Open Science Blog

Mass media are an important and effective channel for disseminating medical news. Unfortunately, messages often contain, intentionally or not, exaggerated claims that are not supported by the research itself. However, journalist are not always the ones to blame, and scientists themselves have an opportunity — and a responsibility — to improve the communication about their research. In this case study, I describe the challenges and difficulties that I encountered while trying to present the results of research on a sensitive topic: side effects of oral contraceptives.

My experience with open research practices centres on the task of translating the ‘grand’ research questions and hypotheses from a grant proposal, to the ‘specific’, testable questions for an analysis plan. A large portion of my PhD trajectory has been dedicated to collecting data that was designed to answer a particular research question: Can we find early warning signals before symptom improvements in depression?

My journey towards open science began as a Master student. I participated in the course Transparency in Science and learned about questionable research practices, non-reproducible, and nonreplicable research findings. Majoring in clinical psychology, this made me especially concerned about the impact on validity of treatment recommendations.

The ESM Item Repository is introduced as a platform to improve transparency, methods reproducibility, and validity within ESM research. Experience sampling methods (ESM) have become increasingly popular to investigate psychological phenomena in ecologically valid, daily life settings. ESM allows researchers to measure psychological constructs such as mood multiple times a day for long, continuous periods of time.

Each month, the library’s open access team puts an Open Access publication by a UG author in the spotlight. The article of September 2020 is "The Effects of Migrant Background and Parent Gender on Child Protection Decision-Making: An Intersectional Analysis," co-authored by Floor Middel and Mónica López López.

The subject of Open Educational Resources (OER) is becoming more prominent in higher education, especially in times of need to rapidly switch to online teaching and learning. Read all about these resources and how the UG Library is actively engaged in building services to support teachers in the area of OER and related copyright issues.

Dr Rose Harris-Birtill serves as Managing Editor across the Open Library of Humanities platform of 28 Open Access scholarly journals, and Editor of its flagship journal OLH, based at Birkbeck, University of London. In this interview, she discusses the benefits and challenges of open access publishing in the humanities and describes the publishing model of the Open Library of the Humanities.

Open science has become a catch all term to describe the many different ways in which digital networked communication technologies have opened and begun to transform research and scholarship across different disciplines, even those outside of the sciences. Whilst this term has been useful, Marcel Knöchelmann argues that for the humanities to successfully adopt digital technologies, rather than have them imposed upon them, they need to develop an independent open humanities discourse.

“Whenever I make something open – be it my data or methodology – I am always a bit nervous before I click the button." Interview with Dr Ineke Wessel, associate professor in Experimental Psychopathology at the Faculty of Behavioural and Social Sciences.

Margreet Nieborg is publishing consultant for University of Groningen Press (UGP). UGP supports UG editors and authors in making digital academic journals and books available open access. What do researchers use UGP for? Read the interview with Margreet.