Recognising our ORCAs: Celebrating their Impact

Farewell and Thanks to our ORCAS

Some of our talented ORCAs, who have contributed greatly to UKRN, have now moved on to exciting new opportunities in their careers.

Anna Korzeniowska

This feature is on Anna Korzeniowska, who was the ORCA at the University of Surrey until October 25th 2024.

Anna Korzeniowska, 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 was split between being an ORCA and a range of other related work. That included: 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 focused mainly on support for trainers – recruiting them and ensuring they have what they need. The work was very varied, never boring, if sometimes quite demanding.

Anna had a key national role with the Open Research Programme. She was 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 was rewarding though, because Anna could 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 was 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.

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Adam Partridge

Adam Partridge is the ORCA a the University of Sheffield.

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.

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Louise Saul

Louise Saul is ORCA at Southampton University

Louise was the ORCA at Southampton. She loves her Thai rescue cat and custom building bikes – at the moment a 1970s Revell road bike with old style downtube gearing and rim brakes. She has eight bikes, which – while more than most – is not unusual for people who renovate or build them, as well as riding them.

Following her first degree, Louise had stints in various commercial settings, both established (GSK) and startups. She then did a PhD in crystallography and a postdoc in computational toxicology, before a series of other postdoc positions moving into immunology. At the end of that, she has seen enough of academic life to know that she didn’t want to be a lecturer, but it was increasingly difficult to follow a research path so she moved into teaching. This fitted better with family life at the time but, as the children grew up, she looked for ways to get back into the world of research without going back into the lab. The ORCA role seemed perfect – Louise can use her research skills to help others.

Each week, Louise worked 3.5 days as an ORCA and 1.5 days with the Physical Sciences Data Infrastructure (PSDI) group. The latter is a national initiative to link and improve the data systems for research in physical sciences, and Louise brings her expertise on research data and software to develop website content and training. Her Southampton-focused ORCA work gives her opportunities to make connections with PSDI (eg on training) and with pockets of ‘research culture’ work such as in the Faculty of Medicine, but also to work with the UKRN Local Network to organise and promote local activities such as ReproducibiliTea. Based in the library, she works across the University and with a wide range of people, both academics and professional staff, which contrasts with the rather narrow view that many researchers necessarily have, focused on their particular research. Louise is always looking for opportunities to contribute more widely across Southampton, for example at the Winchester School of Art, or the National Oceanography Centre. The ORCA role has given her a broad understanding of research processes in a range of fields and disciplines.

Her previous coding experience (FORTRAN, Python, GitHub, etc) means that Louise can contribute not only to the work of the PSDI, but also to the new UKRN special interest group on computational reproducibility. This group is drafting a UKRN primer, and is discussing how best to go further to support those involved in computational reproducibility, many of whom are self-taught coders. The diversity in the group, including – as well as Louise – a political scientist, a software engineer and a data specialist with an industry background, make this a fertile discussion.

Among the central five projects of the Open Research Programme, Louise has focused mainly on the Training and the Sharing and Integrating projects. The latter is in the final stages of delivering version 1 of a ‘living website’, and Louise is working with Elle Chilton-Knight, Kirsty Merrett, and Evangeline Gowie on how the ORP training work can best use that website to be effective and sustainable, and to do a good job in sharing training resources. She is able to do that partly because she spent much of 2024 pulling together the work of the Training team into an operating manual (the ORCA achievement of which she is most proud), as well as being the liaison point for a number of training courses being delivered – the latter a role that she maintains.

As well as all of this, Louise finds time to innovate. For example, she is working with Steven Vidovic on a self-assessment tool to help researchers see how they might make their data more FAIR, and is working with Kirsty on an action research project (drawing from her expertise from her teaching days) to assess the outcomes from Kirsty’s session next year at the IDCC conference.

Drawing from this diverse experience, Louise has some insightful questions on aspects of research. For example:

• Will the concerted move toward preprint-based models of dissemination (eLife, Gates Foundation policy) transform how research reports are shared, or will the apparently stable model around arXiv – where journals and preprints co-exist – prevail?
• How do open research principles apply to practitioner-led action research, which often is not disseminated because those involved have no way to gain ethics approval?

Louise anticipates greater clarity in the next few years on questions such as these but it is not clear how she will be involved; it is not easy to predict where her varied career path so far will take her next. When asked about role models, Tony Robinson was the first name that came up, so, who knows?!

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