Guest Authors: Helen Hardy, Research Policy and University Collaboration Coordinator, Cambridge University Press (Academic) Kiera McNeice, Research Data Manager, Cambridge University Press (Academic) Meng Liu, Second Language Education Group,Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge

The University Collaboration Budget (UCB) funds initiatives that involve direct collaboration between the University and Cambridge University Press (Academic). Winning initiatives strive to further our shared aims, such as research excellence and integrity, scholarly communication and challenging elitism. UCB initiatives are wide-ranging – from developing free online teaching resources for learning scientific computing, to hosting a major academic event to celebrate the anniversaries of Mahatma Gandhi’s birth and visit to Cambridge.

Open research is currently a major topic for researchers in the social sciences. We spoke to applicants Meng Liu and Kiera McNeice to find out more about their UCB initiative ‘Promoting Open Scholarship in Applied Linguistics’.

Tell us about your initiative itself – what activities do you plan to carry out?

We plan to host a two-day online symposium in June 2022 targeting applied linguistics researchers on the topic of Open Research and its surrounding infrastructures. The organisation of the symposium will be a direct collaboration between the Second Language Education Group at the Faculty of Education, the Data Champion Programme at the Scholarly Communications Office and Cambridge University Press (Academic).

Additionally, this symposium will serve as a springboard for the building and maintenance of an international research community dedicated to promoting Open Research in this field, which will support seminars facilitating academic exchange and collaboration. Far from being a one-off event, this initiative will provide a starting pointing for long-lasting development of Open Research in Applied Linguistics.

How will your initiative help achieve the University and Cambridge University Press (Academic)’s shared aims?

The symposium will promote awareness of the cores values of Open Research through wide-ranging coverage of talks and discussions by an international community of researchers. The symposium aims to attract a balanced mixture of quantitative and qualitative researchers and, through open and transparent discussions on challenging issues (e.g. the tension between the qualitative research paradigm and value of reproducibility), generate a more discipline-specific and paradigm-inclusive understanding of Open Research. The symposium will champion diversity and inclusion since it is online and free to attend, and so accessible for attendees from all time zones and backgrounds. The invited speakers and contributors will span across different career stages, ranging from PhD students and early career researchers to full professors.

By supporting this milestone event, Cambridge University Press (Academic)’s will demonstrate its commitment to Open Research: a dedicated panel session will discuss its role as a publisher in the movement towards Open Research.

What impact do you expect your initiative to have? How will you measure your success?

In the short-term, we’ll seek attendee feedback on the two-day symposium and share all recordings openly online. By bringing together researchers across career stages, research expertise and geographical locations, we expect the symposium to raise awareness of Open Research and inspire related collaboration worldwide. Meng Liu plans to submit symposium proposals on this topic at Applied Linguistics conferences (e.g. AILA 2024, a world congress by the International Association of Applied Linguistics).

The long-term impact of this initiative will be the research community’s website. We hope it will thrive via regular updates of information and activities such as invited talks and collaborative research outputs generated by community members (e.g. journal articles). There are already successful examples of such online communities, such as the FORRT community, where open educational resources on open scholarship and manuscripts promoting open scholarships have been published.

The online symposium Open Research in Applied Linguistics will take place from 9-10 June 2022. Visit the event website to view the programme, register to attend or join the international research community Open Applied Linguistics.

For more information on the UCB, please see our website.