Title: Open and healthy research cultures: bringing insights into policy and practice
Funder: Economic and Social Research Council

Abstract: My findings offer novel insights to research organisations that are currently implementing open science and research culture policies (e.g. UKRI, Wellcome Trust). They also highlight the importance of working bottom-up within research communities to create lasting and positive cultural change. I therefore propose a policy and community engagement focus for this Fellowship, combined with some academic dissemination and training, as follows: 1. I will consolidate my PhD findings by disseminating to key audiences. I will produce three papers, for three primary audiences: (i) a social science publication featuring my novel empirical finding on interpersonal openness, and my conceptualization of openness as an epistemic virtue (for e.g. Social Studies of Science); (ii) a publication for research policy audiences, featuring my analysis of advocacy and policy documents (for e.g. Research Policy/Science and Public Policy); and (iii) a publication for biologists capturing practically valuable insights; a commentary or research article depending on the journal (for e.g. eLife or PLOS Biology). I will also establish a website to bring together my professional profile and dissemination activities and to reflexively engage with the openness of my PhD research by linking to my research data in public repositories and posting methodological reflections. I will submit posts to existing blog sites (e.g. LSE Impact Blog; PLOS ECR Community blog) in order to engage with established policy and research audiences outside of the policy organisations and UoE research communities with whom I will collaborate in this Fellowship. 2. I will engage with national-level open science/research culture policymakers, meeting and exchanging knowledge with individuals from at least two of: UKRI, the Wellcome Trust, the Royal Society and Scottish Government (contact established at UKRI). I will make up to four in-person visits to these organisations, and seek out opportunities for an ongoing collaboration and/or a placement. I will keep an awareness of the events or calls for evidence hosted by these institutions which are suitable moments for intervention. 3. I will engage with research communities and university-level policymakers at UoE through two main approaches: (i) exchanging knowledge, collaborating, and coordinating across groups already interested in openness/research culture; (ii) directly applying empirical and methodological insights from my PhD to engage a broader population of researchers in biological science, through experimental interventions in bottom-up culture change. Several groups across UoE are currently building capacity and enthusiasm around the topics of open science and research culture; these are early-stage developments that are highly receptive to input. I will have an opportunity to shape university-level policy coordinating implementation of UoE's Open Research Roadmap. I will also collaborate and exchange knowledge with the grassroots groups Edinburgh ReproducibiliTea and the Edinburgh Open Research Initiative. I will run a workshop to coordinate and these top-down and bottom-up activities and to promote reflexivity. Through a second workshop and a drop-in discussion groupI will pilot methods for understanding and developing healthy, open research cultures. I will engage a population of biologists who face epistemic/social vulnerabilities and tend to disengage from "open" issues. I will document a process of supportive engagement and solicit feedback. Learning from these activities can be shared with policy collaborators as an example of a methodology supporting healthy research cultures from the bottom up. 4. I will pursue a short training courses to support my policy and engagement activities and career goals, e.g. the Durham University course Leading and Managing People-Centred Change, CSCCE Scientific Community Engagement Fundamentals, and/or IAD training on designing and facilitating engagement events.

Lay abstract: In the last twenty years, "open" has become a prominent buzzword in science. Many movements supporting open science have arisen within communities of researchers and overlapping groups interested in Web technology and research communication. Open science has also become a top-down policy agenda. Many governments, research funders, universities, and publishers worldwide now ask or insist that researchers adopt "open" practices. Open practices and concepts are diverse. Two of the most prominent are open access and open data, which entail free, unrestricted online access to published research findings, and to underlying datasets, respectively. More ambitious visions of open science evoke "revolution", and press for online transparency of entire research processes including plans, methods, and real-time results. Open science is sometimes characterised simply as "good science". Yet, many scientists do not seem to understand open science in the same way as its advocates, and seem slow or ambivalent in their uptake of open practices. In my PhD research, I investigated interesting social features of open science. I began in historical contexts, tracing traditional ideals of scientific openness, and the roots of today's open science movements. I also examined present-day policy and advocacy documents, to make sense of current meanings of "open". This provided context for an interview study with 40 biological scientists and 14 advocates or policymakers about their understandings of openness in science. These were mainly based in the UK and Australia. The most prominent "openness" topics for scientists were open access, data openness, and interpersonal openness. The last of these topics is not part of today's open science movements - and is not an online practice - but has special importance to many of the scientists interviewed. Interpersonal openness showed how some scientists occupy research cultures in which they feel free to behave in open and collaborative ways, and others feel constricted in their openness: vulnerable to factors like competition, career insecurity, a lack of social support, or loss of trust in their research community. These insights are useful for national-level UK policy organisations that hope to promote open science and healthy research culture from the top down. They are also useful for grassroots initiatives embracing open science, which hope to engage with a broader group of researchers. Moreover, these insights show how certain kinds of social support within research communities can build a foundation for more open and healthier research cultures: cultures in which fewer researchers feel vulnerable and inhibited about sharing openly. In this Fellowship, I am building links with both policy and grassroots groups with the aim of supporting openness and healthy research cultures from both the top-down and the bottom-up. I am also developing experimental interventions (via a workshop and discussion group) that directly support these improvements to research culture. I will also share and consolidate the academic value of these insights by publishing them for three different audiences: social scientists, research policymakers, and biological scientists.

Research activity codes: 8.3 POLICY, ETHICS AND RESEARCH GOVERNANCE
Health categories: GENERIC HEALTH RELEVANCE