ORP ORCAs
Celebrating the vital role that Open Research Coordinators and Administrators play in the ORP ProgrammeSpotlight an ORCA
Spotlight an ORCA is series of pieces that will describe and celebrate the vital role that Open Research Coordinators and Administrators (ORCAs) play in the Open Research Programme. Every partner institution has at least one ORCA and may also have other staff involved. ORCAs and these other staff are the backbone of the Programme delivering the outputs that all partners use, such as the train-the-trainer programme, the OR4 resources and community, the survey, the open research indicators and the living website. They also have a critical role within their institution, enabling those outputs to be turned into benefits locally in the shape of more informed trainers, reformed recruitment and promotion procedures, better insight into the uptake of open research, and learning from other institutions.
Adam Partridge
The University of Sheffield is fortunate in having Adam Partridge as its Open Research Coordinator and Administrator – ORCA – within the UKRN Open Research Programme. Adam joined Sheffield after managing the Brain Stimulation Lab at CUBRIC, Cardiff University where he was also the UKRN Local Network Lead. Before that, he did a PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging at the University of York, with specific interests in brain stimulation and auditory processing.
He first learned about open research during his MSc and he used some open research practices such as preregistration and preprinting during his PhD. Like many early career researchers, he could see issues with the academic system and open research was gaining some traction as a way of addressing these issues. This was initially mainly with enthusiasts; these ways of working were not recognised more widely. He saw the ORCA role as a way of speeding up this process. He was familiar with the UKRN from his local network lead role and also saw this as an opportunity to build relationships across the network.
Adam’s overall role at Sheffield is the Open Research Training Lead. This encompasses his work on the UKRN Open Research Programme and local open research activities. There is therefore a lot of synergy between his ORCA activities and local activities.
The collaborative and multidisciplinary nature of open research itself is reflected in his work with wider teams at Sheffield. He is based in ‘Research, Partnerships and Innovation’ – part of professional services which includes researcher development and ethics teams amongst others. However, he also works with library staff (such as Open Research Manager – Dr Jenni Adams) and reaches out to departments too. The Sheffield Open Research Working Group has members spanning different disciplines and is led by their UKRN Local Network Lead Dr Jim Uttley. Adam is also a member of the more formal Open Research Advisory Group, giving him the chance to engage with senior academic and professional staff across Sheffield. He works most closely with Sheffield’s Research Practice Lead – Professor Tom Stafford – who is also Sheffield’s Institutional Lead for the UKRN and is based in the Psychology Department.
Across the Open Research Programme nationally, Adam has primarily been involved with the Training Project. This part of the Programme is responsible for working with training partners and institutions to enable delivery of the training. He has particularly enjoyed connecting with the training partners, learning more about their initiatives, and also getting to know the other ORCAs.
His deep involvement in the Programme has given Adam clear insights into its likely impact. The most immediate effect of the training project is increasing open research skills and capacity across the sector. However, Adam feels that many of the benefits go beyond the measurable outputs, for example ORCAs are able to start or strengthen conversations around open research and connect different teams within their institution. Further, he sees the Programme itself helping to normalise cross-institution collaboration on training. Training is often considered a core part of an institution’s offering to their staff, with efficiencies via inter-institution collaboration rarely considered. As a result, policies around the use of openly licensed materials and sharing materials are often absent or unclear and, even when they are present, collaboration is not normalised. One concrete benefit from changing the culture around the use of openly licensed materials is the potential to improve staff workload – which Adam anticipates might be welcomed.
Outside, but very related to, the Open Research Programme, Adam has just finished an ELIXIR-UK data stewardship fellowship, which involved developing training materials around open data and research data management. He is a FAIRsharing Community Champion, where his involvement so far has included developing an infographic and working to make institutional research data policies more FAIR-enabling. He also recently became a Carpentries instructor through the Programme. He is thus developing an international network and profile.
Reflecting more generally on the future of open research, Adam sees it becoming a more normalised part of the research process in more disciplines. He is particularly interested to see what open research looks like in the arts and humanities, where the values underpinning open research such as collaboration, transparency and rigour are important, but the research methods are very different. He expects to see a less siloed and more multidisciplinary culture with metaresearch being valued more, as long as academia in general takes the right path going forward. The foundations of traditional academia, like control of knowledge and prestige are being challenged by open research and the internet. Longer term, he also sees a more pluralist, decentralised and community-owned future, where research communities decide what they value and they can independently fund, review and publish work that fits with those values. Such a change will need changes in funding, procurement, business models, recognition and reward, and infrastructure.
As an ORCA, Adam is most proud of his contributions to the training team last year, when Sheffield led it. The team moved from having a list of training providers and list of priority training topics to delivering a train-the-trainer programme. Currently, delivering training is hard for individuals to prioritise, given the lack of incentives. A next step would be for institutions to better recognise and support the trainers and the training they deliver during and after the Programme. The training community of practice should enable trainers to maintain momentum, learn from each other, and create a lasting impact, while these incentives are being implemented.
Personally, Adam would like to continue working in the area of open research. Whether that’s supporting institutions to implement open research, conducting metaresearch, or a combination of the two. Being an ORCA has helped with this as it enabled him to learn more about the research and training ecosystem. It’s also enabled him to gain experience with project management and develop links with UK institutions and international partners. Finally, it has also enabled him to develop stronger links with other teams within Sheffield and gain a better understanding of the many different perspectives on open research.
Anna Korzeniowska
This feature is on Anna Korzeniowska, who is the ORCA at the University of Surrey.
Anna has had a varied career already, both within and outside of academia. She was enthusiastic about taking the ORCA role partly because it sounded interesting, even if the details were a bit unclear at the time, because it was part-time to fit with her PhD, it was at a university and because, at the interview with Emily Farran and others at Surrey, it was clear that she would be joining an excellent and very friendly team.
Her role within Surrey is split between being an ORCA and a range of other related work. That includes: putting on major events; briefing interested staff including faculty representatives, librarians and the research integrity office; running the champions network; and drafting resources for the website. ORCA-specific activities at Surrey so far have focused mainly on support for trainers – recruiting them and ensuring they have what they need. The work is very varied, never boring, if sometimes quite demanding.
Anna has a key national role with the Open Research Programme. She is the project manager for the OR4 project, which is a significant initiative involving 45 institutions reforming how they recruit and promote staff to better recognise open research. As is the case for all the central Programme teams, the OR4 team barely has enough members to do the work, and so the project manager is a vital and difficult role. It is rewarding though, because Anna can see how it directly contributes to a significant sector-wide change that will improve research practice – especially if open research is sensibly rewarded in REF2029. Managing this lean project with very busy academics is one of the things of which Anna is most proud as an ORCA, and its success would be the achievement she would most like to have contributed to in the Programme. Closer to home, she would like to enable Surrey deliver a good range of open research training.
As if all this were not enough, she works part-time on research culture at the University of Southampton, and is involved in the ManSpotlighyDogs2 project, which is a multi-lab collaboration to increase sample sizes in canine science and so improve replicability. Next career steps? Anna isn’t sure, perhaps more project management, or perhaps other things. Being an ORCA, and working with amazing and supportive colleagues such as Emily, will certainly help.
Alice Howarth
Alice is the ORCA at the University of Liverpool who is involved in a quite dizzying number of activities with the Open Research Programme, at Liverpool and beyond!
Liverpool is heavily engaged in the Open Research Programme, playing a leading role in most of the projects, mainly via Alice but also involving the APVC(R) where the University of Liverpool is reforming reward and recognition as a case study institution in the OR4 Project, and involving the institutional lead Bill Greenhalf and others in designing and running some innovative evaluation methods to attribute change to the Programme. Alice is also co-leading, for Liverpool, one of the Open Research Indicator pilot projects, with Reading on the downstream effects of sharing research data.
Her research background gives Alice plenty of relevant experience – she did two postdocs before deciding that the academic research system was sufficiently broken that her time would be better spent fixing it. Her particular frustrations included the non-publication of “negative” data and findings and the relatively closed nature of the ways research is often done. She wants to see a much more open research culture, in many different ways.
Part of the ORCA role is helping the Programme add value at Liverpool, given the particular institutional context there (everywhere has a particular institutional context!). Alice sees herself as an ambassador for the Programme within Liverpool, and is well-placed within the Libraries, Museums and Galleries team to play that role. Within Liverpool there is both an Open Research Leadership Group (senior, formal) and an Open Research Community (grassroots, activist), and Alice is a key driver of both of these, giving her a unique opportunity to promote coordination between them. She also works closely with the ‘Academy’; the professional unit delivering training and development for researchers. There appears to be a lot of senior-level support for improving the local research environment to promote more open and rigorous research, in particular from those at associate PVC level; support that Alice has both nurtured and now benefits from.
As part of her Liverpool role, Alice co-organises an Open Research Week, as a collaboration also with three other universities – last year it had 1300 people registered. Other groups of institutions are now setting up similar regional initiatives, for example in the East Midlands.
But Alice is also extremely active in the Open Research Programme nationally and, indeed, internationally. With Ruth Davies at King’s, she co-leads our work to meet our responsibilities to be inclusive and promote equality and diversity. The Programme made some commitments to Research England, but Alice and Ruth are working with the UKRN EDI Advisory Committee to push us beyond those, if we can. She draws from her experience and expertise as the chair of the Liverpool disabled staff network for this and is building EDI into the Programme Evaluation Design work based on the ‘theories of change’ workshops that each ORP project did last year, again co-organised with Ruth; few of the projects had really considered EDI at that point, and so there was clearly work to do. It is these workshops that Alice feels most proud of in her ORCA role.
Her work with the Evaluation Design project team goes further, though – this is in fact the area that she was hired to focus on. She hopes that this work will build on cross-Programme conversations to find reliable and inclusive ways to monitor the changes we intend to make. There is both national and international interest in this topic – as mentioned above Alice is co-leading work on indicators as well and is a member of three international working groups related to UNESCO, CERN/NASA and the French ministry, all of which are developing ways to monitor open research.
As if that were not enough, Alice is also a leading member of the project team on ‘Sharing and Integrating’, developing the living website. She is enthusiastic about the prospect that people like her will be able to share and learn from each other’s practice, so she is leading interviews and focus groups to work out how this will best be done, with Steven, Evangeline, Louise and others.
Alice is optimistic that research culture and open research are now embedded in both institutional and national agendas, and that we are moving from awareness to action. In common with many others in the ORP, she is excited about being part of the movement at this stage, being part of a really significant change in the sector. But Alice will likely not move back into an academic career – that is behind her now. The ORCA role as cemented that decision for her, and also given her a lot of different experiences and expertise over quite a short period of time, that will be very useful. For example, in the next step in her career, Alice would like to have a role in public engagement in research, and her work on the ORP Evaluation Design team will mean that she can demonstrate relevant experience for that.
Almost unbelievably, outside of work Alice is also an active public speaker in the UK and more widely, runs a podcast, edits a magazine and co-organises a conference.