Introduction and guidance
Welcome to this free course, Open Research. If you are an academic researcher and you would like to make your research more open and accessible to other researchers, this course has been designed for you.
In this course you will explore what open research is, why it’s important, and how it can be applied to different disciplines and stages of the research process. You will learn about why transparency, credibility, and accessibility are important in research, and about what can go wrong when these three principles are not attained.
The objective of this course is to train researchers in open research. The course lasts eight weeks, with approximately three hours of study each week. You can work through the course at your own pace, so if you have more time one week there is no problem with pushing on to complete another week’s study.
The course consists of instructional text and weekly self-test quizzes, which allow you to test your understanding of the course as you go. There are links to inspiring open research projects and interviews with researchers, sharing their first-hand experience of open research. At the heart of the course is an interactive decision-making tool, which allows you to decide quickly what action you need to take, no matter where you are in your research. There is an open-access version of this tool in the collection page, so you can share it with your colleagues.
In the final week, you will learn about ways you can commit to open research and get involved in different open research communities.
Moving around the course
In the ‘Summary’ at the end of each week, you can find a link to the next week. If at any time you want to return to the start of the course, click on ‘Course content’. From here you can navigate to any part of the course. Alternatively, use the links at the top of every page of the course to help you navigate through the course. It’s good practice, if you access a link from within a course page (including links to the quizzes), to open it in a new window or tab. That way, you can easily return to where you’ve come from without having to use the back button on your browser.