Unknown: [music]

Matthew Sillence: [music]

Welcome to PGR Matters. I'm your host. Matthew Sillence, the

spring break has arrived as the campus is becoming quieter, I

blocked out some time this afternoon to do some searching

online about Open Research Training Microsoft's Co-Pilot.

AI search, for instance, provides a list of several

universities in the UK that offer structured programs online

or in person. I think it's pretty heartening to see how

many options there are available for both post graduate

researchers and more established academics. Most of these, if I

scroll down on the page, most of these appear to cover topics

we've already introduced in episodes one and two of this

season, such as open access publishing and open licensing,

data management and adherence to the fair principles study pre

registration and reproducibility techniques. In this episode, our

final in the open research series, we take a step back from

these principles and priorities and try to understand how

conceptions of openness are being reshaped, particularly for

researchers in the arts, humanities and social sciences.

We also explore ways of learning about open research that are

founded on gamification, and consider what this is to offer

to novice researchers who might be struggling to see how the

open research agenda applies to their work practically.

Our first interview is with Dr Samuel Moore, lead researcher on

the MORPHSS project, a multi-institutional initiative

with Dr Jenni Adams and Professor Stephen Pinfield at

the University of Sheffield, Dr Miranda Barnes, Dr Amelie Roper,

Dr Valentina Bertolani at the University of Cambridge, Dr

Janneke Adema and Dr Rebekka Kiesewetter at Coventry

University, and Dr Siddharth Soni at the University of

Southampton. MORPHSS is funded by the UKRI Research England

Development Fund, the Wellcome Trust and the Arts and

Humanities Research Council. In the course of our discussion,

our guest challenges a number of the statements that have become

core tenets of open research in the UK over the last 20 years.

On first hearing this, it's tempting to question our

engagement with the principles and practices that we've already

covered in this season, questioning how open research is

being discussed, performed and valued, however, is not to

outright reject it. Through our discussion, we can discern forms

of openness that can happen and are, in fact, are happening

right now. It's simply that these often fall outside the

priorities of the discourse. Fantastic to have you here, Sam.

Thank you for making time, because I know you've been on a

whirlwind of doing book promotions and also conferences

in relation to the project that we're going to be talking about

in a moment, but I think a lot of our listeners will probably

want to know a little bit about you, so I'll ask you a bit in a

moment about your academic origin story. But one of the

things I do want to point out before we get started into this,

is that you, you did publish a book which is open open access.

It came out in September 2025, with the University of Michigan

Press, which is called publishing beyond the market,

open access, care and the Commons. So I'm sure many people

will be having a look, taking a deeper dive, I guess, into the

structures that surround open access and open research work.

So But for today, maybe in your own words, you can say a little

bit about your own academic origin story. So a little bit

about where you came from, how you got into this line of work.

Samuel Moore: Yeah, thank you. Yeah. Thanks for Thanks for the

invite. So I guess my academic origin story, which is quite a

nice term, I've not really heard about that before. Heard that

term before, but so I was a sort of humanities trained

researcher. Did a philosophy undergraduate, and actually at

the University of Essex, which I still have a very soft, soft

spot for the for the department there. And and then I did a

master's in literature. So I was always steeped in that kind of

thing, in humanities work. And and then I subsequently, after

my masters, I joined a publishing my first job was a

publisher. Publishing Company called PLOS, which was a

fledgling scientific publisher at the time, and they had

developed this new model of open access publishing, which was

very new at the time, and and it was sort of the it was going to

change the future, and it was going to allow the. Research to

be free to everyone and and it was this kind of really

interesting, exciting time. And I joined that organization a

time of real rapid growth, and they were absolutely

transforming the publishing industry. And a lot of what's

happened since then, for better or for worse, was actually, was

a result of plot and what they did, particularly things like

the article processing charge and but then I thought, well,

actually, I'm not really that interested in science. I don't

understand any of the stuff I'm publishing. I'm just an

editorial assistant and and so I thought, well, I'm going to go

and do a PhD, and just think about how open access publishing

relates to the humanities and social sciences. And this was in

sort of the mid 2010s really, when I started it. And so I

explored that question in King's College London, in the digital

humanities department. So I'm essentially a digital humanist.

I don't really know what that term means. I still don't really

know. I still call myself that, but I don't, I think about

digital stuff from a range of different ways, I guess. And and

so I explored this, this question of like open access,

looking at policies, how the policies impact our disciplines,

and then how grassroots collectives sort of explorer

alternatives as well, which, which that was kind of like the

PhD, which, then that's what turned into the book, which was

just published now. And so I had a very slightly strange career,

I guess I did the the PhD, did some post docking, some teaching

fellowships, and then I joined Cambridge. And so my role at

Cambridge is, I would say it's an academic role in the sense

that what I do is research, informed policy making, research

informed sort of behavioral, sort of stuff like that, where I

try to see, like, what's going on with open research, not just

open access, but sort of open science, open research, and see

how that relates to researchers at Cambridge. And so a lot of

the stuff we do is sort of studies around the kinds of ways

in which we publish there, or the impacts of certain policies,

like rights retention policies, and try to try to make the

service that the University Library provides to its academic

quite research led. So I think I've got quite a unique

position. I don't think there are many of me that exists in

the UK, if not the world, which is, which is quite interesting

for me. And so I guess that's the that's the story, really.

That's what takes me up to today. And the Morse project,

which I'll talk about, was really sort of situated in that

we want to be able to stimulate behavioral change in HSS

subjects, and we do it in this research informed way, I guess,

fantastic.

Matthew Sillence: That's really fascinating work. And I do think

you're absolutely right. Yeah, there's not many, not many of

you in this world, I think, who were taking that kind of, that

kind of view of the ecosystem, maybe, and how it and how it

informs the policies and practices that we, that we

engage in in universities. So you mentioned MORPHSS, which is,

we've mentioned already so far on the podcast, which is, which

is about Materializing Open Research Practices in the

Humanities and Social Sciences. That's the acronym I'm from the

University of East Anglia, which is often abbreviated to UEA,

which is also known as the University of Excessive

Acronyms. So I'm pretty familiar with with them, and I think that

was a really good one. But do you want to explain to our

listeners what the main aims of MORPHSS are as a project?

Samuel Moore: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the acronym was even

nicer when it was first designed. It was just going to

be morph, and the age was standing for Humanities. But

then then social sciences sort of got involved as well, in a

really great way. I mean, it was great that the funders were

interested in broadening out. Broadening out, but it was going

to be the MORPH project originally, but, but yeah, so

more. So what we're trying to do is essentially explore how the

how approaches to open research, which is often called Open

Science, how that scientific understanding of openness has

shaped how, the various ways in which we we practice it in the

UK so if you think about like the UK Government, it's funding

initiatives that the UKRI, for instance, very they're very

interested in open research. But if you read their statement

about open researchers, has often called Open Science, and

then you see quite quickly afterwards that open science

often refers to things like reproducibility or data sharing

or rigor, transparency, all these things that actually do

not really resonate that well with humanities and social

science disciplines. And I say and I lump those terms together

humanities and social sciences, knowing full well that there's a

lot of quantitative social science that would be completely

comfortable with those sorts of terms. But what we're doing is

we're focusing on what you might call like the qualitative end of

that, of that spectrum, the critical theoretical traditions,

rather than the more quantitative stuff. And so we're

thinking. That, that the government narrative or the

funder narrative or the institutional narrative, it's

it's really led to disinterest or uninterest that goes on the

part of of arts, humanities and social science researchers, they

don't see themselves within that scientific framework, but, but

we think actually, that's not really, that's not really good

enough. We think that there are real reasons that that our our

discipline, should get involved in openness, and they already

are getting involved in it in many different ways. And we

think that the best way to say to openness is good. This is a

range of practices or a range of values that really conform to

your disciplines. That's sort of how what we're trying to do with

with the project. It's, it's, it's very much programmatic.

It's about behavioral change and so and so and so. Yeah, that's,

that's sort of the the basis of it is, is we figure if we can

reframe open science as open research, or even open

humanities, open arts and whatever, if we can reframe it

and then we can give people lots of guidance around how to engage

in these practices, then ultimately, a better research

culture will come out of that. We think that openness has loads

to offer for our disciplines, but it's just it has to be

framed in a way that is sensitive to them.

Matthew Sillence: So from what you've described there, it

sounds as though there are kind of issues around language. So

the kinds of terms that are being used and what, how those

so you mentioned sort of resonate with different

communities of researchers. I guess scholarly communication

is, you know, has a long history, in a sense, because we

could, we could think of it in terms of scholarly

communication, pre open access publishing or pre open research

in many respects, but maybe if I could just press you a little

bit more to share how you came to focus particularly on this

aspect of scholarly communication. So lots of you

know, lots of different things that you know, I suppose

practices in academia that have been going on for a really long

time, but, but why, you know, why was it that open access was

kind of the area for you? Yeah, that's a

Samuel Moore: good question, actually, because that the idea

really is that, I mean, yeah, you could ignore all this stuff,

like 5, 10 years ago, but now you really can't ignore this.

It's it's the kind of thing which, if you are working in a

university in the UK right now, you have to do some form of

openness. And open access is usually the way that people

encounter open research. But if you're submitting for a funding

application to someone like the Wellcome Trust, they will ask

you to provide a data sharing agreement, or data sharing

sharing statement that says how you're going to share your data.

If you don't think of what you're doing your source

material, or whatever, if you don't think of it as data, then

there's just a mismatch of language there. So I think, I do

think language is a really important thing, but I think

it's, it is more fundamental than just language. It's also

actually these, these things have really come there's a

different genealogy that that that open science reflects, and

that has led to what we've ended up with now. And actually

there's a ton of open research in the humanities and social

sciences that, firstly is being done already in quite mainstream

places. Secondly, is being done it quite marginal places, and

could be done more. And thirdly, we might be able to use some

things that that really aren't being done at all, and bring

them in and make them for ourselves. So it's so that is

that focus of language. But actually the practice is, is

really where it gets interesting, is that we don't

want people to have to just blindly do a different practice.

And you see that actually when you see qualitative researchers

sort of having to to write data sharing statements, they

automatically think, oh, I should be sharing my data. I

should be sh... like, I should be sharing my raw data files, my

interviews and those sorts of things. And that really is kind

of anathema to qualitative research. You don't it's not

something you just sort of blindly share. It's something

that you, that you work out how to, how to, how to share with

various publics in various ways. There's a lot more nuanced than

just here is my day to take it and so, so that's the sort of

stuff we're talking about. Yeah, yeah.

Matthew Sillence: I think, I think what you've just mentioned

there echoes some some comments that were made by the head of

open research at my own University back in in episode

one, where there may be very, very good ethical protocols and

reasons that have been followed for not sharing that

information. You know, if there are human participants involved

in it, and there's particularly sensitive content, yeah, I mean,

in the cases,

Samuel Moore: Yeah, yeah. And sorry to interrupt, but I think

that that's why I really hate statements like as open as

possible, as closed as necessary, because they situate

it in this, in this. They make people think that they have to

make things open. It does. There's a pressure to make

things open, and there's a sort of a spectrum we what we want

things open as. Much as we can. But actually that's just not the

best way of looking at it, because if you're, if you're,

again, if you're a qualitative researcher dealing in human

subject research, and you feel this pressure, you think,

actually that kind of everyone's telling me, I need to share this

data. So should I just share this data? And it might be

completely inappropriate to do so, but it's that. It's that

sort of pressure. And so rather than thinking about it as a

binary, or even as a spectrum of open versus closed. We're

thinking about it in a much more exploratory way, where actually

openness could mean something like how you open participation

up to various people as part of your research process, or it

could mean openness to experimentation and those sorts

of things. That's That, to me, is a more productive way of

speaking to our disciplines.

Matthew Sillence: Okay, thanks for that. And one of the things

that you mentioned in your recent report, which was

fantastic and really broadened my view, I suppose, in trying to

take into account practices that actually, of course, are going

on all the time, but not necessarily surfaced, perhaps in

quite the same way they don't necessarily have the prominence

was the CARE principles. So we've been talking on this

series so far about FAIR, about those FAIR principles as well,

but we've also mentioned CARE. I mean, how did that kind of come

into play with assembling the report that you've done

recently? Is that something that you've that you found helpful, I

guess? Yeah.

Samuel Moore: So what, what we tried to do with the report is,

is make a case for open research in the arts, humanities and

social sciences, based not just on saying we disagree with a lot

of what's happening, but also saying we've identified a range

of practices that we are terming openness that are not

traditionally part of what you might call like the Open Science

canon or or how we think about open research, or at least they

don't find themselves within the policy sphere. So the UNESCO

Declaration on open science does account for some of this sort of

stuff, which is the same thing as like, openness to alternative

knowledges, indigenous knowledges, openness to

collaboration, to different participation, and those sorts

of things. But that that is not that just doesn't find itself as

a priority within within institutional frameworks. And

it's that kind of thing which we don't think is, is particularly

productive, and so with the care principle specifically. I mean,

if you were to look at CARE, CARE is actually one way, if

you, if you're thinking about it in an open science perspective,

from a sort of brute, open versus closed, CARE is actually

a way of closure, of keeping something closed, because a

community says that actually we want to, we get to decide what

to do with that. Now we think, actually, that's the wrong way

to look at it. CARE is a form of openness. It's a form of saying,

this is this is the community's work. This is something which we

are kind of stewards of, and we want to ensure that

participation is done in the best possible way with our

communities norms and values in mind. And so it's and so that's

openness to those participants, as long as those participants

are respectful of of your of your rules, of your cultures and

those sorts of things. And so that that's you can think of as

a form of closure if you're thinking about it in open

science perspective. But it's actually a form of openness if

you're thinking about kind of letting people in. And so what

we a lot of, what we think about, is this idea of

experimentation, or maybe openness to certain practices,

rather than openness of now, a lot of people now write about

this. So Sabina Leonelli, her book on open science, is a

fantastic argument in favor of moving away from what she calls

a resource-based understanding of openness, where what the

intention of openness is to share publications, to share

data, to share code, all these sorts of things. And she says,

Actually, no, you need something a bit different. She argues for

something called judicious connection, where you make

different connections between different materials in order to

generate more openness and such, and we say, actually, what we

want is more experimentation, which is, which is, say, we

don't know the best way to bring stuff together, but we're pretty

confident that that collective approaches to knowledge

production are really productive, and that

experimenting in things like the form of the book, or

experimenting in linearity, research presentation, all those

sorts of things that that, to me, is, is that's the openness.

So openness then becomes openness to, and that could be

an openness to participation, to presentation, to all these

various things, rather than openness of, and I think that's

probably that if I was to say any conclusion, like the top

level conclusion from the report, I would identify that as

being kind of the important one, because it really does shift how

we think about openness. Because then, when you're when you're

uploading your article to the institutional repository, as

you're being told to do for REF purposes or whatever, you're not

doing that because you're making it available to to whoever. It's

just not, not an indiscriminate thing. It's more of a collection

of what. Am I doing this? Why? Why? Who are the audiences who

might access this? And then it starts to sort of percolate in

different ways. And so if we can, if we can think about it in

that openness to way, then it becomes a lot less homogenizing,

I guess, and loads of things might happen from it. So, so

it's a little bit theoretical, but I think that there's, I

think there's some meat there, which, which allows us to

stimulate new practices.

Matthew Sillence: Yeah, great. Experimentation is exciting. I

think that maybe we could just focus on that for a final point

here, which is that this episode is looking at, in many ways, how

we learn about open research and how we learn about open access,

and we're going to be talking to somebody who's looking at

gamification and different in some ways, quite experimental

ways of engaging with with with that as a training, as a form of

training in academia, you mentioned that in your report,

it's actually one of The recommendations is to offer

training on a diverse range of open practices. I was just

wondering if you could say a little bit more about what you

what your team meant by that.

Samuel Moore: Yeah, I mean, I think a diverse range of open

practices would be the sort of stuff that I've talked about. So

at the moment training would, it tends to be open access, which

is, which is so important to everyone here because of the

government's policies on that open data is still an important

thing. But then there's all these things around

participation and experimentation that just,

they're just not a feature of of the training landscape at all.

And I think that the idea behind MORPHSS is, it's like I say,

it's highly programmatic, and we think that if we want to change

research cultures, then if you we want to be able to show

researchers that this stuff is is good, I guess, and it's worth

engaging in. And so part of the project, I mean, I didn't

mention this actually, when I introduced it, but what we're

focusing on now is a series of case studies where we are

exploring these practices in more detail. So there's one

about open peer review, and it's moving away from the idea that

peer review can be either open or closed, and we're piloting

things like collective approaches to peer review. And

then we're also piloting approaches to social creation of

books, like how different people can get together to create

books. And so with these practices, what we hope to do is

to say to people, what do you think? Is this the kind of thing

that excites you, that stimulates you, or is this

actually, have we got it completely wrong, and you just

want to go back? Just want to go back to publishing in exactly

the same way, which, I mean that probably will happen as well,

which is, which is completely reasonable. And one thing we are

doing, actually, is this thing called the unbind workshop.

We've done one in the in the past in Cambridge. And the

Unbind Workshop brings together a bunch of scholars who are

writing their first book. So probably some of the people

who'll be listening to this podcast, and we say to them,

this is kind of what openness is. We're really interested in

openness. Could you all give a presentation about what you what

you would like to do with the book if you didn't have any kind

of preconceptions around having to publish it as a book?

Everyone's expected for their careers to publish a monograph

in the way, or at least these scholars are they have to

publish a monograph for their career reasons. And so we asked

them, if you didn't have to do that, how would you share your

research? And it's all long form stuff, so it's all kind of

bookish quality to it. And they all had incredible ideas around

like archiving, massive archives that people could immerse

themselves into, or completely non linear scholarship, that you

go over here in one way, and then you go over there in

another way and you explore it in a different way, or things

like multimedia presentation, all this sort of stuff. And

they've got these completely nuanced and defined ideas of

what they want to do, but they can't do it because they have to

publish a book that looks like a book that's just how it is. And

so we're saying, like the training actually should allow

people to experiment more with that, and to be able to take

that, take those thoughts and use them and see exactly what

happens at the end of it. And so obviously, there's a huge

research culture angle to it. And so while we're telling

people that we need to stop publishing in, I don't know,

prestigious journals, or high impact journals, and those sorts

of things, we actually want something that people can do

instead. And we think that's the kind of thing, the experimental

stuff, the stuff which you're not really supposed to do

because it's just takes up too much time, or, or there's no one

supporting you to do it, or it's just hard to conceptualize, and,

and so that's kind of where the training angle comes in, and

that, I think again, is the way to speak to our research

communities is to say, this is openness here. It's not data

sharing and all this, this stuff. It's it's the stuff that

allows you to really reconceive how you're producing and sharing

knowledge.

Matthew Sillence: Thanks very much, Sam. That. That's really

thought provoking. I'd be really interested to learn more about

those case studies, and I'm sure many of our listeners will as

well. Before we finish, it'd be good maybe for you to tell our

folks where they can find information on the MORPHSS

project, because you've got a lot of outputs on project

deliverables as they're known. And, yeah, do you want to give

us a quick signpost to you to those?

Samuel Moore: Yes, that's a good point, isn't it? So we have a

website that's based on the Humanities Commons or the

Knowledge Commons repository, but the best way to find that

would be if you just Google MORPHSS, which is M-O-R-P-H-S-S

and I'm sure it would come up that way. That's probably the

easiest way of accessing it. But the Knowledge Commons

repositories are fantastic place for academics to have their own

kind of web pages, and then it's connected to a repository. So I

love to sing its praises as well. So that's the best way of

finding it. Just just MORPHSS. Is a pretty unique acronym, in

fact, which is quite helpful. So yeah,

Matthew Sillence: it is indeed well. Thank you for your time

today. It's been an absolute pleasure having this

conversation, talking through and learning more about what

you're what you're doing with the project, and hopefully

there'll be much more in the future coming our way. So have a

great rest of the week, Sam and thanks for joining us. Cheers.

Thank you very much. Cheers. In our second interview, we build

on the previous point about experimentation and talk to

Hannah Crago, Open Research Development Librarian at the

University of Essex like Samuel Moore, Hannah's role has emerged

from a deep interest in scholarly communication.

Together with colleagues from her institution, she spent

several years exploring and experimenting with play based

forms of learning. She's created teaching materials which have

been licensed as open educational resources. Through

our conversation, we consider why games have such resonance

for researchers and how they can be expanded developed as the

landscape of open research evolves. Hi, Hannah, welcome,

welcome. Welcome back, because I only saw you, gosh, a week ago

at the University of East Anglia when you came and led a train

the trainers workshop on something called copyright

dough, which we will get on to in the course of our

conversation. But I just wanted to welcome you back virtually to

UEA, and thank you very much for joining the PGR matters podcast

to talk more about learning about rope and research. When I

ask people onto the show. I normally ask them a bit about

their academic or professional origin story, which sounds very

grand, but I'm sure you've got a very interesting journey that

you'd like to share with people. So how did you come to teach

researchers about open research? Kind of what you're doing at the

moment?

Hannah Crago: Yeah, thank you. I don't know how interesting

origin story makes it sound a bit like I'm a superhero. Yeah,

I will explain kind of roughly how I got into open research. So

I've been working on open research within our Research

Services team at Essex since October 2019, and so yeah,

around six and a half years now, which when I was thinking in

advance of this. I had to calculate the years multiple

times, because I couldn't believe it had been that long.

But I have done quite a few different roles in that time,

which have had kind of varying levels of involvement with open

research. So it has been a bit, kind of in and out, I guess, a

bit the first role I had in what we call our Academic and

Research Services team here at Essex, was information literacy

coordinator, but my line manager at the time, Katrine Sundsbø,

was our scholarly communications and Research Support Manager, so

she therefore kind of got me involved In lots of research

support and open research activities. And I think the aim

that Kat had to try to broaden the scope of that information

equity coordinator role to more kind of open research, research

support kind of helped me to get that job, and put me in quite a

good position to get it in the first place. Before that, I'd

been working in our collections team, and where I was

responsible for interlibrary loans and digitizing content for

reading lists. And that area requires quite a lot of

knowledge on copyright, mostly in terms of kind of copyright

exceptions, educational licenses, like the CLA license,

that sort of thing, and that kind of copyright knowledge was

transferable to the copyright elements of open research and

things like Creative Commons licenses and open licensing more

generally, and so I think that stood me in quite a good

position to move into this area. I'd also been studying for my

Master's in Library and Information Services Management

at the University of Sheffield, part time, kind of alongside my

full time job at Essex. And within that course, I'd

completed a module on academic libraries, and I'd chosen to do

my assignment for that module on open access. It was an area that

already, yeah, kind of it already interested me. It was an

area that was growing, and an area that I was sort of learning

a bit more about through my job in interlibrary loans and

digitizations, and I thought it would be helpful to know more

about it. And when I was doing that assignment, I went and

spoke to Kat about her job, and she taught me more about how

open access was just a small part of open research. And that

kind of interest grew from there. So I think those two

things helped me to get an interest in the area and get the

job in in the area. And then, yeah, so I was the Information

Industry coordinator. Less than a year into my time with that

role, cat got her way, I think, and the scope officially

changed. The title changed to scholarly communications

coordinator. And then around six months after this, I was on

secondment, doing Kat's job while she was on maternity

leave, so I was then managing our Research Services team. So I

had to learn quite a lot, quite quickly. But the really good

thing with open research is it's a really rapidly changing area,

so it feels a bit like everyone is always learning, no matter

how long they've kind of been in those sorts of roles. And I

think that's partly why I still love it, and why it doesn't feel

like I've been working in the area as long as I have. And I

think it's also why teaching researchers about open research

plays a part in most roles in that kind of area, because

there's always something new to learn about open research. The

scope of open research is always growing. And I think the MORPHSS

report, which is the Materializing Open Research

Practices in the Humanities and Social Sciences. I hope I got

that right. Oh yeah, that sounds good. Sounds right. Anyway, that

was published quite recently, and I think that that report and

the catalog that's come out of that defines 30 different open

research practices, and the focus of that report is only

arts and humanities and social sciences. So that really kind of

demonstrates how broad open research is, and why those of us

working in open research, we kind of have to be happy to

train researchers a lot. We have to be happy to train ourselves a

lot as well, but it's a part of the job that I really enjoy, and

one of the reasons I've stayed in this kind of area, I think I

like to get other people enthusiastic about open

research. So training researchers is a good way to do

that. Fantastic.

Matthew Sillence: Thank you, Hannah. I mean, you have

definitely conveyed the enthusiasm and inspired me,

because we wouldn't be doing, we wouldn't be doing this joint

project with, you know, between the University of East Anglia

and the University of Essex, and the funding from the chase

doctoral training partnership on open research for for the

Humanities, if, if, if you, I guess, hadn't been promoting and

discussing and also publishing on the work that you've been

you've been doing. And also you mentioned Kat the Kat Sundsbø,

who was your colleague in developing some fantastic

resources, which we will come on in to in just a moment. I was

just thinking about something you said a few moments ago,

which is about scholarly communication, and we're

talking, and we have to have spoken to Dr Sam... Dr Samuel

Moore, who is the lead researcher on the MORPHSS

project. And I know you're off to the launch online in in about

15 minutes straight after this interview. So, you know, I'm

sure there'll be more revealed about MORPHSS in a moment. But,

but scholarly communication certainly from what what Sam has

been saying is, is, is something that researchers and information

professionals are kind of it's kind of common ground, really,

in a sense, because it's an area where they're both highly

invested and infused, but it's also kind of rapidly evolving

and developing and back in episode one of the season of the

podcast, Grant Young at UEA, Head of Open Research at UEA,

mentioned that this is, in a sense, a kind of opportunity,

but it's also poses a lot of challenges for novice

researchers coming through and trying to navigate this, this

ever changing landscape around things like open access, which

we talked about in the previous episode. So I guess my second

second question, which goes back to to you and Kat, because you

published open access, actually published some work on get.

Gamification. And first of all, maybe, if you could kind of

define that a bit for us, for our listeners. But secondly,

maybe, in what ways has gamification been by used by you

and colleagues at the University of Essex? So bit about

definition and kind of then now you know how that's kind of

manifested at Essex.

Hannah Crago: Yeah, so gamification as a definition,

it's not something I've got immediately to hand, but I guess

it's as the as you would expect. Really, it's delivering training

in a way that is kind of get don't know how to say it without

saying gamifying it, incorporating some fun and maybe

kind of competitivity, but not always competitivity, kind of

playful learning is another way people describe it,

gamification. And I think that something that we've found with

it is that it takes people out of their every day to kind of

look at a problem in a in a different way. And that problem

can be just needing to learn about something new, or it can

be needing to navigate your way around a particular scenario.

But by gamifying it, you're kind of making it almost a bit more

manageable, I think, and making it seem something that isn't so

high stakes, maybe, and you can kind of take a different

approach to it, but yeah, gamification, playful learning

and those sorts of concepts are what how you kind of hear them

discussed in the in the literature, and gamification is

something we've incorporated into lots of elements of

teaching and training at Essex for several years now. So when I

first started working in the library as a graduate trainee,

back in 2016 for example, we were already using gamification

through things like Lego based referencing sessions. We ran

scavenge hunt challenges for library inductions. We had a

beach ball at some point that we used to throw around in

information literacy sessions. But I really can't live with me.

Remember how that worked, but I know it was, it was fun, but

also was used in the training. So it's always been something

since I've worked at Essex that has been kind of incorporated in

different kinds of training for engagement and to kind of reach

those learning outcomes in a different way and keep people

interested in in the topics. But I think it really took off at

Essex in 2018 when Kat, who we've spoken about already,

designed the Open Access Escape Room, and that was the first

sort of full game, rather than just a gamified element of

training that was developed within within our team, and it

was very much Kat's creation, though, so full credit needs to

go to Kat for the Open Access Escape Room. But Kat did include

several of us in in testing the game, and I was one of them, and

that really helped me to learn more, both about open access

when I was at a stage of my career when it wasn't something

I was overly familiar with, but also to learn more about

gamification as a concept, and sort of, rather than bringing

small elements of gamification into sessions, using that as the

whole, the whole concept of that, of that training session.

And I think through running the escape room, we all saw within

our team how that sort of immersive game could really help

make quite complicated or maybe lesser known concepts like open

access was, at the time, lesser now more accessible to

researchers, and it allowed those who we were teaching to

yes as a kind of already alluded to step out of the their own

sort of position, and maybe the expectations that come with

that, to really be someone else in the game. So it's an

important concept when you're working with researchers,

because researchers are used to being experts. They're used to

knowing everything that they're talking about, what they're

researching, and we know that PGRs so postgraduate researchers

especially often struggle with imposter syndrome. And so asking

these people who are used to being experts to learn about

something that they maybe don't know anything about can be quite

difficult or quite unsettling for them, almost in a way. So if

you give researchers an excuse to not know the answers by

assigning them a new role, by making them step outside of who

they are in their day to day, it can help them to sort of embrace

the fact that they have a lack of knowledge. If they're

pretending to be a science student and they're actually a

history academic, bit apart from what they're used to. So that

was a concept that cat and I leant upon when we developed a

new game after the Open Access escape room, which is called

copyright dough. So this is the game that we played with you,

Matthew, just a week ago, and it was also partly inspired by

Chris Morrison and Jane Secker's game, The Publishing Trap. I'm

not sure if you're aware of that one, but it's another open

access game that is used to teach researchers about the

publishing journey and scholarly communications more widely, I

guess. And Kat and I had played The Publishing Trap with some of

our researchers, and we'd found it worked really well, and

because, like the Escape Room. The research took on different

roles. So when we set about designing Copyright Dough, we

knew we wanted to have a game where researchers had that

permission to not know the answers. And that really led to,

leads to not just past tense. Still does. It leads to greater

discussion in the game. I think people can kind of play devil's

advocate almost by not having to feel like they're representing

their own views. And that discussion is really pivotal to

copyright dough. And we also really wanted an approach to

teaching that allowed for a more memorable learning experience.

People are much more likely, I think, to remember a training

session where they've sat and created a Play-Doh Penguin,

maybe then one where a librarian has kind of just stood and

spoken at them for an hour, and if you can remember the learning

experience, you're more likely to remember the learning

outcomes. So and that kind of speaks to the final aim, really,

which was we wanted to make copyright fun. We already

thought it was fun. We I like copyright. I think it's

interesting, but sadly, not that many people do. So gamifying

those kind of topics, the topics that maybe it can be difficult

to get people through the door to training sessions on can help

break down those barriers in the first place. So yeah, I think

gamification works for quite a lot of reasons, and corporate

Though it really is just one example of that, but we found it

to be a strong tool for teaching researchers. I think fantastic.

Matthew Sillence: I was just thinking as you were explaining

the value of stepping into different roles, how when we

went as a group, we were playing Copyright Dough last Friday, and

I was quite taken aback at how people, somebody I knew very

well, was in the room, I won't say who, and that person,

adopted a completely different persona when they were trying to

defend their choices around The way they were using what we're

creating, and also essentially reusing content that other

people have created. So actually thinking about the the

application of Creative Commons licensing, and the particular

license terms and how they apply in the real world, and what that

means for the create... the original creator, and what that

means for the kind of secondary creator, I suppose he's there.

And, yeah, I mean totally different, totally different

kind of attitude, language, intonation, as you say, adopting

a kind of, you know, almost devil's advocate position. So

it's really stepping outside of their own personal preferences

or ways of operating in the world. And I think that's really

exciting to see, because I think all researchers do that to some

extent, or encouraged to think in that way. So when they're

starting out as a postgraduate researcher, often when we're

running training sessions where we're talking about things they

haven't encountered yet, so they don't yet know how they're going

to respond in this particular situation in the future. So, but

they're always kind of projecting forwards into this

kind of scenario and a kind of a role that they might adopt. So

sometimes it might be, you know, a researcher who's on field

work. So they're a field researcher. So what would they

be like in a particular community? Then they might be a

writer. They might be an author. They're publishing their a

journal article, or maybe, you know, one day, they're

publishing a monograph, or something else, you know, a book

chapter, some kind of contribution. Another time,

they're a conference presenter, they're actually presenting

their work. And in each of these situations, they adopt different

behaviors, and they have to read the room, sometimes quite

literally, in a conference, and make choices about what they're

going to say next or do next, and as what I really loved about

Copyright Dough and experience is they really brought that to

the forefront of people's minds and thinking, actually, yeah,

maybe I do need to reflect a bit more on how we engage with these

ideas and These this kind of situations. So great. It was

very, very powerful. And there's some brilliant penguin Play-Doh

penguin pictures as well that we we had from it.

Hannah Crago: So thank you. Oh, sorry. I was just gonna say

yeah, no, it's, it's really great to hear that it resonated

that way in the with the roles and things. And I think I know

who. Were talking about, and I would agree, they embrace the

different roles, which is exactly what we want people to

do with Copyright Dough. So it was really great to see, and I

think it it does help. And I think also with researchers,

those kind of roles work particularly well, because you

can be one of those one day and one another. So the way the game

works, we have students, teachers, researchers and

creators. And for most researchers, they have been

students. They may still be students if they are PGRs, they

are researchers, they are likely to be if they're not already

teachers as well. And they are also creators. And so they kind

of have experience, or will have experience of all of those

roles. And I think appreciating that you can be one of those one

day and one the next, and seeing things from all of those

different points of view is is quite powerful in a way. It's a

different kind of perspective of looking at things. But yeah, it

it works well for copyright because of the way they are, the

different layers of research work and the way the copyright

licenses affect reuse and things. But I think it's a

concept that could work in different areas of scholarly

communication as well.

Matthew Sillence: Fantastic the resources that you've created

for Copyright Dough I've I mean, we're not, we don't have a video

for this episode. But, I mean, if I were to just walk over to

to my cupboard here, I've got a whole stack of Play-Doh over

here, and a load of laminated cards and information sheets and

things like that. The the these were we've we've printed for our

training session that we're going to be running very soon.

But I could easily get hold of that material because it was

available online. I didn't need to actually ask you to send me

the material over. It was, it was hosted on, I think it was

Figshare, which was the kind of resource sharing platform or

repository, and so for all intents and purposes, this, this

is a, this is an open educational resource which

actually falls under, funnily enough, in a very meta way,

falls Under the the kind of rubric of open research, really.

So open educational resources, OERs, are, you know, one area of

practice, I guess, that that universities can engage in. So

can you tell us a bit more about the way that this resource has

been licensed and and how, maybe, how maybe, how similar

resources actually influenced your your work and the work that

Hannah Crago: Yeah, absolutely. So Copyright Dough, like you

cat did?

say, is a is an OER. It's shared on Figshare under a Creative

Commons Attribution license, so a CC BY license, and what that

means is that others can reuse the work, including remixing,

building upon distributing all of those sorts of things, and

all they need to do is give attribution to Kat and I as the

copyright holders, and in this case, also the creators of the

game. And we deliberately chose that license for a few different

reasons. Firstly, we do want people to be able to reuse the

game, but we want them to be able to reuse it in a way that

works for them and for their researchers. So we want them to

be able to create variations on the game if that's what they

want to do. We included in the materials on Figshare some blank

cards, for example, so people could write in their own roles,

their own task scenarios, those sorts of things. So they might

be quite, quite small tweaks that people could could make to

the game. But also, we'd be happy for people to create wider

variations on on the game as kind of just reusing the concept

of it, but to teach a completely different topic. You could use

the kind of premise, but not necessarily teach about

copyright licenses. So that's why we kind of wanted to use as

one of the reasons we wanted to use a quite open license there

with the CC BY and we have had some people at other

institutions tell us that they have made variations of the game

or done some tweaking, played it slightly differently, that sort

of thing, which is exciting and is a massive compliment as well.

So yeah, we wanted the that reuse and adaptation to be

possible, and we also wanted to practice what we preach around

openness. So like lots of institutions, we encourage our

researchers to make all elements of their work, not just the

final outputs, as open as possible and as closed as

necessary. So that's sort of how we approached it. We thought,

how open do we want it to be and how closed does it necessarily

need to be? We didn't think there was a particular reason to

add an NC or non commercial layer. We. Didn't think there

was a reason to add a no derivatives nd layer. So we

didn't. We thought about the different licenses and what that

would mean for us, and we were happy with CC BY but we also did

want that attribution element. We didn't want to completely

openly license it CC Zero. I think attribution is really

important, especially when you put quite a lot of work into

something. Plus, it is always nice to see or hear that other

people are using the work, and it's opened up some

conversations with colleagues where we've seen it cited, or

they've emailed us, maybe to say we're using it, that sort of

thing. And then we could chat to them about it and what they're

doing with it. And it's it's good for kind of building,

building relationships and links with other people who are maybe

also using gamification in their training in different ways. You

asked also about kind of similar resources, and I've mentioned a

few of these already, so specifically, Open Access Escape

Room and The Publishing Trap, both of which are openly

available online. I think that the escape room is CC BY I think

that The Publishing Trap might be BY-NC, but they are both

openly licensed, and the Open Access Escape Room is also

hosted on Figshare. So yeah, that the way cat had already

shared the escape room. We did quite similarly with with

Copyright Dough. And I think Figshare is quite a accessible

platform. It's quite easy to use from a user point of view. If

you were considering sharing something openly, it's easy to

use. You get a DOI for your work, and you can kind of pull

things together in projects. And so copyright dough is a project

where each of the individual resource material has a its own

DOI but it pulls it all together. But yeah, so the the

escape room and the publishing track are both really great

games. Encourage you to have a look at those as well on

Figshare. But I think a point I wanted to make about the kind of

OER element of of Copyright Dough and other other OERs. One

thing that was important for us to include alongside the cards

and things that you mentioned, Matthew, that you've you've

printed and used, is we've got instructions there for running

the game and instructions for the facilitators. And I think

it's quite a subtle but important point with OERs, and

also with any openly licensed content more generally, really,

because these resources need to be reusable practically as well.

So not just in terms of the license allows you to reuse

them, but the person who finds and downloads or is using that

material needs to know how how to use it. Otherwise, it's just

a set of cards that you don't know what to do with. So that's

important for OERs. It's important for things like open

data, open code, lots of different elements of things

that are being shared openly. If you want people to be able to

reuse them, reproduce them, adapt them, those sorts of

things having that kind of relevant depending on the

context, supplementary materials, in this case, just

some instructions about to play the game are really helpful. I

think that's kind of another part of the accessible nature of

open that needs to be kept in mind that kind of making it

possible, not just license terms wise, but practically, to reuse

content. Thanks.

Matthew Sillence: Hannah, that. I mean, that's a really, really

fascinating point there, and I think, really important one to

remember, because the Open University, unsurprisingly, has

done an open research module online, which I think is also

licensed under a Creative Commons license. And I, as I was

working through those materials in the last sort of couple of

months or so, I came across some interesting, an interesting

analogy that they use in their training, which is about baking

competitions, or sort of baking challenges, where, you know,

online, someone might say, you know, here's a here's A cake.

You know, it's kind of perfection, beautifully iced.

It's supposed to in one form. They take a photograph of it,

they put it on, you know, Instagram or something, and lots

of people look at it, and then, you know, along with that, there

is a challenge to create that cake. And you might provide

maybe a list of the ingredients, but that's it. So there's no,

there's no method mentioned with the recipe. There is just, just

a list of ingredients and and then, you know, people go away,

and they labor in their in their kitchens, and bring these things

out the oven, they ice them, and then they send pictures back in

on social media, and they look absolutely nothing like the

original cake. So the point, the point being that actually, you

know, the elements can be there, all of the things that you're,

you know, the raw data or the resource, in this case, the OER,

but without the instructions, it's, it's extremely limited in

terms of what you. Can do, or at least what you get at the end of

it is going to be quite different. And I think we, we

talked about that a little bit with Grant in episode one, how,

as you mentioned, open data a moment ago, and how things like

data dictionaries can really help people understand the kind

of structure and the layout of the the data set. And I guess,

how you know things like, you know, you've provided printing

instructions, for instance, of how to print the game out on a,

on a, you know, a non-commercial printer, yeah, which is really

helpful. And I'm sure I did it. Did it wrong anyway, but I think

it's still, you know, really helpful to have that, because if

somebody is printing at home, and they just want to, you know,

do some copies on paper and, you know, color copies, they want to

be able to cut those up at the right size. They want to be able

to use them effectively in the in the, you know, whilst playing

the game. So not only have you got those, you know, great

instructions of how to play, but also you've got the instructions

of how to actually manifest it in the physical world. A little

bonus question, I suppose, for you, which we haven't agreed,

but is something that you mentioned last week when you

visited UEA, was about the online version of the game,

because during during the pandemic, obviously we're

talking about, we're sort of, I guess, implying that these

sessions are all physical. But that wasn't always the case, was

it? You? You did. You did have different ways of running games

Hannah Crago: at that point in time? Yeah, we did. It's a sorry

tale. Kat and I had just finished putting together the

game. We'd kind of run some tests with it, and we were

booked into two, I don't know, maybe three different

conferences to take the game to to play. And then it was a

global pandemic. Everything shut down. Could not attend those

conferences. But one of the conferences shifted online, and

they asked us if there was any way we could run it online, and

we had no way to run it online, but we came up with one, and we

created an online version of Copyright Dough, which we went

on to run with some of our researchers during the pandemic.

And it ended up being a quite a nice way to engage people more

with training through the pandemic. It feels a long time

ago now, but you'll remember after several months of online

training, more and more cameras were being turned off, more and

more people were kind of not engaging with you in these

online sessions. And so running copyright dough online gave us a

way to get that engagement back a bit in some online sessions,

and we couldn't call it Copyright Dough. There was no

Play-Doh involved. Unfortunately, we, instead of

ask in in Copyright Dough, all the people playing, create,

Play- Doh, models, and then they are licensed under a Creative

Commons license, and discussion ensues of whether the reuse is

permissible or not. So instead of creating Play-Doh models, we

use the whiteboard feature on Zoom for people to draw their

creations, rather than creating them out of Play-Doh, because

quite an important element of the game is that you have to be

able to be inspired by or copy other people's models. So we

needed everyone to be able to see the drawings as they were

happening. So we, yeah, had the whiteboard divided up into a

grid with people drawing in their section all at the same

time. And yeah, we were kind of sending them links to their pack

of cards that would open into a Box folder that they could view

just their cards and not everyone else's cards. And it

was a bit of a logistical headache, but we got it to work,

and it was, it was quite rewarding in the end. And we did

have, yeah, some people came along, enjoyed it, I think, got

people chatting, discussion still happened online. So it

just shows that you you can bring gamification to lots of

different types of training in lots of different ways, and the

fundamental kind of playful learning, as we mentioned

earlier, can still translate, even if it's not quite in the

exact same way as you might have originally thought. So yeah, it

was fun. It was a different way to think about it, and it kind

of made us reflect on what are the key parts of the game and

the gamified learning that we wanted to maintain, even if we

couldn't keep the exact method of playing the game, I guess.

Matthew Sillence: Wow, great. Well, the good news is, I mean,

although that was a fantastic adaptation as opposed or kind of

evolution in the history of of Copyright Dough, we are going to

be playing it again in person. And I think, I think there is a

kind of, there's a value to the tactility of it. So there's

some. Thing, there's something about, you know, physically

making a three dimensional object, which I think really

captivates people. It's like, sort of, you know, people lean

into their creative side a bit more. And it sort of also lends

itself to some pictures, which I think is actually not to give

too much away, but is, you know, occasionally part of the game is

taking photos. So, yeah, it sounds very exciting. I I know

you've got, you've done some publications, you've got some

information out already, partly with Kat as well. Where can

people find out more about the kind of work that you've been

doing at Essex? Yeah.

Hannah Crago: So you can find all the copyright day materials

on Figshare. If you look up my ORCID profile, then it's all

linked there as well, along with the publications that Kat and I

and Kat and my current colleague, Liam Bullingham, have

written about gamification more broadly, you can also follow me

on LinkedIn or connect with me on LinkedIn. Rather, don't

follow you. And yeah, there's resources and things shared on

there. I'm always happy to talk about it as well. So if anyone's

dropped me a message, I'm happy to to hear from them. But yeah,

the the publications, including the copyright domain materials,

probably the easiest way to find them is through my ORCID

profile. Excellent.

Matthew Sillence: Thank you, Hannah, it's been a joy seeing

you again, learning more about the history of copyright dough

and your other activities, and we'll be catching up again very,

very soon online, I guess when we're doing our training

sessions and also thinking about how there can be another stage

in the evolution of Copyright Dough, I guess, and how we might

work with with postgraduate researchers to create new

resources and make extensions to the game system. Thanks for your

time. I do hope you enjoy the MORPHSS launch as well this

afternoon. Thank you. And have a great rest of the week, and look

forward, looking forward to catching up very soon. Thank

you, and

Hannah Crago: thanks very much for inviting me along. It's been

a really great series so far, so look forward to hearing the

conclusion of it.

Matthew Sillence: That's it for episode three of season two of

PGR matters. I hope you found the conversations around the

principles of open research, the forms of open access, publishing

and licensing, and this episode's focus on open

research, training, engaging, particularly if you're a

postgraduate researcher from the arts, humanities and social

sciences. If you'd like to learn more about the training program

funded by the chase doctoral training partnership, check out

my website at matthewsillence.org for my

latest blog post on this topic and links to resources as part

of this initiative. Finally, I'd like to say thank you to all of

our contributors so far this season, Grant Young, Sean

Andersson, Alison Barker, Sean Seeger, Sam Moore, Hannah Crago,

and to you the listeners. If you would like to get in touch about

the podcast, you can contact me at PGR matters@pm.me.