Abstract

An open, responsible and innovative research culture requires participation from all stakeholders in the research life cycle. Research today is undertaken in a highly competitive environment, which can have a detrimental impact on outputs if researchers are not conducting their research ethically and in a responsible manner. Unethical research practices are damaging and harmful to a researcher’s personal reputation, the reputation of the institute or institutes hosting them, and to the public’s perception of academic research. The quality of research outputs is dependent on the academic rigour of the researcher and the research integrity practices and policies in place to support them.

In Ireland, the higher education landscape is currently going through a process of unprecedented and rapid change. The recent creation of five technological universities has presented the sector with an opportunity to collectively foster and embed a culture of open scholarship and research integrity, and to co-design a common open research roadmap. This collaborative endeavour aims to reach a consensus in terms of exemplary research integrity policies and internationally-benchmarked research practices.

Atlantic Technological University (ATU) is one of Ireland’s new technological universities, created through the merger in April 2022 of three existing institutes of technology in Galway-Mayo, Sligo and Donegal. One of the goals of the university is to increase its research capacity, with a particular emphasis on applied research that is congruent with regional development plans. Boosting the transfer of knowledge from the academy into the local economy – for the purposes of catalysing sustainable growth – is one of the core strategic aims of ATU. As such, the university is working to shape its research and innovation strategy around the open science agenda. In a recent policy statement, ATU affirmed its commitment to the key principles of open research (openness, collaboration, and accessibility) and stated that “embracing open practices at all stages in the research life cycle increases efficiency, fosters research integrity, and promotes higher quality, more reproducible, more reusable research” (TU-NET Joint Statement on Open Research, 2023).

Fostering a culture of open science in a research-performing organisation can, in principle, benefit a range of key internal and external stakeholders, including researchers themselves, but also research management, professional support staff, policymakers, funders, and citizen scientists. It can have downstream, spill-over impacts on other functions such as teaching and learning and graduate education.

The aim of this paper is to understand the change management issues that arise for technological universities, and in particular Atlantic Technological University, at the start of the process of embedding and nurturing a culture of open research. It explores the challenges and opportunities that are involved in cultivating practices of open research across a range of areas, including scholarly communications, research integrity, data management, and career progression, but also more ancillary areas such as bolstering robust reproducibility and involving citizens in research science.

The study will use a qualitative methodology involving questionnaires, workshops, and consultations to (i) capture the attitudes and positions of all stakeholders, (ii) chart the factors that lead to adoption, and (iii) tabulate any notable barriers.