Open science (also known as open research) is a global movement towards making the research process and the knowledge gained from it as transparent and accessible as possible. The principles underpinning open science are built upon the notion that all aspects of the scientific research process should be available for others to access, reuse, and distribute for the benefit of society at large. Committing to these ideals will support the Institute's efforts to promote key attributes of research and innovation, such as transparency, rigour, and reproducibility across the research lifecycle in its role as an international leader for research in healthy aging.
The Institute’s commitment to open science is guided by two main values:
Open Outputs
By embracing open access to data, methods, tools, and publications, the Institute aims to make scientific progress more accessible, empowering researchers worldwide to build upon each other's work and collectively address important questions in biology. Our researcher staff are expected to make the publications resulting from their research freely accessible in journals that support open access publishing. The Institute’s Open Access Publishing policy provides more detail on our approach to this.
These publications are supported by large amounts of data. FAIR principles guide the Institute’s approach to the creation, storage, processing, and dissemination of research data. FAIR standards aim to make data Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable in order to maximise the use and benefit of the data supporting our research. See our Open Data policy [link forthcoming] for more information.
As part of our commitment to open science, the Institute also aims to involve the community in scientific research and to bring together researchers, policy makers, and society as a whole in the interest of openness and transparency in research. Guided by the idea of citizen science, the Institute views the public as important participants and stakeholders in publicly funded research. The Institute strives to increase the visibility of the research by encouraging active involvement of the public in community dialogue on our science, such as research involving early human embryo development.
Research integrity
Research integrity means conducting, reviewing and reporting research in a responsible way that allows ourselves and others to have confidence that our research is trustworthy and of the highest quality. It also sets the culture of the Institute as an inclusive, respectful, open and outstanding place to work. Research integrity covers the entirety of the research process, from conception and project design to execution, dissemination, and fostering conducive research environments and culture. The fundamental principles of research integrity include honesty, transparency, accountability, respect, and rigour. The Babraham Institute aims to embed these standards in all facets of our research.
To further promote integrity in research, the Institute commits to embracing the use of next generation metrics and contributing to in the shift in research impact assessment, valuing qualitative metrics that better reflect the impact of and merit of individual outputs beyond purely quantitative metrics like journal impact factors and simple citation counts. The Institute is a signatory to the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) and stays connected to the latest guidance to inform improvements in research assessment.
Please see our Research Integrity policy and read more about our commitment to research integrity here.
The importance of Open Science is recognised by various global scientific community initiatives that seek to drive these changes such as the Agreement on Reforming Research Assessment, the Concordat on Open Research Data, the Concordat to Support Research Integrity, and Horizon 2020’s ORION Open Science Project, with which the Institute was a partner institution.