Ten members of the University of York research community share their thoughts and experiences in our latest post marking International Open Access Week
Dr Dan Denis
University of York web page | ORCID
Dan Denis is a Lecturer in Psychology, having joined the University of York in 2022 as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellow. His primary research interest is understanding how we identify and prioritise key information in our environment so that we can remember important events. Dan is a member of the York Open Research Advocates network and the lead for the Open Science Interest Group which meets regularly to discuss practices in the Department of Psychology.
What started your interest in open research?
My interest in open research really started upon learning about the replication crisis in Psychology, the finding that many influential studies could not be replicated. I started to think specifically about how these issues may arise in my own area of research, that focuses on the relationship between sleep and cognition. I realised that many of the challenges in this field (which include challenging data collection, small sample size, and issues of multiple comparisons and selective reporting of statistics) could be improved by engaging in open science practices.
What challenges have you faced when engaging with open research practices?
One of the first challenges was how to organise my data for sharing. We record the brain activity of sleeping participants using a technique called electroencephalography which creates large and complex datasets. Previously I had given very little thought to how I organised my data, but when it came to uploading these data to a repository I found that it required the data to be stored according to a very specific standard (the Brain Imaging Data Structure, BIDS). Converting the data to the required specification was difficult and at times overwhelming. I learned a lot about the logic of designing file directories, and making your data as easy to understand as possible for both a human and a machine.
What positives have come out of engaging with open research?
Engaging in open research practices has given me a lot of skills that have supplemented my skills as a researcher. Learning about how to format data according to BIDS has given me a standard template for how to organise my data. While it was a very time intensive process the first time, the skills I learned meant that converting a second dataset to the BIDS standard was much faster. Now that I am knowledgeable about the standard data sharing template in my field, in my most recent experiments I have set things up so everything is saved according to the BIDS specification from the outset. I now have the data for almost all of my studies stored in the same format, which means that I have a much better understanding of my own data, and this has facilitated the sharing of data with the wider community much smoother.
Kirralise Hansford
University of Oxford web page | ORCID
Kirralise Hansford is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Nuffield Department of Women’s & Reproductive Health within the Medical Sciences Division at the University of Oxford and a 2025 Ambassador for Open Science at the Wellcome Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging. Kirralise completed a PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging at York in 2024 and worked with the Library as an Open Research Graduate Engagement Lead for the Sciences. Her Open Research Journey reflects her perspectives at the beginning of this role.
What started your interest in open research?
When I was completing my MSc, I attended a lecture on open research practices and was confused about why this wasn’t just how research was done anyway. It made me sceptical about research that was not pre-registered, did not have open data, and that did not give adequate details for replication. I knew I wanted to work in research to expand our knowledge of sensory neuroscience and its applications to clinical populations, but I was only prepared to do this if I knew that my research practices would be open, replicable, and reproducible.
What challenges have you faced when engaging with open research practices
When starting my PhD, I wanted to do every study as a registered report, as I was sure this was the best way to do research. However, my supervisors were cautious of this approach given the lengthy process involved and the time constraints of a PhD. We agreed to do one of my studies in a registered report format, which was the first time any of us had done so. As they predicted, doing a registered report did take a long time. It even took a lot longer than they had expected, meaning that data collection was delayed until the final year of my PhD, which was not ideal! This process showed me that engaging in open research practices is not always easy, and if your research is quite exploratory and interdisciplinary, it can create additional barriers (in my case, a lengthy review process).
What positives have come out of engaging with open research?
Given the lengthy process of doing a registered report, I was able to fill my time with 2 additional projects that were not planned to be included within my PhD, and both projects gave me the opportunity to engage in new open research practices. For one project, I learnt how to make my research fully computationally reproducible. This process was tricky at times, but taught me some great coding and collaboration skills which are transferable to any new projects I undertake. The other project had a clinical focus, which allowed me to develop open research skills in public research dissemination.
The skills I have learnt through engaging with open research practices during my PhD have made me a better researcher. I now have a deeper understanding of how important it is to plan your research study before collecting data, how useful it is to have accessible and reproducible data and analyses scripts, and how vital it is to share the research outputs within the wider community.
Dr Zlatomira Ilchovska
University of York web page | personal website | ORCID
Zlatomira (Zlati) Ilchovska is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of Psychology where her research interests include bi-/multilingualism and its role as a possible cognitive/brain protective life-long experience. She is passionate about open scholarship and doing and teaching better science, and received a York Open Research Award in 2025 as a member of the Feminist Wonderlab Collective. Zlati wrote about the foundation of this international ECR-led feminist research group in an Open Research in Practice case study.
What started your interest in open research?
During my undergraduate education in Psychology, I remember struggling to access published literature and experimental materials, as my university in Bulgaria did not have any journal subscription at the time. Much later, during my first months of the PhD at the University of Birmingham, I learned about the drive in science to preregister, preprint and share materials openly, and this completely changed my idea of research and academic work, providing me an opportunity to contribute to what I missed the most in my education.
What challenges have you faced when engaging with open research practices?
It is a steep learning curve in the beginning, and it takes time to get “converted” if one has never done any open science activities before, but once this happens, it becomes a fruitful learning process.
What positives have come out of engaging with open research?
Open scholarship helped me understand the gaps in my and others’ research, and made me a much stronger researcher in terms of planning methodology, analysing data and understanding the outcomes.
Alfie Lien-Talks
University of York web page | personal website | ORCID
Alfie Lien-Talks is an AHRC-funded postgraduate researcher in digital archaeology, working in collaborative partnership with the Archaeology Data Service and Historic England. His research focuses on the reusability of archaeological datasets and explores how AI, machine learning, and large language models (LLMs) can be leveraged to improve data accessibility, integration, and interpretation in heritage research.
What started your interest in open research?
My interest in open research and open data was sparked upon the realisation that, in the field of bioarchaeology, there is a limited amount of material available for scholarly inquiry. Acknowledging the finite nature of these resources, it becomes imperative for researchers to ensure maximal accessibility to existing data in order to fully leverage its academic impact. As archaeology is fundamentally concerned with elucidating the human past, broad data availability takes on an ethical dimension as well. Enabling comprehensive access to our ancestors’ stories has thus become a guiding principle propelling my commitment to open research practices and unfettered data sharing in my field.
What challenges have you faced when engaging with open research practices?
Pursuing open research has presented complex challenges in navigating issues surrounding data privacy and ethical considerations. Achieving the appropriate balance between transparency and sensitive information protection has proven an intricate undertaking. However, grappling with these issues has ultimately reaffirmed the paramount importance of responsible and ethical approaches to data availability in scholarly work.
What positives have come out of engaging with open research?
Adopting open research practices, particularly FAIR data sharing principles, has led to tangible scholarly benefits. Open availability of my work has allowed for wider dissemination and collaboration within both my core discipline and related fields. Embracing open data has also opened unanticipated interdisciplinary avenues, substantially enriching the reach and impact of my research. Overall, connectivity with the broader academic community has proven the most valuable aspect of open scholarship.
Dr Andrew Mason
University of York web page | lab website | ORCID
Andrew Mason is a Lecturer in the York Against Cancer funded Jack Birch Unit of Molecular Carcinogenesis, Department of Biology. His research has two main areas: characterising human urothelial carcinoma, and understanding the impacts of endogenous retrovirus interactions in avian and human cancers. Andrew is a longstanding member of the York Open Research Advocates network and also a Data Stewardship training fellow in the UK node of the pan-European Elixir organisation.
What started your interest in open research?
During my PhD I was trying to find and analyse as many diverse chicken whole genome sequencing datasets as possible. I quickly learned what informative metadata was (and wasn’t!) and that I would often need to discard technically high quality data if I wasn’t able to reliably annotate it. This was frustrating, so I made sure to make my shared data as clear and informative as possible.
These open research skills developed through my membership of chicken genome consortia (reference genome, pangenome and diversity) and as bioinformatic lead in the bladder cancer research and clinical partnership in the Genomics England 100,000 Genomes Project. I wanted to find ways to embed these open research practices in Biology (rather than my experience of fumbling along), so I developed my skills further in an Elixir-UK Data Stewardship and Training Fellowship.
What challenges have you faced when engaging with open research practices?
The sensitive nature of data has always been a stumbling block for fully open data practices in my research. Initially this was because I was working on commercially-sensitive data from industry, but increasingly my work uses highly sensitive and (technically) identifiable human data. This is not just because we have clinical metadata for patients. Having full genome DNA sequence data is genuinely unique, and governments, health care and industry (pharma, insurance etc.) are still in a phase of understanding how that data should be managed, stored and utilised. This often means data is open but behind some kind of wall (i.e. a data access committee; DAC), or only accessible through a trusted research environment (TRE). This is still open practice, but many of us have experienced a DAC who limits access, or won’t even answer emails.
What positives have come out of engaging with open research?
Fundamentally, following open research practices has improved my own record keeping, data management and dissemination of data. I always work imagining what someone else would make of my file structure or code! An unexpected benefit has been the positive impact on my teaching practice, as I have been able to augment Biology’s already fantastic materials for teaching data science to undergraduates and postgraduates, by incorporating research data management resources from my Elixir fellowship.
I’ve also found the wider open research and research data management community really welcoming and engaging – both at York and wider (UK and Europe) through Elixir.
Dr Colleen Morgan
University of York web page | personal website | lab website | ORCID
Colleen Morgan is the Senior Lecturer in Digital Archaeology and Heritage in the Department of Archaeology, and Director of the Digital Archaeology and Heritage Lab. She has an established international reputation as a leading scholar in critical digital archaeology and heritage. Colleen is a longstanding Open Research Advocate with an interest in supporting archaeology staff and students in considering open access publishing, open research, and general transparency in practice.
What started your interest in open research?
I began research blogging in 2002, chronicling my first archaeological field school as an undergraduate at the University of Texas. Since that time I’ve continued to participate in most kinds of creative social media, such as Flickr, Instagram, YouTube and now TikTok. I’ve written quite a bit about science communication and was steeped in the Open Source/Open Access and Creative Commons movements through my PhD at the University of California, Berkeley. With help, I founded “Then Dig” which was an Open Access, Open Peer Review archaeology journal, which ran for a few years until everyone became too busy to maintain it any longer. Since that time I’ve always ensured that my research is as open as possible–it is an even deeper ethos for archaeologists, as we destroy much of the contextual evidence around our data as we excavate, so it is imperative that we share this data.
What challenges have you faced when engaging with open research practices?
There are many countries where it is forbidden to openly share excavation data online or anywhere else before approvals from the government agencies. As a guest in these places, it is important to abide by these rules, or else you can lose your permit to excavate. This is true to a certain extent even in the UK, as sharing excavation locations can result in what are sometimes called “Nighthawks” that come and dig around in the site looking for treasure, or worse, human remains to collect and sell.
What positives have come out of engaging with open research?
I think engagement at the very beginning of social media raised my research profile beyond what it might have been without this sharing. I am happy that a community of researchers and science communicators were able to creatively experiment with ways to share their passion and enthusiasm for the past. There are better standards now for open data and the FAIR principles and in particular reuse has become much more prevalent, informing research such as the Avebury Papers, which was the digitisation, exploration and reuse of the archival materials associated with the Neolithic henge site of Avebury in Wiltshire. It is also a fundamental element of the Tetrarchs project, which aimed to reuse archaeological data to tell stories. Such projects are only the beginning; hopefully there will be a lot more work in this area in the near future.
Luqman Muraina
University of York web page | ORCID
Luqman Muraina is a Postgraduate Researcher in the Interdisciplinary Global Development Centre, based in the Department of Politics and International Relations. His research focuses on the topic of decolonising development studies and teaching informed by alternative development epistemologies in Nigerian Universities. Since 2023 he has been an Open Research Advocate and Graduate Engagement Lead for the Social Sciences, working with the Library and practitioners in his Faculty to develop training, advocacy and community-building initiatives.
What started your interest in open research?
There was an advertisement for an open research seminar during my Master’s program at the University of Cape Town (UCT), South Africa. I found Open Research enticing, concerning how it presents an opportunity for a new research order, bringing the university closer to the community and ensuring that the outcomes of higher education public funding is immediately available for public consumption.
I was so inspired about the variety of open practices I could engage in my research, especially open data. Subsequently, I attended additional seminars on open licences, data management planning, etc. I immediately practised open data by depositing my qualitative data into the UCT’s repository (Zivahub), which was a rigorous yet pleasing process. I was encouraged by how others could use, cite, and adapt my data.
What challenges have you faced when engaging with open research practices?
Open research can sometimes become an extra task for a usually overwhelmed and busy researcher. In my experience of practising open data, I ensure to obtain consent from participants concerning making the data open, which can be sometimes difficult to get – requires further explanation. Similarly, the repository back-end personnel (at UCT) returned my qualitative data transcripts twice as not passing the anonymity practice, i.e., some details included in the data can be attributed to a specific person/group in which the research is attributed to. This proved time-consuming to fix.
What positives have come out of engaging with open research?
Open research aids scientific transparency and conformity to ethical guidelines. Transparency offers the opportunity to reduce the pressure to perform illegitimate and unethical scientific practice, i.e., data falsification, plagiarism, contracting, etc. If a research work is more accessible and data is openly available, there’s more consciousness on the part of the researcher to be transparent and ensure a just and fair research report and good practices. For example with open data, I took extra efforts in cleaning the data to ensure that the qualitative data do not include anything that makes inference to specific persons (including my participants), communities or groups.
Career wise, open research is also a means to get recognised for one’s hard work. For example, by publishing my data on a repository. means I can be cited both in traditional journal publications and also get my data cited independently.
Yorgos Paschos
University of York web page | ORCID
Yorgos Paschos is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Humanities Research Centre, having recently completed a PhD in the Department of Archaeology researching the (sub)cultural heritage significance of grassroots music venues. During his time as a PGR he was an Open Research Advocate and Graduate Engagement Lead for the Arts and Humanities. Yorgos has also shared his reflections on preparing to publish his PhD thesis open access as an Open Research in Practice case study.
What started your interest in open research?
My interest in open research began during my PhD work in Grassroots Music Venues and cultural heritage, where accessibility and inclusivity are critical. I quickly realised that open research not only democratises knowledge but also allows for broader collaboration, especially with non-academic communities. A turning point that boosted my interest in open research was my involvement in the Archive: All Areas exhibition, where I saw firsthand how open access to research could empower communities to engage with their local music heritage. This experience underscored the transformative potential of open research to connect academia with real-world impact.
What challenges have you faced when engaging with open research practices?
One challenge has been navigating the technical aspects of open research, such as understanding the different licensing options or identifying the best platforms for open-access publishing. Additionally, I’ve found that raising awareness about open research often requires clear communication to address questions or uncertainties. These experiences have taught me the importance of providing accessible resources and creating supportive environments to help others adopt open practices more confidently.
What positives have come out of engaging with open research?
Engaging with open research has had several positives for me, both professionally and personally. It has broadened the reach of my work, allowing me to connect with audiences outside academia, including policymakers and community groups. Open research has also fostered collaborations I wouldn’t have encountered otherwise, as it breaks down barriers between disciplines and institutions.
Dr Joe Spearing
University of York web page | personal website | ORCID
Joe Spearing is a Research Fellow with the Health and Social Care Policy group in Centre for Health Economics. His research interests include disability benefits, mental health and working conditions, the health and social care workforce and demand and supply of social care. Joe is also an Open Research Advocate and ECR Representative member of the Open Research Strategy Group, which provides guidance and direction for open research activities at the University of York.
What started your interest in open research?
For me, open research is about equity and rigor. I became interested in open research because significant advances have been made in Economics by the use of replication packages and sharing of code, where researchers have been able to identify and correct coding errors. We have a lot further to go in building the infrastructure which would allow us to confidently share code and promote norms around publishing replication packages, but doing so potentially improves the reliability of our quantitative results. I’m interested in finding ways to further this.
What challenges have you faced when engaging with open research practices?
I see two major challenges around open research for quantitative social scientists: the first is our norms of sharing and giving feedback on code before publication. Before I submit an article to a journal it has typically been read by multiple people who have given feedback on it, but as a discipline we check each other’s code much less often, and even then it is mostly for “accuracy” rather than readability. Shifting norms is difficult, but there are a lot of people, including at York, working to try to do this.
Secondly, using replication files is often understood as something of an adversarial activity: early career researchers are often frightened of sharing their code widely for fear of exposing an embarrassing mistake. This relates partly to the reality that a lot of time the code has not been checked extensively by others, and also to academia’s often competitive culture.
What positives have come out of engaging with open research?
For me, open research has been an invitation to take my own empirical research more seriously: to think about my analysis code as a tool for wider consumption rather than just for delivering results; and to begin to build my capacity to write code which is more easily understandable for a wider audience. I think it has improved my workflow and my confidence in my results. I hope to engage further with efforts to build a greater culture of sharing and giving feedback on work before publication, which I hope will build my confidence in my work.
Katie Vernon
University of York web page | ORCID
Katie Vernon is a Postgraduate Researcher in the Centre for Medieval Studies, whose research focuses on arms and armour in Middle English romance. She is an Open Research Advocate and Graduate Engagement Lead for the Arts and Humanities, sharing her passion for access to higher education and working with both academic and external organisations to make research available to the wider public. Katie has also shared her experiences of publishing an open access book chapter as an Open Research in Practice case study.
What started your interest in open research?
My interest in open research began through my love of heritage and longstanding involvement in educational outreach. I wanted to share research that I found exciting and through my time volunteering in digital heritage I realised just how much information is out there waiting to be put online and read. I have recently been thrilled to see how far reaching the impact of open research is with engaging different communities across academia, heritage and the public; for instance, publishing a review of an exhibition at the Royal Armouries in ‘Aspectus’ has led to an invitation to lead a public workshop.
What challenges have you faced when engaging with open research practices?
There have been a few challenges for engaging in open research practices. Firstly, producing written work to share research with different audiences has been challenging; this includes changing reading level when working with heritage groups but also changing subject-specific jargon when working with scholars in different fields. Which brings me onto my second challenge, of finding pockets of scholars who are engaged in publishing open research in my field. I have found that the best way to navigate this issue has been to take an increasingly interdisciplinary view, collaborating with scholars in fields very different from my own.
What positives have come out of engaging with open research?
Engaging with open research has really opened my eyes to the different ways in which research can be shared, and I have been pleasantly surprised to see how open research principles are increasingly gaining traction. It has enabled me to join new communities of researchers from across different institutions and disciplines. It has also allowed me to think about my research in a new light, and I have been able to develop ideas further through thinking about how I might frame them to different audiences and what impact my work can have on different groups.
Credits
Open Research Journeys were originally published in the internal Open Research Newsletter between December 2023 and June 2025. We would like to thank each of the contributors for sharing their insights and our Graduate Engagement Leads, Kirralise Hansford, Melissa Kays, Luqman Muraina, Yorgos Paschos and Katie Vernon, for initiating and helping to deliver this project.
This resource is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike International 4.0 licence (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)