 My colleague Josh and I want to take you on a journey towards open research that we're currently undertaking at Lancaster University. We like to compare our journey to moving along stepping stones, careful but with a clear plan. We will introduce four important stepping stones, data conversations, our open research cafe, the key learnings from our recent open research survey and the next stepping stones that we plan to cross. So data conversations was born out of a desire to diversify our research data management service portfolio. Our approach was conventional. We offered training sessions and we provided systems and services to enable RDM best practice across the institution. Now initially our approach was policy driven. It began with the enactments of Lancaster University's research data policy. Approved by Senate in 2015, it outlined roles, responsibilities and requirements. So it's fair to say that it was a largely top-down approach. Now intuitively we questioned whether a top-down, compliance-driven approach was an effective vehicle to drive us towards instances of RDM best practice and we indulged our intuition. In 2017 we surveyed around 70 library and information professionals internationally and we found that the majority considered an engagement-based approach to be more effective, one which communicates the intrinsic value of research data management rather than one that mandates compliance. So with this in mind we set about transitioning to an approach which essentially leveraged our colleagues passion for research. So early in 2017 the library launched Lancaster's data conversations. Data conversations are a series of events for researchers from all disciplines and crucially at all career stages to share their experiences of collecting, managing and sharing research data. Now data conversations are informal and inclusive events. They're organized, they're advertised and they're hosted by the library and they begin with a free lunch for all attendees. Peter plays a pivotal role in our journey towards a culture of open research. Importantly sharing this informal lunch creates an open and friendly environment and it sets the tone for the event. The friendly conversation creates an environment that's conducive towards sparking those interdisciplinary connections. Now crucially at data conversations the focus is on the research, on engaging researchers by giving them a platform to share their data experiences and to learn from their colleagues. Now data conversations it's a small stepping stone but in the context of achieving cultural change driven by engagement we believe that it is a meaningful stepping stone. We've welcomed attendees from 23 departments. We've had 237 registrations across seven events. The last three events have sold out and 711 slices of pizza have been eaten. Now anecdotally the initiative has acted as an incubator for interdisciplinary research and it continues to act as a springboard for other valuable engagement activities. Now data conversations it continues to gain traction and generate interest both at Lancaster University and beyond the institution. We've had expressions of interest from colleagues at the University of Luxembourg, at the University of Roskilde, Banga University and the University of Reading to name but a few. And what seems to interest our peers at other institutions about data conversations is that it offers a cost-effective scalable and reproducible solution for engaging researchers. What we begin to notice at data conversations was that many of the issues discussed touched on broader issues extending beyond the realms of RDM speaking to issues related to open research and so we set about transitioning the data conversations model toward open research and we took this step in partnership with colleagues from a grassroots group in our psychology department known as Prosper which stands for Promoting Open Science Practices. We've heard that a number of sessions over the last two days you know that there are issues within the sector relating to open research and I think it's helpful to pause for a moment to look at what open research is and I think the University of Reading statements on open research is very helpful in this respect and it describes open research as a set of principles and practices whose aims to make the outputs of research freely accessible and usable thereby to maximize the possibility of public benefit. It's worth commenting before I go on that at Lancaster we employ the discipline agnostic open research rather than open science but for the purposes of this paper please regard the two as synonymous. Now this is a broad church the European Commission speak of the eight pillars of open science encompassing the future of scholarly communications, the European Open Science Cloud, third data, data that are findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable of skills, research integrity, rewards, altmetrics and citizen science. And there are a number of drivers for open research we'll touch on a few here there's this plan S backed by the European Commission and now 14 national funding agencies which requires researchers who benefit from state funding to publish in compliance open repositories or journals by 2020. There's REFS environment statements which speaks of institutional policies for enabling open research and there are funders including our cordial hosts today the Wellcome Trust who increasingly expect and require the outputs and underlying data generated pursuant to their funding to be made freely open and available or for access restrictions thereof to be reasonably justified. Now there's no denying it open research is massive both in scope and in scale and the challenges are structural and they are cultural and when working to change culture it's tempting and to some extent understandable to focus on the tangible aspects of culture those features that sit above the surface. However organizational culture is far larger far more sophisticated than those visible features and so operating solely at this visible level will likely deliver ineffective and unsustainable results and so we must look beneath the surface in order to understand and change culture focus on the deeply ingrained aspects of our culture and now the fundamental thing about what lurks beneath the surface is that they're uniquely human features they're people-centric phenomenon and so in working to unfreeze and to change cultural practices we are committed towards involving our researcher community you know we cannot dictate the direction of travel here it's a shared journey and that's why initiatives such as data conversations and the open research are so important because they act as a vehicle for that shared journey and so the open research cafe co-developed with researchers builds upon the success of data conversations community conversation sharing food with colleagues and research are still absolutely at the core. Working with our research partners we modified the european commissions eight pillars of open science to provide structure to the the discussions at our inaugural events thus our eight pillars became the Lancaster University open research manifesto metrics open peer review systems and services rewards and incentives open access skills and training and open data we also used our modified eight pillars of open research to allow our researchers to indicate where their own priorities lay you can see the results on the right hand side there and you know I must say as a research data manager it's rather gratifying to see the open data I think is the is the clear is the clear winner there so following on from our inaugural open research cafe we resolved to cast the net wider to undertake to investigate perspectives on open research across the institution and so we sought ethical approval for an anonymous online survey to be circulated across the university and to conduct a short series of semi-structured interviews with researchers. So who took part in the survey so it was conducted last month so in February 2019 and 160 research staff and PhD students participated so you can see the distribution of the 160 responses here per faculty so we have four faculties a Lancaster in blue and in orange you can see the percentage of researchers who participated in the particular faculty so we asked so this is coming back to the eight pillars that Josh just showed you we asked participants to rank the eight open research themes according to how important they are to them so on this slide you can see in green the themes they ranked as their number one priority in red you can see the bottom ranked theme seen as the least important so what is clear when you look at the number one choices in green that open access to publications is regarded by by far as the most important theme nearly half of participants made this their number one choice followed by some distance by the institutional open research statement and open data so if you then look at the red bars the bottom ranked themes you can see that metrics to measure openness are not very popular followed by open peer review I believe this graph will will become quite important in our future conversations with senior management and here's why so we asked our participants to what extent do you agree with a statement open research should be an institutional priority of Lancaster University so as you can see 58% strongly agree and another 27% somewhat agree so that's together 86% of participants agree that open research should be an institutional priority and less than 4% disagree so this is more than we expected or hoped for and a clear statement that our research community acknowledges the importance of open research we also asked participants to summarize their views on open research in free text and I would like to highlight a few of those views that are typical of certain attitudes so firstly there was a lot of enthusiasm expressed and here are three examples so the first one on on the left summarizes nicely what open research enthusiasts think if it's not open is it really research in a similar fashion the quote in the middle states that open research is just the natural way of doing things however there's also unhappiness and frustration among many researchers about the current publishing system which in this quote is seen as closed outdated unethical and hindering scientific progress the next quotes show that many researchers have a more nuanced view on open research for example the one on the left believe it is a good idea but should not be pursued at the expense of established publication and peer review practices or the middle researcher approves in principle but has many reservations about the manner and speed of implementation and then the third quote touches on the fact that open research is not widely discussed within the university students are not equipped to engage some researchers point to differences between academic disciplines and believe that the most sorry that most of the open research agenda relates to sciences and does not include humanities in its thinking the early career researcher on the right points to missing rewards and incentives being open will not help them advance their career and finally some researchers are frustrated with all the inputs metrics and assessments like the ref that divert them from their research others point to the issue of leadership and believe that senior management in our university has the power to change the incentive system and reward researchers for open practices so our open research investigations demonstrated we believe a clear desire to further a culture of open research but it also revealed a number of legitimate concerns and challenges so we see the way forward as cultivating a community of open researchers we aim to create a forum for open research with members from different disciplines and at different career stages who can engage in a meaningful dialogue and continue to identify initiatives that embed openness in practice. I should pause for a minute really and acknowledge that we have not invented this concept this is an example of a dimension of innovation referred to as horizon scanning or as Massoud might say of stealing good ideas and so all credit here to the University of Manchester and likewise for the the spark that the data conversations fire to our colleagues at Cambridge University openness collegiality knowledge sharing and giving you credit of fundamental parts of what we do and they represent an important part of our our journey we also recognize that ultimately we do need buy-in from senior leadership not least because we would like a budget a seed fund to continue to cultivate the growing in culture to develop an open research online presence to organize and deliver an open research symposium perhaps to support early career researchers who wish to travel to events where openness plays a central role now we believe in what we are doing open research is a concept it's an ideal which resonates with our own values we're working to change culture and that is notoriously challenging and it takes time but we'll continue to foster a culture of open research with humility and with perseverance and we recognize that not every initiative that we undertake will succeed and failure is okay and reframe to fail is simply the first attempt in learning our journey we believe it demonstrates the evolving role that academic libraries can play in developing new services that contribute and support changing practices in research now i'm reminded and have been over the last two days of sconell's 2017 report mapping the future of academic libraries and in that context we operate amidst the nexus of difference and evolving trends we're moving from emphasizing collections to services or at least to collections as one service amongst others the traditional outside in role of libraries of selecting acquiring and managing externally produced content for an institutional community remains but this traditional role is complemented by a growing inside out role of libraries of managing internally produced content for sharing beyond the institutional community and in my mind the synergies between open research and the growing inside out role are becoming clearer of promoting and enabling openness curating and managing institutional repositories and sharing our research outputs beyond the institution with the world without restriction we're consciously questioning old mantras and we are building new paradigms we're providing services and activities across the institution often at scale we are partnering co-working with researchers professional service partners other institutions present within the room today and other external organizations and we are leading innovating in new areas we're persuading key stakeholders of the way forwards we're contributing towards overall institutional strategy and we are co-creating and communicating a compelling vision for open research now we believe that our approach is is reproducible it's low cost it's modular and it's community driven there are two essential pieces of advice I would give any colleagues in the room who are interested in pursuing it and that is be ever mindful of your own institutional culture and secondly identify both critical friends and allies who can co-author and advocate for your your vision for open research now the final word today goes to one of our researchers who said that open research is of great importance not least because we are creating increasingly more digital datasets but also for preservation and sustainability of knowledge from my point of view Lancaster needs to make open research one of its priorities so all that remains is to to thank you all for joining us on our journey towards open research and we keenly await your questions