Events diary
Engaging Audiences: Sharing, Caring and FAIRing - Open Research in Practice
Why does Open Research (OR) matter now? OR is increasingly demanded by research funders, making it essential for researchers to keep up with evolving policies and practices. But this workshop treats OR as more than a box-ticking exercise. OR is also a live question about the purpose of research itself.
As public trust, funding models, and expectations of impact shift, openness has become entangled with democracy, participation, pressures to demonstrate value beyond the academy… and our deeper motivations for doing what we do.
Whether you’re a postgraduate researcher or ECR, or a seasoned veteran, this workshop is for you. We will look at the relation between OR and FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable), and give examples of how your research can benefit from applying FAIR principles to your own practice. We will look at some tools to evaluate the FAIR-ness of our data, and the role of persistent identifiers in promoting FAIR practices. We will work through real examples of how you can share research more widely, and make outputs genuinely FAIR.
We’ll examine everyday decisions around formats, platforms, licensing, documentation, and strategic and ethical trade-offs. We’ll also touch on how OR connects to co-production and participatory methods, where these methods can fall short, and what happens when work is technically open but socially invisible… when you fling open the gates, but nobody comes. Other topics of discussion may include tensions between ideals of openness and pressure to commercialise. The session offers tools and frameworks for making OR meaningful, not just about compliance.
The workshop is open to Sussex researchers at all levels - please register using your @sussex.ac.uk email address. Refreshments will be provided.
This workshop is part of The Digital Methods Accelerator (DMA) programme 2025-26, a series of in-person workshops aimed at Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities researchers at all levels wanting to explore and skill up on digital methods for their research.
Note: by participating in this event you agree to uphold the Sussex Digital Humanities Lab Code of Conduct.