Training and workshops

Professor Patrick Dunleavy (LSE) and Dr Frances Pinter (CEU) led a webinar on Choosing Open Access Publishing: The Key Issues on Thursday 15 September at midday (CEST). Dr Tim Monteath (LSE) moderated.

Dr Lou Safra (Sciences Po/École Normale Supérieure, Paris) led a webinar on Pre-registration in the Social Sciences on Tuesday 27 September 2022 at 11am to 12pm (BST).

PowerPoint slides for the event [PPT <1MB]

Dr Frances Pinter (Executive Chair, CEU Press) and Emily Poznanski (Director, CEU Press) led a workshop entitled Open Access Book Publishing: What Authors Need to Know on Thursday 13 October 2022, 11am (CEST)

This workshop was the first in our CIVICA Research Open Science for the Social Sciences Training Programme, which aims to help PhD students, post-docs and other early career researchers engage with the principles, processes and tools to disseminate, share, explore and maximise the impact of their research and collaborations.

Frances and Emily helped participants learn about how open access sits within the open science framework, the new business models that are emerging, understand the open access terminology and how open access is funded. Copyright and licensing in the open access space was also covered.

PowerPoint slides for the event [PPT 5MB]

The European University Institute Library hosted a Roundtable on Unravelling the value and practice of Openness in Academia.

With the recent renewed commitment of the EUI to the Budapest Open Access Initiative recommendations in mind, this panel discussed how the value of Openness can (or cannot) drive practices and decision making at EUI with respect to debated issues of:

1. Transparency in Social Sciences and Humanities research.

2. Open knowledge and equitable access to research results from public funded academic institutions.

3. The system of mandates, incentives and rewards that is emerging at the European policy level to make Open Science the norm.

Slides for the event [PDF 1MB]

Lotta Svantesson and Monica Steletti (EUI Library) led this EUI Library roundtable which provided useful information in relation to creating an ORCID ID and on social media use in academic environments. The session was divided in two parts. The first part discussed how to create an ORCID ID and best practices in using it, and the second part provided a short introduction on social media use in academic environments.

Slides for the event [PDF 2.5MB]

A key aspect of encouraging and developing ‘open science’ modes of research in the modern social sciences centres on being explicit about decision-making about all stages of the research process. Yet for all kinds of researchers, documenting your research as you go need not be an unpleasant, extra chore. Instead, it can become an integral and time-saving way of underpinning your research advances, strengthening your critical grasp on issues, avoiding common ‘timebomb’ problems, and improving the preparation of research for the later publication and depositing of data phases. 

Professor Patrick Dunleavy and Dr Tim Monteath led this session, which covered some fundamentals of recording coding, analysis and research-shaping decisions in transparent and recoverable ways. The presentation and discussion covered resources that may be useful for new researchers starting out and for experienced researchers seeking to improve their approach.

PowerPoint slides for the event [PPT 7MB]

Re-analysing secondary data (collected by other researchers) to address new questions is a well-established, economical and time-saving research practice in the social sciences, that fits well with open science goals. Key types of data include consortium research projects using cross-national surveys, standardized data from international organizations, well-respected databases from individual research teams checked for consistency over time or across areas, metrics data, and one-off datasets deposited by individual researchers or teams in data archives. Yet re-using any data collected by others for new and different purposes can entail compromises. Question wordings in surveys or categories/concepts in official statistics may only partly capture the phenomena you are interested in. ‘Mashing’ data from different sources or across different units or periods can be tricky. And for individual deposited datasets or constructed metrics, clarifying how the data was originally created and cleaning it so that it can be fully understood can be non-trivial tasks. In this session, Professor Patrick Dunleavy (LSE) and Dr Tim Monteath (LSE) examined how to develop research questions for re-using and mashing data, how to work with the limitations of secondary data sources, and how novel insights can be gained from bringing datasets together.

Slides for the event [PDF <1MB]

This online session covered the basics of open access and open data. Attendees learned how open research can have a positive effect on the impact their research makes on the world.

Slides for the event [PDF >2MB]

New rules apply in Horizon Europe in order to open up every step of the research process, according to the principle "as open as possible, as closed as necessary". Is it only a constraint? The umpteenth administrative burden? Or, both a fair principle, as publicly funded research ought to be publicly available, and a powerful leverage for a more transparent and effective science as COVID-19 clearly showed? In our workshop Dr Elena Giglia (Turin) set out the reasons, tools and rules to practice Open Science in the daily research workflow. Bocconi Professors Guido Alfani and Dirk Hovy also discussed Open Science from experience drawn from their own ERC projects.

Tuesday 22 November 2022, 1pm

This session will give you a helpful overview prior to submitting your PhD thesis to LSE Theses Online and making it open access. What do you need to know about using copyright material in your PhD thesis? How does making your PhD thesis available on LSETO benefit you? What are the implications for your publishing plans?

Thursday 24 November, 4pm to 6pm (CET)

What data can be best used to identify a piece of research? What data are most effective for its dissemination and retrieval during a web search? Starting with a brief examination of user search strategies by using some practical examples, the workshop focuses on the researcher's use of keywords and abstracts to effectively describe the content of his or her research in order to broaden and improve its dissemination and retrieval by potential users.

Slides for this event [PDF <1MB]

Tuesday 29 November 2022, 12pm (CET)

Dr Martina Ferracane (EUI) and Dr Fiammetta Menchetti (University of Florence) will present the open science best practice from the randomised controlled trial (RCT) conducted by seven doctoral and post-doctoral researchers from the European University Institute and University of Florence in 2021-2022. The RCT involved around 1000 students from different high schools in Italy with the objective to measure the impact of certain creative digital course on students’ interest in STEM and on certain skills including creativity and grit. The webinar will focus first on the process implemented to data protection, including the protocol followed for data gathering and data processing with full respect of GDPR, and it will illustrate the steps needed for an objective and transparent data analysis. Finally, it will showcase how the data will be made available for reproducibility.

Wednesday 30 November 2022, 10am (GMT)

This workshop will introduce you to the journal publishing process and landscape. You will consider your motivations for publishing, learn how to choose and evaluate journals for your research and develop a publishing strategy for your next articles.

Slides for this event [PDF <1MB]

Thursday 1 December 2022, 12 to 1pm CET

Implementing open social science (OSS) innovations focuses in large part on showing more of the concrete evidence that underpins analysis of findings and researchers’ conclusions and arguments. Many commentators have cast doubt on how far OSS approaches can be applied in qualitative research, suggesting that only limited openness can be achieved, especially where a large part of the evidence-base comes from qualitative interviews. Some forms of interviews aiming to recover the ’life-world’ of interviewees as a whole, and as they see it, may be feasible to do on a fully ‘on the record’ basis where archiving of whole transcripts or recordings is feasible with the permission of interviewees. By contrast, for elite and specialized interviewing and conversations are ‘off the record’, then transcripts and recordings cannot be archived or shared with other researchers. However, most such interviews are now conducted on a ‘non-attributable’ basis where direct quotations are allowed so long as they are completely anonymized. With care, it may be feasible to achieve non-straightforward ways of archiving or allowing re-access to such materials. Finally, changes in interview technologies towards using digital methods have opened up new ways of conducting and making available interviewing that might begin to approximate systematic podcasting or video-casting interviews.

Friday 2 December 2022, 2pm (GMT)

This workshop will introduce PhD students and early career researchers and academics to the practices associated with being an accomplished, constructive and respected reviewer. Effective reviewers learn from the review process and, as a result, can see how to improve their own publications. Good reviewers are also recognised by the community and are often offered opportunities that enhance their academic profile, including journal editorial positions and conference track positions. The workshop will be interactive.

Friday 2 December 2022, 14:00 to 15:30 CET

This session will cover:

1.   Data discovery, input and quality control;

2.   Data protection and database copyright;

3.   Data generation, data processing and ethical use;

4.   Managing data during the research project cycle;

5.   Data management plans;

6.   Repositing and preserving data; and,

7.   ICT support and international guidelines. 

PowerPoint slides for the event [PPT >2MB]

Wednesday 25 January 2023, 12:00 to 13:00 CET

Alongside case studies and interviews, documentation analysis and review of varying kinds and levels of sophistication forms one of the top three parts of qualitative social science. In this session we focus on contemporary or fully publicly available document and text sources where access for replication purposes is feasible, and where a full set of documents can be read or sampled. Thus, our scope includes a vast range of government, parliamentary, public policy, sub-national government documentation (especially available under freedom of information), plus publicly available documentation of corporations, firms and NGOs, and a wide range of media outputs in text/document or other formats. (We reserve discussion documents in formal archives with restrictive access needing specialist skills, such as many historical archives, for a later session).

Open social science aims to enhance the confidence that readers can respond in the presentation and interpretation of documentary evidence, strengthening the replicability, robustness and generalizability of studies using this key methods tool. Key steps include:

• Strengthening the systematic nature of documentation identification, search and summarization via content analysis, and QCA/set-based methods;
• Developing improved quantitative summaries of documentation contents and memes;
• Making more evidence crucial for qualitative judgements accessible for inspection or counter-interpretation;
• Pre-specifying hypotheses and propositions, and narratively recording the evolution of analyses or interpretations;
• Making more explicit and ‘stress-testing’ the posited links between particular evidence and analytic judgements;
• Complementing open social science approaches for interview-based research (see here) and case studies (forthcoming). 

This event is part of a series of workshops organised to support the development of the CIVICA Research Open Science Handbook for the Social Sciences. 

Those interested can register for this event, hosted by the LSE, on the CIVICA Research Open Science Eventbrite page.

Thursday 26 January 2023, 11:00-11:30 CET

The rapid growth of cutting-edge technology in science and education served as a catalyst for the development of practical skills to support learning, teaching, and research. Open access issues require an understanding of specific concepts and the use of techniques, applications, procedures to optimise the scientific work. Digitisation opened major opportunities for research activity, imposed the use of common formats and standards for expressing data and knowledge. The topic of digital skills is linked to an assumed career route, to the principles of lifelong learning, to the integration of current issues of academic ethics, and to the laws governing open research. The presentation will also illustrate particular contexts and skills necessary for information discovery in an open access environment.

Those interested can register for this event, hosted by SNSPA, on the CIVICA Research Open Science Eventbrite page.

Tuesday 7 February 2023, 10:00-10:45 CET

Information and documentation are fundamental building blocks in the study and research process that help to develop a scientific work with high academic worth. A clear definition of the information needs, knowledge of the information types best suited to answering the research question, identification of the most appropriate information sources, as well as effective management of the information references are all necessary for the successful information discovery and usage. All scientific articles include references to pertinent literature on the subject being researched. It takes a lot of effort and time to gather, organize, store, read, annotate, and incorporate references as prepared citations in a specified citation style for a scholarly publication. Mendeley Reference Manager is an open-source program that streamlines the workflow for managing references so that the researcher may concentrate on the research objectives. Following an overview of the application's main features, this session will provide several usage examples.

Those interested can register for this event, hosted by SNSPA, on the CIVICA Research Open Science Eventbrite page.

 Thursday 9 February 2023, 12:00-13:00 (CET)

Writing a good data management plan is an integral part of successful open social science practice and a key factor in securing research funding. Yet many researchers have difficulty in fully engaging with writing and implementing their data management plan. This can become a barrier to the publishing high quality, create extra work in depositing discoverable research data, or even lead to irretrievable data losses.

We show how to incorporate best practice in data management from the earliest stages of a research project. Key steps include:

• Demonstrating and following quality assurance measures;
• Making sure you keep good documentation and descriptions of your data;
• Addressing technical and storage issues;
• Thinking about copyright and ownership of your data;
• Identifying all of the data that you can publish or need to deposit in an open science database; and,
• Deciding the appropriate levels of access for different parts of your dataset.

This event is part of a series of workshops organised to support the development of the CIVICA Research Open Science Handbook for the Social Sciences.

Those interested can register for this event, hosted by the LSE, on the CIVICA Research Open Science Eventbrite page.

Tuesday 21 February 2023, 12:00-13:00 CET

Open science has been prioritized by the European Council for the environment of research and education. Data expression through specific languages, reusing research data, and annotation with discoverable metadata are all required components of the FAIR principles. The shift towards open data forced the development of new methods for processing data in various environments and using various technologies (description and storage standards, platforms and repositories, security issues, publishing formats, usage and citation requirements). As a stand-alone characteristic, FAIRness guarantees adherence to the principles of open access, interoperability, reuse, adding value, and encouraging new research. Professor Simon Munzert (Director of the Hertie School Data Science Lab; Professor of Data Science and Public Policy at the Hertie School) will lead this discussion.

Those interested can register for this event, hosted by Sciences Po Paris, on the CIVICA Research Open Science Eventbrite page.

Tuesday 28 February 2023, 11:00-11:30 CET

Open science has been prioritized by the European Council for the environment of research and education. Data expression through specific languages, reusing research data, and annotation with discoverable metadata are all required components of the FAIR principles. The shift towards open data forced the development of new methods for processing data in various environments and using various technologies (description and storage standards, platforms and repositories, security issues, publishing formats, usage and citation requirements). As a stand-alone characteristic, FAIRness guarantees adherence to the principles of open access, interoperability, reuse, adding value, and encouraging new research.

Those interested can register for this event, hosted by SNSPA, on the CIVICA Research Open Science Eventbrite page.

Monday 6 March 2023, 10:00-11:30 CET

Ethical rules in social science research have raised increasing concern, reflection and continued discussion in the research community. Research ethics consists of a core set of scientific norms, developed over time and institutionalised in the international research community. The purpose of this session is to highlight the fundamental norms of research ethics. It will discuss the main actors that are responsible for ensuring compliance with research ethics, but also several case studies to illustrate different ethical challenges and possible options to solve them. A distinction between ethics and law will be made, in order to clarify the legal basis for the investigation of scientific misconduct and for dealing with personal data particularly in qualitative social science research.

Those interested can register for this event, hosted by SNSPA, on the CIVICA Research Open Science Eventbrite page.

Tuesday 7 March 2023, 10:00-10:30 CET

Institutional Open Access repositories are tools for supporting, disseminating and showcasing the institution's educational and research outputs, as well as an alternative to the high cost of academic journals. The session will cover the basics of institutional Open Access repositories, including what they are, their advantages, difficulties, and barriers for the institution, contributing researchers, and the general public, their key characteristics, mandates, and policies, the available software platforms,

how to configure a repository, and the metadata used. To help illustrate the theoretical points, examples and practical tips will be offered.

Those interested can register for this event, hosted by SNSPA, on the CIVICA Research Open Science Eventbrite page.

Wednesday 8 March 2023, 14:00-15:50 CET

Whether you are swamped among multiple revisions of your work or you wish to be more effective and efficient in keeping track of changes in your research (textual documents, code and data), the Git revision system and its on-line component Github will certainly help you in the process. Please join us in this session on Git and Github, where the basis of the two systems will be introduced by means of practical examples. You will be able to complete the basic steps to set up Git on your computer during the course, or reproduce them afterwards. Be advised that most of the steps presented are on the command-line and within a Unix/Linux/MacOS environment, but all of them can be easily reproduced also on Windows with a few adjustments.

If you find yourself comfortable, we advise to install git on your computer ahead of the training session, but it is not strictly necessary. Instructions are available.

Those interested can register for this event, hosted by the EUI, on the CIVICA Research Open Science Eventbrite page.

Thursday 9 March 2023, 12:00-13:00 CET

A key component of open social science (OSS) is to bring the voices of non-professional stakeholders and research ‘subjects’ fully into the undertaking of research, a broad participatory approach best covered by the term ‘citizen social science’. It has three different but inter-related rationales:

• Extra hands to the pump. Many tasks in the social sciences and humanities (and indeed in some STEMM sciences like ecology or even astronomy) cannot be fully automated. Involving large numbers of non-professional volunteers in collecting data, making observations, recording experiences, coding materials, and making translations has huge potential to expand the feasible scope of research, especially using web-enabled apps and programmes.
• Participatory research improves methodological rigour, boosts accuracy and reduces the scope for distorting researcher ‘power’ biases that can otherwise be hard to appreciate or address. Involving research ‘subjects’ as co-participants from the outset in surfacing and designing questions, evolving measurements and indices, and commenting on played-back research results and findings requires careful handling, but done well can greatly strengthen the robustness and replicability of research.
• Specific normative rationales inform some key forms of citizen social science, such as improving individual and community capacities in development research; research encouraging peace and reconciliation in post-conflict situations; ‘decolonizing’ legacy research approaches used by western universities to study colonial people/areas or other historically disadvantaged groups; or deliberative democracy’s push to enhance the scope for reaching more consensual mutual understandings of how best to resolve policy choices and designs.
• Committing to open access publishing also provides a capstone element for citizen social science projects. We review the key issues and many useful approaches to solving them evolved across the different forms of open citizen social science. This event is part of a series of workshops organised to support the development of the CIVICA Research Open Science Handbook for the Social Sciences.

Those interested can register for this event, hosted by the LSE, on the CIVICA Research Open Science Eventbrite page.

Wednesday 15 March 2023, 11:00-12:00 CET, 12:00-13:00 EET

With the help of open-source knowledge representation languages, the current session aims to highlight how essential data and information structuring became for fast retrieval and research optimization. Removing ambiguities, efficient information ordering, structuring into taxonomies, and connecting them into ontologies and knowledge graphs have all been made possible thanks to the evolution of artificial intelligence-based systems. We want to demonstrate, using examples and case studies, how knowledge representation languages can organize and improve the information environment.

Those interested can register for this event, hosted by SNSPA, on the CIVICA Research Open Science Eventbrite page.

Tuesday 21 March 2023, 12:00-13:00 CET

The movement towards Open Science has many research students asking, ‘how can I incorporate Open science methods into my Research Project, Dissertation or Thesis?’ In this session, LSE researchers Daniel Jolles and Nikita from The Inclusion Initiative (TII) at the London School of Economics share their experiences of applying Open Science in their research projects. They discuss the pros (and cons) of Open Science practices for research students and how practices like replication, power-analysis and pre-registration can shape post-graduate research projects and open up research opportunities. In their theses, Daniel and Nikita have both focused on experimental approaches to hiring decisions, with Daniel’s focus on ‘age’ and Nikita on ‘caste’. Through these projects, they demonstrate how Open Science practices can be applied to help broaden research built on narrow definitions of diversity, and the steps they are taking together with the TII team to make their research projects more open and transparent.

Those interested can register for this event, hosted by the LSE, on the CIVICA Research Open Science Eventbrite page.

Thursday 27 April 2023, 11:00-12:00 CEST

Dr Célia Bouchet offers a reflexive account of the confusion she experienced while depositing the quantitative and qualitative data from her Sociology PhD thesis into an institutional repository. Three key issues contributed to this confusion:

• The contrasting temporalities and requirements of depositing different types of research data (variability of norms);
• The grey areas in the legal rules and scientific protocols surrounding the archiving and storage of research data (lack of norms); and,
• The ambivalence towards this time-consuming exercise, in which the costs associated with self-depositing data are constantly weighed against moral reasons for the sharing and furtherance of knowledge on disability (margins of rationalising norms).

This presentation is based upon the doctoral research Célia conducted between September 2018 and November 2021. Her research sought to document the imprint of disability on life courses in France: from childhood to social positions in adulthood. Mixed-methods were used to survey different groups of people who have lived with a “disability” since birth, childhood or adolescence. Comparison of their life courses was also made with the so-called “able-bodied”.

Quantitatively, bivariate statistics, regressions, and factor analyses were used to examine the educational, professional, and family situations of the 3,185 people surveyed who grew up with a “disability” in the broad sense and 16,168 who did not. All statistical analyses were performed with R. Qualitatively, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 37 people aged 30-55 who had grown up “with a disability or disabling difficulties”: 20 who had grown up with a visual impairment (partial or total); and, 17 who had grown up with specific learning difficulties (dyslexia, dyscalculia, dyspraxia, dysphasia, etc.). All interviews were recorded, transcribed verbatim, and then coded using the RQDA package in R. Methodological note files of unrecorded information were also compiled (2-5 pages).

Those interested can register for this event, hosted by Sciences Po, on the CIVICA Research Open Science Eventbrite page.

Thursday 25 May 2023, 12:00-13:00 CEST

The OPTIMICE project devised a method that combines neural machine translation (DeepL) and human post-editing to improve the quality of article metadata (titles, abstracts, keywords, etc.) from French to English in the editorial process of journals. Our recommendations for writing and translating metadata in the Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) are intended to complement existing instructions to authors, and improve journal acceptance, referencing and international visibility of papers. Our method for translation is meant to be reproduced and transferred to various journals, languages and disciplinary fields. The webinar explains and illustrates the OPTIMICE method and the proper use of MT in support of scientific publications.

Those interested can register for this event, hosted by Sciences Po, on the CIVICA Research Open Science Eventbrite page.