This is a guest post co-authored by the Library’s 2026/27 Graduate Engagement Leads for Open Research, Katie Vernon (Postgraduate Researcher, Centre for Medieval Studies) and Luqman Muraina (Postgraduate Researcher, Department of Politics and International Relations)
The UKSG Insights journal recently published our reflective piece, ‘Interdisciplinary collaboration for open research: reflections by Graduate Engagement Leads’, which offered personal thoughts on how this role has changed our outlooks and knowledge of open research. Key reflections focused on the challenges and opportunities we have experienced when promoting a culture for open research at York, and we hope this might provide a model for how PhD candidates working in library teams can promote open research communities of practice and help to ensure their longevity. In this blog post we summarise our activities over the past two years and provide more recent thoughts about the role and our experience of open research since writing the piece for Insights.
Being involved with and developing networks for open research has been a key focus of our role. We have helped to shape discussions about open research on social media such as the team’s Bluesky account, within the Open Research Advocates Network, and more widely at conferences. Luqman was able to present a lightning talk at the UKSG 2025 conference on ‘Enhancing Open Research Culture at the University of York: Lessons Learned from our Community of Practice’, and a breakout session at UKSG 2026 on ‘Africa in the Open: Reimagining Global Knowledge Beyond Western Publication Models’. Katie also presented our collaboratively-made poster, ‘Five Years of Open Research Awards at the University of York’ at Manchester’s Open Research Conference 2025, and was recently able to attend a MORPHSS (Materialising Open Research Practices in the Humanities and Social Sciences) workshop in Sheffield aimed at creating a resource for training and showcasing what ‘openness’ could mean for Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences research. These experiences have reshaped our understanding of open research practices and enabled us to think more reflectively from different perspectives of various communities throughout Higher Education.
We have also been able to organise and be part of activities for researchers at the University. Particular highlights have included online lunchtime events, most recently Reproducibility in Quantitative Social Sciences Research, for which we were joined in discussion by colleagues from the University of Oxford and various departments and professional services across York. We have also delivered bespoke training to interdisciplinary research centres including Medieval Studies and Modern Studies. Steadily building connections across the University is paying off, with many of this year’s one-off events and training sessions requested to be delivered again.
A particularly enjoyable opportunity was acting as panellists for York’s Open Research Awards. We were able to see the many different projects being undertaken throughout the University, from taught students to postgraduate researchers, early-career researchers and senior level staff. We had a relatively high number of submissions for this year’s Awards, and hope this shows we are doing something right in reaching out to communities across the University. The variety and quality of submissions have been staggering, and we have been able to see how researchers are at the forefront of finding new ways of doing open research, from different types of publication, to community outreach or online media and creative outputs. It has been such a privilege to see the great research that York’s community is undertaking and then share these projects through the ongoing Open Research in Practice case studies series.
A personal impact has been how we will approach open research ourselves. We have noticed an increased personal drive to practice open research, given that we have seen the benefits it brings to communities. The role has motivated us to think carefully about where we publish and share our work and prompted us to advocate for open research in our own areas of interest. We hope to see an increasing drive for equitable academic publishing, having advocated at conferences and directly with researchers at York to consider publishing with diamond and non-profit presses. Further thoughts on our practices were shared in our case studies, such as Katie’s reflections on writing an open book chapter and in our contributions to the Open Research Journeys at York Q&A series.
Katie has recently taken up a volunteer associate editor role at DOAJ (the Directory of Open Access Journals), assisting with reviewing applications by journals to be listed. Luqman has also begun a new Research Associate role in the CAREERS (Citizen Science for Advancing Racial Equity in Environmental Research Super-consortium) project which involves environmental Citizen Science activities, multiple stakeholder and collaborative engagements, and participatory approaches. This project reflects a wider trend we have noticed across the University where funded projects incorporate open research-aligned practices but may not be directly defined or codified as such.
As we approach the end of another year in this role, we acknowledge that there is still more work to be done. Feedback from events has shown how useful our training is, but also how barriers are still in place for researchers, especially around knowledge gaps and the perceived ‘additional work’ doing open research poses. Looking to the future, we hope that a cultural change, led by established academics, supported by appropriate funding and incentivised by universities will enable everyone to publish and share their research openly.