The Office for Open Research, led by the Library, was launched in April this year and supports the University's aims to create a more open and responsible research environment. It helps to make the University's research more open and transparent by making it simple to access a wide range of open research support and resources from across the University.

Recently they have been showcasing examples of successful open research practice across all three Faculties. The aim of these case studies is to help provide the research community with practical examples of how open research practices have been applied in a variety of contexts and across a range of disciplines.

One of the video case studies features Ann Gledson from our Research Software Engineering team who shares her insights into how she overcome potential challenges and how open research practices have benefitted their research projects.

Ann talks about her role in developing an open source environmental data-set and tools with colleague Douglas Lowe and researchers from the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences and the School of Computer Science. They were keen to open up their work to other researchers and to prevent any repetition of the arduous processes involved in extracting and cleaning up the data. They published their data-sets and the data extraction/cleaning tools, with a focus on making them accessible and adaptable as possible, thus allowing researchers to get on with the job of evaluating the impact of environmental data, rather than becoming bogged down in pre-processing.

Ann’s top tip on making your research more open?

Don’t aim for a perfect product to suit everyone or it will never be finished. Decide on an approach, provide clear explanations and allow users to adapt it if required.

Find out more about the Office for Open Research on their website and watch Ann’s case study video on their site.