About this book

This Open Research Book is based on 15 scripts written at Oxford Brookes University. The original author was Joseph Corneli. Editorial oversight was provided by Robyn Curtis. Eric White and David Bullock provided further input on the contents. In line with our agreements as participants in the UK Reproducibility Network’s Open Research Programme, the videos and scripts have been released under a permissive open licence (CC By SA).

A public-facing website based on the scripts has been published at https://orbook.github.io. The site is created from Markdown sources using the static site generator Franklin.

Given the existence of resources such as:

• the Open Science Training Handbook (2018),

• the Guide for Reproducible Research (2019-ongoing),

• the GO-GN Open Research Handbook (2023),

• and the PathOS Open Science Impact Indicator Handbook (2024),

(among others) it’s worth asking why would put in the effort to create a new book on open research.

The answer has to do with the comprehensive and thoroughgoing effort to embed open research in institutional practice and culture that the 6-year UKRN Open Research Programme represents. Over the course of the ORP, we expect to develop over 180 trainers via a national-level train-the-trainer programme, who will go on to train over 2700 people in UK research institutions. The Training Schema that we’re following covers a wide range of topics, several of which are simply not covered in the other resources mentioned above. We also need to develop a resource in which open research topics are covered in a practical and well-integrated way, suited to our working context.

Starting from approximately 60 pages of material in the original scripts, members of the UKRN https://www.ukrn.org/ukrn-community-of-practice/ have been invited to contribute to the further evolution of this material. The editorial workflow will develop across Google Docs (by invitation), Github, and in Hypothesis comments (aggregated here) on the published pages. The hope is that the contents will grow to around 250 pages!

Contributing

We’ve started by asking for contributions from the UKRN Training Community of Practice, but contributions from others are also welcome. Get in touch via Hypothesis, Github, or email. When you’ve made contributions to the book, we’ll update the copyright and authorship information below accordingly.

Formal copyright and licensing statement

If reuse this material in your own work, you must include a statement such as the following:

This article re-uses material from the work "Open Research Book" (https://orbook.github.io) by Joseph Corneli, Robyn Curtis, Eric White, and David Bullock, which is used here under the terms of the Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. If you re-use this material, you must include a similar statement in the derived work you create.