Interviewed by Pauline Ward, Research Data Support Assistant

Q: Would you like to introduce yourself to the readers?

I arrived at the university in 2015 as a Chancellor’s Fellow, and I’m now a lecturer in the Centre for Cardiovascular Science. My research background is in biomedical sciences, current projects looking at metabolism, diabetes, obesity, fat tissue and inflammation. I’ve always been very interested in Open Research and some of the approaches to research assessment.

Q: What is your role as LERU representative?

I’m called an Open Science Ambassador.

LERU (League of European Research Universities) in 2018 published a roadmap about Open Science which is often called Open Research or Open Scholarship, on how its member institutions might embrace and implement Open Research practices among their researchers. It suggests each appoint an academic to lead the design and implementation of their own roadmap. There are really two sides to my role:
• Help with design and implementation of the University of Edinburgh’s own roadmap.
• Liaise and meet with counterparts at other LERU institutions, to discuss our progress, which makes us accountable, and will allow for sharing best practice re strategy and implementation. And allow me to feed back to refine and improve what we’re doing.

The term Open Research encompasses many different aspects – publishing, data management and availability, research culture, research assessment. So, there’s a lot to take on, and although I’m going to be leading on that, a lot of it will be coordinating with other people within the university, who have more specific remits for each of those.

The University of Edinburgh’s representative on the Info group of LERU is Dominic Tate from Library & University Collections. He previously was nominally in the role I’m now in, but we felt it was more appropriate to have a researcher in this role as an Open Research ambassador because it covers diverse aspects of research. I’ll be working with Dominic to make sure I’m up-to-date with the Library and the university strategies for research data management and trying to embrace more what’s called FAIR data, where the data can be shared openly among researchers. Each arm of Open Research has challenges and implications for how the university needs to address that in terms of infrastructure, training and culture and so on.

Part of my job will be working with the university’s reps on the other sub-panels of LERU: research broadly, research integrity, research careers / HR (looking at how we can recognise and reward a researcher for embracing and implementing Open Research practices in their own research), doctoral studies, teaching and learning – ensuring researchers coming up through the university are aware of Open Research, and enterprise and innovation. I aim to make sure the roadmap is developed in such a way to meet the challenges and goals of those arms.

Q: Why did you take on this role?

Research should be about creativity, challenging dogma and doing things in an evidence-based way and yet the approach to scholarly communications has been anything but those things.

Coming to Edinburgh I was aware there have been lots of initiatives at a policy level around REF outputs having to be open access which is great. So there really was this momentum shift towards open publishing. But then that hasn’t translated as much into the open sharing of the primary or source data for manuscripts.

In 2019 a postdoc in my department organised a research symposium on research culture and what’s called FAIR data. FAIR is an acronym: Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Re-useable. It’s basically an approach to sharing research data in a way that means that other researchers can re-use it, scrutinise it, can maybe use it to address new hypotheses.

This led to the establishment of the Edinburgh Open Research Initiative (EORI), which is led by a PhD student in my lab, myself and several others. The aim of EORI is to communicate and raise awareness of open practices and the benefits of open research. I was then involved in the university’s working group on the responsible use of research metrics. That has concluded its activities and the university is moving towards establishing a working group on research culture.

And I think it’s a good way to make sure that the investment the original researchers put into a study, is not just closed and limited, it can actually go on to lead to new breakthroughs. We’ve seen that with Covid, with the open publication of the SARS-Cov2 genomes.

Q: – In the Research Data Support team we’re always trying to help researchers to share their research data and raise awareness of the benefits, while making it easy for them through the DataShare repository as well. You say that hasn’t been happening on the scale it should be – what’s your observation? Where have you seen that?

Most of the adoption of open research practices is probably around scholarly publishing in terms of having open access publications that people can read, not behind paywalls. And then when we think about research data and open data sharing, there are various commonly used repositories around transcriptomics data, proteomics and that kind of thing. But it is less routine practice when a group publishes a study, for example, to provide the raw data or links to the raw data. That is now changing, but I’d say it is lagging behind, and many journals now require you to publish the source data or links to it along with the publication, so that’s great. I just think it’s almost like there’s still a fear or paranoia, you don’t want people to scrutinise your data because maybe you’re wrong. There needs to be a cultural shift towards people not being afraid of that, and also that it’s OK to be wrong, because that’s how knowledge progresses, we disprove things. There’s also the funding burden: it costs money to store all the big datasets. But funders are more aware of that now, requiring Data Management Plans for example as a matter of routine. So I think it is changing. Typically in the paper nowadays you’ll have a section on data sharing and availability of source code, and the authors may simply have a statement saying ‘all data is available upon reasonable request’, and that’s fine, but it still presents a barrier. Some people might not feel comfortable contacting an author to ask for the data, so I think it’s much better just having some sort of searchable database.

Q: What would you say to a researcher who was more sceptical about the open research approach?

I think I’d want to know why they were sceptical. I can imagine someone being sceptical because you don’t feel like you have enough time, you know you sort of can’t teach an old dog new tricks, you developed your career taking a certain approach that works for you. It works for lots of other people. Why shouldn’t you keep doing that? And there is a sense that to take new practices might just add to your workload and you don’t want to do that, which I understand fully.

There’s probably also a fear that if you’re sharing your data openly, or if you put a paper up as a pre-print, then maybe you would get scooped, or you would alert competing groups to the fact that you’re doing this research. But now I think there’s more of a sense that actually, by posting a pre-print, you’re sticking your flag in the ground and saying we are doing this, and we were first. It might not be peer reviewed yet, but look, we’ve got this to a level that’s complete enough to be out there.

And there’s a fear someone might find a mistake. But it’s good for science if we find mistakes. So we almost need to shift focus from the ego of the individual to being a bit more selfless and caring about the integrity of research as a whole. That maybe is a hard shift to make, but I think we’ve seen with Covid again how you can get a sea change in mentality where now I think most people in biomedical research are very happy to publish a pre-print. It’s just the done thing for many fields now. And that’s happened really quite quickly, so I think maybe we can see a similar thing happening with depositing of open data.

If you’re worried about the increased workload, you don’t have to be. Most journals have plenty of avenues for publishing your paper Open Access. There are many existing platforms for making your data openly available, or your protocols openly available.
There are benefits to you. More people will read your research, have access to your data, and may be able to use that to develop new projects. You might get new collaborators. You might be a co-author on future papers or patents, or things like that.
And then there’s issues around research culture and research metrics. If you’re publishing your research, and if most people are going to judge it only on the journal it ends up in, you’re at the mercy of peer review. It can be very hit and miss, it’s almost flipping a coin sometimes. And you feel like you’ve invested so much effort into getting this paper ready to go, if people only view it through this really narrow and illogical sort of lens, then it’s frustrating. We feel a bit powerless. So I think if we can move away from that where people are a bit more open minded about how we view the merits of a piece of research and the researchers who are doing it that will help to alleviate some of the anxiety and powerlessness you feel as a researcher.
So it’s good for research culture. Basically it’s good for the wellbeing and the motivation of researchers, and hopefully then that will translate over into better research integrity. You don’t have these perverse incentives that might encourage people to cut corners.

If someone said they were sceptical about open research, I would ask them what exactly their concerns were and then I would point to the ease of overcoming those concerns and embracing these parameters and the many benefits to themselves to their research conclusions, robustness and the research community as a whole.

Learning more

You can read more about Will’s research on the Research Explorer:

https://www.research.ed.ac.uk/en/persons/will-cawthorn

An interview with Dr Will Cawthorn, our new LERU Open Science Ambassador / Edinburgh Open Research by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0