open research case studies

Dr Joseph O’Mahoney has piloted a tool that enables access from articles to digital versions of archival sources.

Publishing research software code under an Open Source licence and providing user support can improve the quality of the software, build an active user community, and lead to new collaborations. 

Dr Alanna Skuse discusses the benefits and challenges of publishing Open Access in the humanities.

Making the code for a new computational model of the solar wind Open Source has led to new collaborations and a partnership with the Met Office to develop a forecast tool.

The Energy Meteorology Group has been sharing innovative datasets at the renewable energy-meteorology interface. This has led to new research collaborations and re-use of the data in both research and operational contexts.

ReproducibiliTea Reading is a group of researchers and students who meet regularly to learn about reproducible research and develop their Open Research skills, as part of the international ReproducibiliTea initiative. 

Open Source hardware has been used in the design of a robot developed by a Biomedical Technology Lab at the University to take high resolution images of experiments capturing changes in colour and fluorescence due to bacterial growth.

The world’s first open global-scale flood and drought forecasting system for rivers worldwide has been developed by scientists from the National Centre for Atmospheric Science, the University of Reading and the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasts.

Thousands of citizen scientists have collaborated with Reading meteorologists to carry out open research on solar storms as they travel through space.

Experimental psychologists teamed up with a philosophy academic to explore how people talk about knowledge in everyday language. They used the methods and tools of open reproducible research to test and qualify findings from a published study.

Staff and students at a University of Reading brain imaging facility have worked together to build a culture of Open Research, through Open Access publishing, using preprint servers, making code and making data openly available as standard.

Open source software developed at the Institute for Environmental Analytics allows users to visualise and explore large-scale environmental datasets online. Since its release in 2010 the software has been used by research institutes, government agencies and the insurance, oil and gas, shipping and aviation industries.

TAMSAT-ALERT is an open monitoring and decision-support tool that helps African farmers and insurers to assess the risk of crop losses from weather hazards. Applying Open Research principles has directly boosted its uptake and impact, particularly in the financial sector, in which transparent decision-making is essential.