The University of Liverpool’s statement on open research

The University of Liverpool believes that practising high quality open research is instrumental to achieving its vision and core values.

What is open research?

Open research is the holistic approach to making knowledge accessible across the research lifecycle which in turn supports collaboration, transparency, reproducibility and integrity of research. Open research principles cover the entire research lifecycle and can be relevant to all disciplines.

Why open research?

Open research is increasingly incorporated in funder and institutional policies with the view that publicly funded research should be made publicly available where legally and ethically appropriate to enhance transparency and impact of that research. Moreover, open research can enhance trust in the quality, rigour and integrity of our research while building opportunities for collaboration, innovation and globally-recognised impact of our research.

Our commitment to open research

The University of Liverpool commits to supporting, facilitating and encouraging researchers in making their research openly available as soon as possible at all relevant stages of the research lifecycle while considering and mitigating ethical, legal and commercial implications.

Expectations of researchers

The University expects researchers at all career stages, including research students and technicians, to comply with their relevant funding policies as well as the University of Liverpool’s Research Publications and Copyright Policy and Research Data Management Policy.

In addition to this, we strongly encourage all researchers to demonstrated consideration of where open research practices can be embedded within their research process and begin to adopt those practices which are relevant, ethical and appropriate to their research and discipline.

This might include:

• Practising, teaching and supporting good open research practices
• Pre-registering your research or publishing a registered report
• Making methodology openly available where possible, as early as possible
• Making data openly available where possible, as early as possible and making use of FAIR principles
• Making outputs open access through open access publication, pre-print publication or open monographs
• Making code, software, hardware or other output types open where possible
• Practice open peer review or prioritise publication in open peer review journals
• Use persistent identifiers for yourself and your outputs such as ORCID and DOI
• Join the University of Liverpool’s Open Research Community
• Talk to the Open Research Team about how to adapt open research practices for your discipline or research.

Expectations of research enablers

The role of research enablers is varied across the institution and can be key in supporting the openness of research. We encourage research enablers such as project managers, clinical trial managers, research impact leads, research support staff and any other professional services staff who support researchers, to consider their role in supporting open research and develop a plan for providing this support.

This might include:

• Undergoing, delivering or organising training on open research practices
• Engaging with researchers in understanding how they can embed open research practices in their research processes
• Signposting researchers to open research materials available
• Working with the Open Research Team to develop or review local policies or guidance on open research practices
• Feeding back barriers or challenges encountered in embedding open research practices to the Open Research Team
• Feeding back examples of good practice in open research from across the institution
• Join the University of Liverpool’s Open Research Community
• Talk to the Open Research Team for more information and support.

University support for open research

The University of Liverpool has a wealth of resources to support researchers in making their research open.

Support from the Open Research Team

• Open access webpages for generalised support, please contact the Open Access Team for more individualised advice
• Research data management webpages for generalised support, please contact the Research Data Management Team for individualised advice
• Responsible metrics webpages for generalised support, please contact the Open Research Team for more information
• The University hosts a data repository: DataCat – The Research Data Catalogue
• Your research can be published to the University repository via Elements.

Other institutional support

• Outputs Development Team
• Research Support Office
• Research and Partnerships Development
• Research Integrity Guidance
• Knowledge Exchange and Impact.

Selected collaborations

The University of Liverpool is a member of the UK Reproducibility Network and its flagship project the Open Research Programme. The University subscribes to the UK Research Integrity Office.

• UKRN Local Network events hosted by Local Network Lead Dr Alexis Makin
• UKRN supported trainers who have been trained under the train-the-trainer programme
• UKRIO resources on open research.