Open Practice

Support for Open Practice

Libraries play a pivotal role in enabling open practice and fostering an environment where information is accessible, collaborative, and transparent. Open Practice is an activity that cuts across all Open and Digital Research, and newer areas that we offer advice and guidance on our open research workflows, open peer review, pre-registration, pre-prints, engaging the public and involving citizens in research, open code and code management, but overall focusing on reproducibility and research integrity.

Benefits 

• Community support and engagement at each stage of your research helps you to reflect on it and improve your work iteratively.
• Increased visibility of your work can lead to new academic collaborations and more citations.
• Licencing your work for reuse and remixing makes it more sustainable and allows other researchers to build on it, particularly those who can’t afford commercial journal subscriptions.
• By fostering a culture of research integrity, we enhance the impact of our research and innovation and sustainability.

Best Practices 

Consider making your work more reliable, robust, rigorous, and transparent as you plan, conduct, and evaluate your research. Components of open practice may include:  

• Pre-registration for hypotheses and methodologies  
• Informed consent to make research data as open as possible
• Co-production of study design  
• Engaging members of the public through citizen science  
• Open code for computational reproducibility 
• Open peer review 
• Open publishing 

Key Services 

• Consultations on how to embed open practice in project proposals at the planning stage 
• Training and workshops  
• Facilitating networks to build communities in Galway and beyond.

Read the Open Practice Guide

Contact: Jen Smith, Open Research Librarian