Open Research in Practice case studies

Discover how researchers from across the University have explored and embedded open research practices in their own work.

These case studies provide personal perspectives into how researchers have benefited from, and been challenged by, the adoption of open research practices. For further examples of open research in practice at York, see our list of York Open Research Awardees and the recordings of researcher presentations from our Open Research Events.

Case studies

• Covid Realities: participant-led research in response to the pandemic (Dr Ruth Patrick, Dr Maddy Power & Dr Geoff Page, School of Social and Political Sciences)

• Dissociating memory accessibility and precision in forgetting: writing a Registered Report (Dr Aidan Horner, Psychology)

• Enhancing transparency when working with existing data: Examining reading comprehension difficulties in a large-scale birth cohort (Dr Emma James, Lecturer, Department of Psychology)

• Finding solutions for perinatal loneliness through open and participatory approaches: Research in collaboration with practitioners and marginalised communities (Dr Ruth Naughton-Doe, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, School for Business & Society)

• Recognising and celebrating women’s suffrage history in Scarborough (Kirsty Ryder, Postgraduate Researcher, Department of Archaeology)

• Romans at Home: a collaborative outreach project with people living with dementia (Eleanor Drew, Archaeology)

You can also use page labels to navigate to case studies relating to a specific practice or discipline:

Submit your case study

We invite staff and students to submit their own case studies in doc format to the Open Research Team: lib-open-research@york.ac.uk

Case studies should describe the benefits of open research practices in your work and how any challenges were dealt with along the way. While the research context is important to set the scene, the focus of the case study should be on the experiences of the researcher(s) and what lessons were learnt through your engagement with open research practice. 

Formatting guidelines:

• Title: should mention the open research aspect of the case study

• Summary paragraph: 120 words approximately, providing a brief abstract for the case study, highlighting the role of open research practice(s) and key take-away message(s)

• Case study: 500 words approximately, describing:

  • the research context in which open practices were used; 

  • what open practices were used and why; 

  • what barriers or challenges were encountered, and how these were handled; 

  • what benefits were realised, and for whom, as a result of using the open practices; 

  • what lessons have been learnt. 

• Primary citable outputs of the activity (e.g. open access publications, pre-registration reports, datasets, code): resources should be referenced by persistent URL or DOI

• Contact: name of researcher/research group, photo, department, email, ORCiD and Twitter (if desired)

• Images: we would like our case studies to be visually appealing, so please provide three images (if possible) which can be used to help illustrate the research. We will assume that you are the copyright holder of the image unless otherwise stated; if the image was created by a third party then please let us know the source and whether you have obtained permission to share the image publicly in this format.

Researchers are also welcome to produce case studies in other formats as they wish, for example video presentations. 

Adapted with permission from University of Reading Open Research Case Studies.

Terms of use and licensing

Unless otherwise noted, copyright in these case studies belongs to the author(s) who offer permission to the Open Research Team to edit and format their text for presentation purposes. Case studies will be published on the York Open Research wiki space under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC) Licence. This permits others to share and adapt case studies for non-commercial purposes, as long as they give appropriate credit to the author(s), provide a link to the licence and indicate if changes were made. 

Under the terms of this licence the University Open Research Operations Group may use case studies for advocacy and training purposes with acknowledgement to the author(s). This includes (but is not limited to) sharing excerpts from case studies through the University website, researcher training sessions, social media and internal communication channels. 

Authors should seek to obtain permission from potential rights holders and interested parties before submitting their case studies, for example by speaking to co-authors or research supervisors. The Open Research Team can help to address any copyright or data protection/confidentiality issues which may arise from submissions. 

Note that these terms and conditions apply primarily to written case studies, but we also accept case studies in other formats such as video presentations, for which other terms may apply. Please contact the Open Research Team to discuss this further (lib-open-research@york.ac.uk).