College of Medicine & Veterinary Medicine

Open Research communities

Open Research communities and grassroots initiatives at the University and beyond.

Open Research communities  and grassroots initiatives are bottom-up learning groups of staff and students that discuss Open Research practices, within and beyond disciplines.  They play a key role in developing and embracing Open Research practices by:

  • making Open Research knowledge and practice visible 
  • facilitating communication among members and with research support staff, policy makers, research funders
  • identifying obstacles that hinder academics in adopting Open Research principles and workflows.

University Open Research communities and grassroots initiatives:

Edinburgh ReproducibiliTea

The Edinburgh ReproducibiliTea organises journal club discussions every third Friday of the month. The main goal of these sessions is to support researchers from all career stages (including students) in navigating the possibilities and challenges that the Open Research movement brings about.

All presentation slides are stored on the the Edinburgh ReproducibiliTea's Open Science Framework page and recordings are uploaded to their YouTube channel.

 To sign up to the mailing list and receive the session details, please fill out this Google Form: Edinburgh ReproducibiliTea sign-up

CAMARADES (The Collaborative Approach to Meta-Analysis and Review of Animal Data from Experimental Studies)

The CAMARADES research group was founded in 2004 by Malcolm Macleod and David Howells, aiming to address translational failures in preclinical stroke research using systematic review and meta-analysis. Since then, the CAMARADES have broadened their scope to other disease models such as neuropathic pain and Alzheimer's disease.

The CAMARADES have pioneered in the field of preclinical systematic review, and in addition to carrying out their own research, provide a supportive framework for other research groups performing systematic review.

CAMARADES

UK-wide and international Open Research communities:

ReproducibiliTea

ReproducibiliTea are a grassroots journal club initiative that helps researchers create local Open Research journal clubs at their universities to discuss diverse issues, papers and ideas about improving science, reproducibility and the Open Science movement. Started in 2018 at the University of Oxford, ReproducibiliTea has now spread to 140 institutions in 27 different countries.  

These groups are completely volunteer run, and provide a unique and supportive community for their members, who are predominantly early career researchers.

ReproducibiliTea

UK Reproducibility Network (UKRN)

The UKRN is a national peer-led consortium that aims to ensure the UK retains its place as a centre for world-leading research by:

  • investigating the factors that contribute to robust research
  • promoting training activities
  • disseminating best practice

The UKRN seeks to understand the factors that contribute to poor research reproducibility and replicability, and develop approaches to counter these, in order to improve the trustworthiness and quality of research. 

 UKRN

Reproducible, Interpretable, Open & Transparent (RIOT) Science Club

The RIOT Science Club is a seminar series that raises awareness and provides training in Reproducible, Interpretable, Open & Transparent science practices.The RIOT Science Club invites speakers to give talks, present papers, give insights into time-saving tools, recommend new statistical techniques, and much more. Additionally, The RIOT Science Club aims to change research culture that is more collegial, where viewpoint and background diversity can be allowed to flourish.

All presentation slides are stored on the the RIOT Science Club's Open Science Framework page and recordings are uploaded to their YouTube channel.

RIOT Science Club

The Turing Way Project

The Turing Way is a community-led book project that involves diverse perspectives of researchers, funders, educators, learners and various stakeholders from around the world. It is dedicated  to making collaborative, reusable and transparent research “too easy not to do”. 

The Turing Way Project's goal is to provide all the information that researchers and data scientists in academia, industry and the public sector need to ensure that the projects they work on are easy to reproduce and reuse.

The book is collaboratively written and is freely available under the Creative Commons licence. It includes chapters on reproducibility, project design, communication, collaboration and ethical research.

Turing Way Project

The UK Network of Open Research Working Groups 

Open Research Working Groups are action-oriented teams within higher education that are seeking to reform science to make the processes and products of research as transparent, accessible and reproducible as possible.

The UK Network of Open Research Working Groups brings these groups together under one umbrella to focus and amplify our shared mission. They are working to develop policy initiatives, host events and conferences, produce educational materials and workshops, conduct collaborative research projects centered on open science, and assess community needs to bring more researchers toward open 

UK Network of Open Research Working Groups