Universities for North East England (UNEE) Open Research Week 2025
General information
The Universities for North East England (UNEE) Open Research Week took place online between the 24th and 28th March 2025. The UNEE group consists of Newcastle University, Northumbria University, Durham University, Teesside University and the University of Sunderland.
The collection features presentation recordings and transcripts from the events and is relevant to anyone with an interest in knowing more about Open Research, including researchers, academics, technicians, research staff support and students. The presentations feature a range of speakers discussing Open Research practices in UNEE institutions and beyond, exploring and sharing good practice, and considering barriers and strategies to enable Open Research.
Access the collection in Northumbria University's repository.
Contents
- Open Research: towards a more inclusive and equitable research environment?
- Open Data?! Benefits and strategies for sharing research data.
- Monitoring open research: findings and lessons from the UKRN indicator pilots.
- Getting to Grips with Green: investigating the contribution made by self-archiving at our institutions.
- AI and academic publishing: opportunities and challenges.
Session descriptions
Open Research: towards a more inclusive and equitable research environment?
Funders increasingly support Open Research (OR) highlighting its potential to make research environments more equitable and inclusive. The 2021 UNESCO recommendations on Open Science embrace the notion that OR will enhance research and provide equity across the world of research.
In the UK, research and higher education institutions are deploying a range of initiatives to embed OR practices in their research culture and ways of working. This session brought together a panel of experts to discuss OR's potential to create an equitable, fairer and more trustworthy research environment. Can the range of Open Research practices (Open Access, Open Data, Open Software and Codes, Citizen Science, Engaged Research, Open Educational Resources) foster a more equitable and inclusive research environment?
The panel included:
- Professor Stephen Pinfield, Professor of Information Services Management (Sheffield University). It starts at 04:47.
- Dr Catalina Neculai, Assistant Professor Academic (Coventry University). Topic: 'Mind the (power) differentials: Writing for research and publication in Open Research'. It starts at 16:32
- Professor Matthew Campbell, Professor of Human Metabolism and Integrative Physiology (University of Sunderland). It starts at 27:35.
Delphine Doucet, from Sunderland University Library, organised, recorded, and chaired the session.
This session took place online at 10:30 on Monday, 24th March 2025.
Open Data?! Benefits and strategies for sharing research data
Opening Research Data is a key strand of Open Research. This session brought together researchers from all five universities to share their experience and understanding of sharing research data. From planning stage, to sharing data in repositories, they explored some of the strategies, benefits and challenges of sharing different types of research data.
This session included the following contributions in order:
- Associate Prof Martina Ferracane, Associate Professor of International Digital Trade in the Net Zero Industry Innovation Centre (Teesside University) and Assistant Professor (European University Institute, San Domenico di Fiesole). Topic: 'The Digital Trade Integration dataset: an open-access dataset to support empirical research'. It starts at 08:34.
- Prof Sarah Lonbay – Professor of Social Science and Social Care (University of Sunderland). Topic: 'Open research and sensitive qualitative data'. It starts at 15:20.
- Dr Martin P Eccles, Artist. (Graduated from Newcastle University). Topic: 'An artist's gaze on making "my data" publicly available'. It starts at 24:26.
- Dr Louise Rayne, Newcastle University Academic Track Fellow, School of History, Classics and Archaeology (Newcastle University). Topic: 'The challenges and benefits of open data in archaeological Earth observations'. It starts at 34:14.
- Dr Sebastian Potthoff, Chartered Health Psychologist and Assistant Professor in Social Work, Education and Community Wellbeing (Northumbria University). Topic: 'Bridging the research-to-practice gap: Why the I-STEM toolkit for stakeholder engagement is open to all'. It starts at: 46:00.
- Dr Eamonn Bell, Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science (Durham University). Topic: 'FAIR training outputs: Experiences with GitHub and the Carpentries-style lesson materials'. It starts at: 54:43.
- Dr Alan Bowman, Academic Tutor in Clinical Psychology in the School of Social Sciences, Humanities & Law (Teesside University).
David Watson organised the session, which was recorded by Catherine Elliott, both from Teesside University Library.
In addition to the speakers listed above, the session also featured short contributions from Desiree Campbell (Teesside), Beth Houlis (Northumbria), Bogdan Metes (Newcastle), and Delphine Doucet (Sunderland, and on behalf of Durham), who detailed the Research Data Management support provided at their respective institutions.
This session took place online at 14:00 on Monday, 24th March 2025.
Monitoring open research: findings and lessons from the UKRN indicator pilots
Between 2023 and 2025 the UK Reproducibility Network (UKRN) supported 15 institutions to lead six pilot projects to explore and, where possible, document good practice in monitoring different aspects of Open Research. The pilot projects worked with a number of third-party providers, including Elsevier, Digital Science, PLOS and OpenAIRE. The aspects of Open Research they focused on were FAIR and Open Data, data availability statements, the effects of sharing data, preregistration and the use of CRediT author contribution statements. The projects were pilots and were largely done by enthusiastic experts without dedicated resources, motivated by a desire to make practical improvements focused on what it is important to measure, rather than what is easy. Some pilots therefore got further than others, and a lot was learned learned along the way about both monitoring Open Research and about working together to improve that. In this session, Dr Neil Jacobs, head of the UKRN Open Research Programme, will outline the pilot projects, their findings, the lessons learned, and what may happen next.
https://www.ukrn.org/open-research-indicators/
This session took place online at 10:00 on Tuesday, 25th March 2025.
Heather McKenna organised the session, which was recorded by Jack Burns, both from the Newcastle University Library.
The speaker, Dr Neil Jacobs, is head of the UKRN Open Research Programme, a six year Research England initiative to accelerate the uptake of high quality open research practices, addressing skills, incentives, sharing and monitoring. Previously he has held strategy positions at UKRI (on research integrity), cOAlition S (on Open Access), Jisc (on digital infrastructure) and the UK Government (on Open Science).
Getting to Grips with Green: investigating the contribution made by self-archiving at our institutions
The Open Research team at Durham University are embarking on a project to learn more about researchers' attitudes towards and experiences of green open access. In this talk, they discuss why they decided to undertake this project, provide an analysis of the quantitative data they have already gathered from institutional repositories in North-East England and the trends that data reveals, and outline their methodology for the upcoming stages of their project.
This session took place online at 10:00 on Wednesday, 26th March 2025.
Catherine McManus, from Durham University Library, hosted the session.
The presenters are Sarah Hyland and Martin Gleghorn, both from Durham University Library.
AI and academic publishing: opportunities and challenges
AI has the potential to rapidly change academic publishing, raising new opportunities and challenges for researchers. This session brings together experts to explore how AI is shaping scholarly communication, from AI-assisted writing to ethical considerations in publishing. We will discuss how AI is driving changes in academic publishing and how open research practices can support transparency and integrity in an AI-driven landscape.
This session took place online at 13:00 on Thursday 27th March 2025.
The presenters are Dr David Flanagan, VP of AI services at Wiley, and Rebecca Ross and Monica Grandados from Creative Commons.
