Defining open research isn’t always easy. Historically, we might have viewed it as a series of practices tied to specific phases of the research life cycle – like the open-access publishing that dominated our early forays into openness over the past few decades. We might even have seen it as a set of radical tools designed to boost reproducibility.
In these traditional models, we break the research life cycle down into its component parts and ask which practices allow us to open up the methods, data and outputs at each step. This is a valuable perspective. It allows for a clear, discrete focus on individual practices, helping researchers build real proficiency. Clinical researchers, for example, have become adept at trial pre-registration (describing a project in full before any data is collected). Focusing on discrete practices also gives us a clear metric to track awareness, measure adoption and gauge our overall progress.
However, when it comes to driving long-term change across the broader research culture, this step-by-step definition has its limits.
Why open?
Research is increasingly collaborative, accompanied by a growing recognition of the need for real-world impact – especially when public funding is involved. Across the UK, higher education institutions are publicly committing to open research, with many issuing formal institutional statements. Funders, too, expect openness to extend beyond basic open-access publishing of outputs. At the same time, research evaluation initiatives like CoARA and the Research Excellence Framework prioritise openness as a key marker of research quality.
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Even the economics align. Studies like the Technopolis report on the economic benefits of open research show clear financial returns, efficiency gains and broader social and economic value. Outside the academic ecosystem, policymakers increasingly draw on research outputs directly, and the public is far more interested in accessing primary research to inform their daily lives.
Yet, public trust in research remains fragile. While it increased in Europe during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, trust has since declined alongside rising geopolitical tensions, mis- and disinformation, and conspiracism. The continued globalisation and diversification of research and research process has also provoked justifiable mistrust from certain communities, which should prompt universities to consider and evaluate disciplinary paradigms, assumptions and inherited epistemologies and epistemic hierarchies.
Against this backdrop, many in the open research community now recognise that our entire research culture is better served when openness, and particularly transparency, acts as a core, foundational principle running through every stage of the process. Embedding openness at this level enhances research rigour, reinforces reproducibility and integrity, and ultimately builds the public trust needed for research to meaningfully benefit society.
What is open?
When we shift toward viewing openness as an overarching principle, open research transforms into the underlying process that sustains it. This invites us to ask deeper, more reflective questions:
- What is the ultimate purpose of our research?
- Who holds responsibility for its quality, rigour, integrity and openness?
- Who actually benefits from access to research?
Answering these questions helps us contextualise ways to make research open meaningfully and ethically across diverse disciplines, methods and output types. Crucially, it reframes openness – moving it away from a rigid checklist of rules required to be a “proper” open research advocate, and towards an inclusive process that accommodates a much wider variety of open practices. Many of these practices, it’s worth noting, have long been used by disciplines historically under-represented in the open research conversation.
How to engage with openness
When openness is treated as a defining principle of rigorous, high-integrity research, engaging with it becomes an ethos rather than an opt-in checklist.
That said, structured frameworks still play an essential role in helping us figure out how to actively do openness. In “Planning for an open research future: a practical resource and evidence-based guidance”, the University of Chester’s Suzanne Stewart brought together 36 open research experts to create the Transparency and Openness Management Plan template, bridging the gap between intention and implementation.
The template asks structured questions across the research life cycle in a modular format that adapts to different disciplines. It offers both a narrative version (ideal for detailed planning, documentation and justification) and a streamlined checklist version. This helps researchers systematically reflect on their work through the lens of openness, navigate compliance policies and identify practical tools and resources tailored to their specific workflows.
For researchers just starting out in opening their research, the first step is to reflect deeply on the purpose and value of your work, and consider who stands to benefit from it. Grounding yourself in those answers makes it easier to evaluate specific practices, build confidence and ensure you invest your precious time in open practices that offer genuine value to your discipline and wider society.
At the same time, open research cultures risk faltering without investment in human and technical infrastructure. For open research to go beyond individual practice, we require collaborative and coordinated action between researchers and research professionals – as well as infrastructure providers, publishers and funders – across the sector. To that end, we are hosting a coordinated series of thematic webinars across 2026-27, covering research data planning and deposit, monitoring open research practice, skill and capability development in open research and responsible reward and recognition of open research engagement. These webinars will bring together researchers, institutions, funders, publishers, learned societies and research professionals with the goal of moving from individual recommendations to coordinated action.
Alice Howarth is open research manager at the University of Sheffield and open research coordinator and administrator for the UK Reproducibility Network. Gemini was used for light editing.
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