Open Research

Image depicting the benefits of OA - more citations, everyone can access, value for taxpayers, impact on policy and funder compliance.

The Genetics Department fully supports Open Research and endeavours to make sure as much of our work as possible is made available openly and reproducibly, as well as supporting the principles of DORA in all recruitment and promotion activities. DORA aims to ensure that research is assessed on its own merits, rather than relying on metrics such as Journal Impact Factor for judgements of quality.

Open Access

The Department supports making our academic outputs openly available. This helps to ensure our research is seen by the widest possible audiences, including our research colleagues in the Global South as well as the general public. Many researchers in the Department are funded by bodies such as UKRI and the Wellcome Trust, both of whom now require immediate open access upon acceptance of an academic paper to a journal. As part of this, researchers in the Department are encouraged to use the University's Self-Archiving Policy, which ensures that researchers can still publish in their journal of choice and comply with their funder policies. To find out if your chosen journal complies with your funder’s Open Access policies, you can use this Journal Checker Tool.

In order to make our work available openly, the Department aims to deposit all accepted manuscripts and supporting data into the University’s institutional repository, Apollo. You can browse our recent submissions, or search more widely in the School of Biological Sciences archives to find our collaborative work. If you’re a researcher in the Department wanting to deposit your work via Symplectic Elements, follow the instructions on the Open Access pages.

Research Data Management

A large part of ensuring that data are openly available and accessible is correctly managing that data before, during, and after its production. The Department encourages good data management as part of a wider University of Cambridge Research Data Management Policy Framework. Researchers should ensure their data are adequately stored and backed-up, with good supporting metadata and version control, adhering to the FAIR Principles. Data management plans are now a common part of grant applications, and there is plenty of help available for writing these, such as DMPOnline. Researchers are encouraged to share their data openly where possible, while also protecting any sensitive or confidential data as required. To support this, data can be uploaded to the University’s institutional repository.

The Department also supports the University’s Data Champions programme, run by the Office of Scholarly Communication. Data Champions are local advocates for good data management and FAIR research principles, and can be contacted about any research data issue. The current Genetics Data Champions are:

Training and development opportunities

The Department’s Librarian provides regular updates and training on Open Research topics, and is available for 1-2-1 support upon request. The Librarian also assists with teaching on the Biological Sciences Libraries Team’s Research Skills Series, which is run on a termly basis.

In the wider University, researcher training is run by the Office of Scholarly Communication and the Researcher Development team.