The Department is committed to Open Science and established the ‘Open Science Working Group’ (OSWG) in 2017. Members include academics, post-doctoral researchers and PGR students. The group is headed by Scott Glover who reports to the department Research Committee and supports and trains staff to ensure that their research is robust, transparent, accessible and reproducible. The OSWG is a member of the UK Reproducibility Network, which aims to facilitate training and disseminate best practice via local hubs. The OSWG has hosted a number of external speakers on a range of topics including: data sharing, ethics, pre-registration, reproducibility, statistics, and journal practices. Since 2014, all research outputs have been made publicly available via the Institutional Pure repository. Two further Departmental initiatives were developed to strengthen our Open Science practices:
- the requirement for pre-registration for all UG and PGT research projects internally, with supervisors encouraged to register them externally (implemented in 2018);
- the obligation to make all data underpinning published research publicly available, barring compelling reasons to restrict availability (relevant to data collected from April 1, 2019)
