Office for Open Research - Dr David Buil-Gil and Dr Cristina Temenos
The Office for Open Research believes that knowledge, confidence and commitment of the University’s researchers will prove essential in creating a more open, collaborative, and equitable research landscape, within the University and sector. The Open Research Accelerator Fund is one of the ways the Office for Open Research has supported researchers who can illicit change. Projects have included supporting and promoting the sharing of qualitative research methods, and developing and sharing an open-source platform for clinical text mining used by researchers, developers, and clinicians.
Dr David Buil-Gil – CrimRxiv: the global open access hub for Criminology
David is a Senior Lecturer in Quantitative Criminology, Open Research Lead in the Department of Criminology, and the Managing Moderator at CrimRxiv. CrimRxiv is ‘Criminology’s global open access hub and repository’ and is the only open access repository devoted to making criminology and criminal justice research open and available to everyone. Since its launch in July 2020, CrimRxiv has freely shared over 3,000 publications, attracting nearly 400,000 views from more than 195,000 readers across 214 countries.
Through his own research and position as Open Research Lead, David demonstrates a commitment to the belief that, “Research, particularly publicly funded research, should be openly accessible to everyone.”
The Accelerator Fund helped David and the team to survey the legal and technical barriers faced by open access hubs, recruit an assistant managing moderator, and work towards the longer-term sustainability of the CrimRxiv hub.
Dr Cristina Temenos – Data for the People: exploring Zotero’s capabilities as an open data interface
Cristina is a Reader in Human Geography and a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow. Cristina believes that policy research may be seen as ‘boring’ to the public but that, “it is essential in affecting how healthcare and wellbeing is accessed and experienced across all communities.”
Cristina’s pilot project looks to bridge the gap between data collection for research and public accessibility. Stakeholders range from the public to health sector workers and local, regional and national decision makers “who can benefit from a more open and curated engagement with policies that affect their work and everyday life.”
Cristina explained: “As someone who is working towards research to reduce global inequalities, I’ve seen that making data open isn’t enough – it needs to be accessible and inviting to the communities that might benefit from it, which is what this project is trying to do.”
Cristina’s Accelerator Fund project explores the capabilities of Zotero – a well-known open source, open-access citation management tool – as an open data interface. She will assess Zotero’s usability beyond citation management, to present curated collections of open data (in this case, health and social policies in the UK). The ultimate aim is to ascertain its ability to bridge academic, policy, and media datasets and facilitate public consultation and interaction with qualitative research data.
The Open Research Accelerator Fund has been funded by the Research England Enhancing Research Culture Fund and has been supporting the development of Open Research practice since 2022 by funding projects across The University of Manchester.
The 2023-24 fund generated a record number of applications across all three faculties highlighting the diversity of the open research movement at the University. Over £130,000 was awarded to Open Research projects. The successful applicants displayed a commitment to the University’s Open Research principles and demonstrated how they will contribute to a sustainable culture change. You can follow the progress of the projects on the Office for Open Research website and the My Research Essentials training programme.