Open Research: practices, experiences, barriers and opportunities

Survey data and focus group discussions from a study carried out in 2016, investigating researchers’ attitudes and behaviour towards open research, examining the sharing and reuse of research data, code, and open access publications. This research was carried out amongst researchers funded by the Wellcome Trust and the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). Two online surveys gathered responses from 583 Wellcome Trust-funded researchers and 259 ESRC-funded researchers. Both surveys provided very detailed and granular quantifiable information to test existing perceptions and knowledge about these topics for a specific research community.
Five focus group discussions with 22 participants explored the various topics in more detail.
<p>A study investigating the current attitudes and actual practices of researchers to open science, the barriers that inhibit or prevent researchers from practising open science; and the measures research funders can take to mitigate these barriers.

For the purpose of this study “open science” is defined as the sharing and reuse of research outputs, in particular research data, articles and code. We will examine the sharing and reuse of these three categories of outputs separately.

Through a mixed approach of an online survey and focus group discussions with researchers, we will investigate:

(1) attitudes of researchers to the idea of open science, in particular sharing of data, sharing of code, sharing of papers and new models of publishing;
(2) current open science practices applied by researchers;
(3)barriers that inhibit or prevent researchers from practising open science in their research;
(4) researcher-focused incentives and motivators for practising open science;
(4) practical actions research funders can take to remove or mitigate barriers and maximise the opportunities for practising open science.

The research will specifically target researchers funded by the Wellcome Trust and the Economic and Social Research Council, and will provide essential baseline information for the Wellcome Trust to inform their open science strategy.</p>