their hypotheses and study designs; teach reproducibility by setting an assignment to replicate a published study; get students learning programming to set up an online code repository on GitHub; run an open peer review exercise. 

10. Discuss with journals. If you sit on the editorial board of a journal, consider tabling these issues for discussion if policies have not already been debated or adopted: introducing a data and code availability policy (see example); introducing an open peer review submission system and preprint-friendly policy; offering a registered report option; converting the journal to a fully Open Access model, if it is subscription-only or hybrid Open Access. Encourage the use of community agreed metadata standards. As a reviewer, use your influence to encourage (if not insist) that data be made open access (with a working link) in the published manuscript, and that other open research practices be adhered to. 

11. Join an Open Research community or project. For example, contribute to the Open Research discussion within your school / department / research group and help to build a community of practice within the College. In your subject discipline, you could help to develop open standards and tools that support open practices. Use your public profile and involvement with research stakeholders (such as learned societies) to promote Open Research activities and policies both internally and externally. 

*'Open licence' means a licence that permits anyone to freely access, use, modify, and share the licensed material for any purpose. This may include licences conformant with the Open Definition that are commonly used for scholarly works and datasets, such as the Creative Commons Attribution licence (CC BY); and Open Source licences typically used for software source code, such as the Apache License 2.0 or the GNU General Public License (GPL).