Open Research Award 9th June 2021

The University of Reading’s Open Research Award 2021 online celebration will take place at 13.00-15.30 on Wednesday 9^th June. Four finalists (listed below) will present their Open Research case studies and the winner of the 2021 Award will be announced. There will be prizes for the winner of the Award, and second and joint third places, as decided by the Award Panel, and a prize for best presentation, which will be determined by audience vote.

The online celebration will feature a keynote from Sarah de Rijcke, Professor in Science, Technology, and Innovation Studies and Scientific Director at the Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS), Leiden University. Professor de Rijcke is co-author of the Leiden Manifesto for Research Metrics and the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science.

Professor Parveen Yaqoob, Deputy Vice-Chancellor and PVC for Research and Innovation, will present an update on University progress in Open Research.

Book your place now at the Open Research Award online celebration.

A recording of the event will be made available afterwards.

If you have any enquiries please contact Robert Darby, Research Data Manager.

Open Research Award 2021 finalists

• Dr Ting Sun† and Professor Sue Grimmond: Urban climate modelling using SuPy: enhancing the SUEWS community
• Dr Alanna Skuse†: Surgery and Selfhood: lessons from open humanities publishing
• Dr David Brayshaw†, Dr Hannah Bloomfield†, Dr Paula Gonzalez, Professor Andrew Charlton-Perez, Professor John Methven, Dr Phil Coker, Dr Dan Drew, Dr Dirk Cannon: Meteorological data for the transition to future clean energy systems
• Dr Luke Barnard† and Professor Mathew Owens, Open Source modelling of space weather

†Presenters.

Programme

Keynote

Fostering Open Research through responsible research assessment

Sarah de Rijcke is Professor of Science, Technology and Innovation Studies and Scientific Director at CWTS, Leiden University, and Co-Chair of the Research on Research Institute (RoRI). Sarah specializes in social studies of research evaluation, which she considers in relation to epistemic cultures, knowledge infrastructures, valuation processes, and roles of research in and for society. She has a strong international public academic presence with global outreach activities in science policy, speaking frequently on the topic of research evaluation and metrics uses. She recurrently acts as expert advisor in European and global science policy initiatives. Most recently, she was invited to represent the Netherlands in a high-level UNESCO Expert Group to write a global recommendation on Open Science. Her present research is funded by a grant from the European Research Council (ERC). Her team regularly collaborates in research consortia funded by the European Commission’s Framework programmes and national research councils across Europe and the UK.

Finalists’ presentations

Urban climate modelling using SuPy: enhancing the SUEWS community (Dr Ting Sun)

Over 55% of the world’s population live in cities, so their activities are critical to the global environment; but cities occupy less than 0.1% of global land, and their weather and climate is poorly understood. It is essential to understand urban atmosphere-environment interactions, at various scales (building – neighbourhood – city) in order to build resilient cities under changing climates. We developed the Open Source urban climate model SuPy (Surface Urban Energy and Water Balance Scheme or SUEWS in Python) with the goal of delivering reproducible research and exciting urban climate teaching. In this case study we discuss how we developed an active Open Source user community by making strategic decisions about how to package, distribute and support the software.

Dr Ting Sun is a NERC Independent Research Fellow in the Department of Meteorology. His research is in the fields of urban climate and hydrology with a focus on understanding urban-atmospheric interactions for enhancing urban resilience and sustainability. He is an advocate for Open Research as a lead developer of several Open Source models, notably SuPy and SUEWS, and through these is a key contributor to the Open Source climate service tool UMEP (Urban Multi-scale Environmental Predictor).

Surgery and Selfhood: lessons from open humanities publishing (Dr Alanna Skuse)

Surgery and Selfhood in Early Modern England: Altered Bodies and Contexts of Identity is an Open Access monograph published in 2021. It is the product of a Wellcome Trust-funded postdoctoral fellowship undertaken 2016-2019. This is the second Open Access monograph I have published. I explore the challenges of publishing Open Access for humanities researchers, where there may be a limited range of suitable Open Access venues. I also discuss the benefits of taking the Open Access route for long form publications, including increased readership and opportunities for engagement with a non-academic audience.

Dr Alanna Skuse is a Wellcome Trust University Award holder in the Department of English Literature. Her research focuses on early modern representations of self-wounding. She has been a Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellow at Reading and Long-term Fellow at the Folger Shakespeare Library, and has taught at Bristol and Exeter universities. Alanna has published two Open Access monographs, Surgery and Selfhood in Early Modern England (CUP, 2020) and Constructions of Cancer in Early Modern England (Palgrave, 2015), as well as numerous journal articles. She has written for The Conversation and organised numerous public engagement events as well as speaking at a variety of heritage and charity events.

Meteorological data for the transition to future clean energy systems (Dr David Brayshaw and Dr Hannah Bloomfield)

Rapid increases in renewable electricity generation (such as wind and solar), mean that the need for high quality, openly available, climate information for managing energy-system risk has never been greater. The Energy-Meteorology research group has been at the forefront of addressing this interdisciplinary challenge for more than a decade. It has created numerous open-access datasets and models enabling researchers to explore climate risk to energy systems, including long term ‘artificial histories’ of renewable generation and tailored sub-seasonal weather forecasts up to 6-weeks ahead. The methods and datasets the group has developed are now in widespread use by academia and industry.

Dr David Brayshaw is an Associate Professor in the School of Mathematical, Physical and Computational Sciences (Meteorology Department), where he founded the Energy-Meteorology research group in 2012. He has been involved in numerous academic and commercial research projects on weather and climate risk in the energy sector, including a leadership role in two major European energy-climate service prototypes. He leads several initiatives supporting interdisciplinary exchange and education in energy-climate science and climate services more broadly.

Dr Hannah Bloomfield is a PDRA in the Meteorology department working in the Energy-Meteorology research group. Her interests include understanding the impacts of climate variability and climate change on current and future power systems. Hannah has created numerous open access datasets of renewable energy generation and electricity demand which are used in academia, industry and teaching.

Open Source modelling of space weather (Dr Luke Barnard)

We have produced a new, computationally efficient, numerical model of the solar wind. We made this model Open Source because we believe it is useful to researchers, educators, and space weather forecasters. Within a year this has resulted in new international collaborations, uptake by external university courses, and the further development of our model into an operational forecast tool at the UK Met Office, including our own research outputs. Open research practices have significantly raised the quality and the impact of our research outputs; for us, this clearly justifies the resources and effort required to implement open research practices effectively.

Dr Luke Barnard is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Meteorology. Luke’s research focuses on how the Sun creates and controls the space environment near Earth. In particular, Luke is interested in how sporadic eruptions of mass and radiation from the Sun create the space weather that affects us on Earth from day-to-day. Using cameras on spacecraft that observe the Sun’s atmosphere with numerical models of the solar wind, Luke develops methods to improve the skill and reduce the uncertainty of space weather forecasts.

Open Research Award Panel

Professor Parveen Yaqoob, Deputy Vice-Chancellor and PVC for Research and Innovation (Chair); Dr Etienne Roesch, Associate Professor, School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences; Dr Phil Newton, Research Dean for Environment; Professor John Gibbs, Head of School, School of Arts and Communication Design; Dr Robert Darby, Research Data Manager.