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What is open science 

Open science is a set of practices and principles designed to ensure that research outputs are available and accessible to everyone. This includes publications, code for analysis, methodologies, protocols, and other research processes. At its core, open science promotes transparency, sharing, and inclusivity as key foundational themes across each stage of the research cycle. The aim is to foster innovation, enhance the impact of research, and promote the reuse of the research findings and their underlying data and methods. 

Why open science?

Open science has wide reaching benefits that extend from the research community to members of the public. Practising open science means:

  • Helping members of the public make better informed decisions about matters that affect their lives.
  • Increasing the opportunity for research to be found online. 
  • Enhancing trust from the public by demonstrating the robustness of research. 
  • Increasing the opportunity for collaboration.
  • Assisting other researchers in reproducing results and scaling research studies.
  • Ensuring that researchers can preserve access to their work in the long term.
  • Avoiding duplication of research.
  • Accelerating the pace of new research discoveries. 

TASO’s commitment to open science

TASO’s vision is to eliminate equality gaps in higher education. To help achieve this, it is important to provide free access to research processes, findings and outputs, with the aim of maximising the public benefit. To embody open science requires a culture shift across the sector. TASO is committed to supporting all aspects of open science and being a leader in demonstrating a transition to embedding, adopting, and practising open science in the higher education sector. 

How TASO supports open science

TASO currently practises the principles below, and we endeavour to promote more open science practices. 

Open access (publishing)

  • The aim of open access (publishing) is to make information freely available online to everyone without restrictions or fees typically associated with subscription access. At TASO, all of our guidance and reports are published openly and where possible we publish under CC-BY-4.0.  Licensing material under Creative Commons licences allows others to use, copy, and share resources while the creator of the resource retains the copyright. Vist the TASO Technical Guide  Access Creative Commons licensing examples.

Research (data) management

    • We have developed standardised protocols and reporting templates to aid transparency, collaboration and reproducibility in the research process within the higher education sector, all of which are core principles of open science. By having a common framework, research outputs can be shared more easily, and results can be compared, fostering robust scientific advancement.
    • We have developed guidance on code hygiene practices to support data discovery, reproducibility, and transparency. By following these guidelines, researchers can ensure their data is well organised, clearly documented, and easy to reproduce. This will improve the ability of others to reuse data and increase trust in the work. 

 Open Science Framework (OSF)

    • The OSF is an online platform that allows researchers to plan, collect, analyse, and share transparently. TASO regularly pre-registers all projects, pre-specifying research questions, data collection plans, and project protocols. We are also planning to upload our analysis reports and data in line with data processing agreements with partners. By using the OSF, TASO promotes transparency, replicability and innovation.  

Open educational resources 

    • At TASO, we have developed learning and teaching materials on a range of research and evaluation approaches that are freely available for anyone to use. In the future, we will license these outputs under an open licence to fully comply with OER Commons requirements. 

Open source

    • Open source refers to something people can modify and share because its design is publicly accessible. At TASO, we use GitHub, a public repository, to share open-source code. Anyone can access the repository to use, repurpose, and modify the code in our Technical Guide and our data visualisation style guide, as they are licensed under a Creative Commons licence.