Stepping Stones: Our journey towards a culture of Open Research

Presentation slides used on 21 March 2019 at the Research Libraries UK Conference (RLUK19).

The abstract of the paper:

This paper summarises Lancaster University’s three-stage strategy to promote a culture of Open Research across the institution. Our culture change journey began with Data Conversations, which are designed for researchers from all disciplines and career stages to share their experiences of collecting, managing and sharing research data.

Data Conversations has been a success story so far. We have organised six events with increasing attendance numbers and consistently positive feedback. As our second step, the Library has co-founded the Open Research Café with PROSPR, a grass roots open research community from our Psychology department. The Open Research Café widens the scope from Research Data Management best practice to all aspects of Open Research.

As a third step, we are establishing a bottom-up dialogue with the University’s senior management by creating a Forum for Open Research (FOR). The aims are to suggest and promote Open Research initiatives to senior stakeholders in the institution and raise awareness of Open Research.

Our journey demonstrates the evolving role that libraries can play in “creating new types of service to support changing practices in research” (SCONUL p.18) and we believe that this approach could be replicated at other institutions.