Annual report 2023–24

Opening Research Culture practices (strategic priority 7)

Establishing an Open Research Culture is key to the University’s goal to make a positive difference in the world. Open research practices will increase research quality, reach and reproducibility, facilitate interdisciplinary and international collaboration, and ultimately advance knowledge and transform lives.

Developing open research practices

A new dedicated Open Research Advisor advocates for open research practices across the institution, through enhanced support, training and guidance. This role directly supports Directors of Research and Innovation in their Open Research Champion role.

Improved open data sharing

We updated University consent and participant information forms, in collaboration with the Ethics and Information Governance Team, to support greater sharing of open data where appropriate.

Open access increased through rights retention

Problem: Researchers had to inform publishers they were retaining the rights to their work at the point they submitted their manuscript, so that their work could be made openly accessible immediately.

Solved! We changed the University’s publication policy to incorporate automatic retention of rights. We contacted 130 publishers to inform them that our authors automatically retain their copyrights in their research outputs.

Impact: The University’s research is immediately available through our open access repository, increasing research impact and reducing  barriers to knowledge. Researchers do not have to individually assert their rights and negotiate with publishers, who otherwise would take their copyright as a condition of accepting their manuscript.

Our White Rose institutional repositories continue to make the knowledge we create openly available for all. This year we made available:

• 5,695 research outputs
• 678 etheses
• 157 datasets.

Research analytics service (strategic priority 9)

Our research data analytics service actively contributed to faculty strategic priorities through:

• data and recommended actions for Faculty IPE submissions
• providing data for KPIs – primarily field weighted citation impact
• curated, accurate researcher profiles
• structuring data to generate School and Faculty reports
• insight on current awareness and use of metrics for Leeds research evaluation, via a recent Pulse survey.

Improving research visibility 

Our research visibility service has sparked a new initiative, partnering with faculty colleagues to explore priorities and what is needed to ensure Leeds’ high quality research reaches a bigger audience.

Literature searching service

Expert literature reviews were delivered for 11 research projects across three schools, focusing on medicine and health, education, and media and comms.

Researcher professional development and support

• 3,850 individual researcher enquiries answered
• 1,345 participants attended 95 workshops.

It was interactive, and therefore gave me a chance to see if I have understood correctly before the session was over.

Flipping the classroom

A new flipped classroom approach for research analytics workshops led to greater participation of staff and postgraduate researchers, who rated it good or excellent.

Trainers were knowledgeable about different types of research and data. They were pragmatic and honest about the challenges.

New AI course (strategic priority 18)

We developed new training resources on using artificial intelligence to support literature reviews.

The session was very descriptive, insightful, and dealt with all the related concepts of the course in detail. It was very helpful since there were a lot of examples that were relatable.