2023 Culture, Employment and Development in Academic Research Survey (CEDARS) is now live!

The University is running CEDARS from 11th April to 26th May 2023. This is your opportunity to influence research culture and researcher development at Westminster. What is CEDARS? Designed in collaboration between Vitae, researchers, and researcher developers across the HE sector in the UK, CEDARS seeks to gather the thoughts and experiences of researchers around …

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Articles, books, and data, and where to publish them

The Scholarly Communications team recently held an information session on scholarly outputs and where to publish them. You can watch a recording of the session in Stream at this link (staff login). You can also download the presentation sides from SharePoint at this link (staff login). First, Nina Watts, Open Access and Repository Manager provided …

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NEW University Research Data Management Policy

The University has published a new Research Data Management (RDM) Policy.   The RDM Policy outlines the key expectations for researchers in relation to the management and preservation of research data and research related records created at the University, and clarifies the responsibilities of researchers and the institution in relation to good research data management and …

Preserve your research data FAIR-ly

The University’s new Research Data Management (RDM) Policy (2022) sets out a series of key expectations to aid you in meeting best practice in the management and preservation of research data. One key expectation is that research data selected for preservation beyond the lifetime of a project are deposited in an appropriate research data repository …

How sustainable is your research project website?

Many researchers create websites to disseminate their research without planning for how the website content will continue to be accessible and usable when their funding runs out. Websites are also rapidly outpaced by software and hardware advances, meaning that they cannot be relied upon as secure or long term hosts for research findings or outputs. …

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Open Access Week 2022: How do we keep the open science momentum going?

This is a guest blog post from Dr Sam Westwood, Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Westminster. Sam founded and runs the RIOT Science Club (https://riotscience.co.uk/), a forum where researchers can learn about Open Research reforms and practices. The RIOT Science club aims to foster Reproducible, Interpretable, Open & Transparent Science. Sam also runs ReproducibiliTea …

Open Access Week 2022: How to be an Open Researcher

Today we have a guest blog from Ka-Ming Pang, Academic Engagement Librarian (Computer Science and Engineering) at the University of Westminster. Ka-Ming highlights some key tips and takeaways from an event run in collaboration with the Sustainable Cities and the Urban Environnment Research Community on “Becoming an Open Researcher”. In the two decades since the …

Open Access Week 2022: Open for Climate Justice

International Open Access Week (October 24-30) is a time to advocate for openness as the default for research and to ensure that equity is at the center of this work. This year’s theme is “Open for Climate Justice” and seeks to raise awareness around how open enables climate justice. Climate Justice is an explicit acknowledgement …

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Using social media data responsibly in research

Here at Westminster, research using social media data where the research concerns users is considered as if working with human participants in real life. Your research design is therefore subject to the same ethical considerations and ethical review as if you were collecting observational data in the field.  In this blog post, we’ve compiled some …