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Open Research Hub

What is Open Research?

Open research is the practice of making research data, methods, and findings freely accessible to enhance transparency, collaboration, and equity. It aims to break down barriers to knowledge-sharing, empowering diverse stakeholders to engage in academic discourse and foster innovation to tackle complex societal challenges. 

What are the benefits of open research?

Open research enhances integrity by making hypotheses, methods, data, and results available for everyone to see, leading to more reliable and trustworthy conclusions. It promotes reproducibility, helping others verify findings or expand on them, and ensures research remains accessible for future use. This openness boosts the visibility and impact of research by allowing findings to be shared quickly and reach a wider audience.

Getting started

Putting open research into practice

The following pages serve as a centralised resource to explain open research practices, concepts, and terminology. Organised around the research lifecycle, the content highlights key resources, training, and case studies at every stage. By providing an overview of the open research landscape, these pages aim to encourage reflection and empower you to adopt more open research practices.

Open in planning and developing research

Topics covered include; preregistration, registered reports, data management planning and ethics.

Open in conducting research and acquiring data

Topics covered include; reproducibility, open protocols, finding, reusing and handling data and reproducible workflows.

Open in analysing and sharing data

Topics covered include; FAIR data principles, open software and code, sharing qualitative data and data visualisation.

Open in disseminating and publishing research

Topics covered include; persistent identifiers, preprints, open access publishing, copyright, repositories and Open Educational Resources.

Open research beyond academia

Topics covered include, engaged research, patient and public involvement and engagement, participatory research and citizen science.

Request for your feedback

These pages were developed by the Open Research Training and Resources Task and Finish Group to support your practice. We welcome your feedback to help us improve the Hub—click here to share your thoughts.

Further resources

Open Research across Disciplines

The UK Reproducibility Network (UKRN) is a national consortium that investigates, promotes and disseminates best practice for robust and reproducible research. Explore their collection of case studies, showcasing how open research can be applied to your discipline.

Listen to the open research season on our podcast

Season 3 of the Research Culture Uncovered Podcast focuses on different aspects of open research. Starting with open research in different disciplines, and followed by episodes discussing reproducibility, open research in the curriculum, FAIR data principles and more.

Catch up on Open Lunch webinars

Our Open Lunch webinar series brings internal and external open research experts to discuss a range of topics, relevant across disciplinary areas. Future events will be on the Open Research Leeds calendar, this link takes you to blogs and recordings from previous events.

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