Category: Staff Development

Academic Careers: Time to reflect: learn, focus and plan

Posted on by sarah.allsop
Sarah Allsop

With the end of the academic year rapidly approaching, in this blog, Sarah Allsop challenges us to think about scheduling a session of reflection through 3 lenses: retrospective, introspective and prospective and how these can help us to learn, focus and plan.

Photo by Alexa Williams on Unsplash

So, we have made it to the end of another academic year. This may lead to a mixture of excitement, anticipation, or simply relief! Often, we start to think about taking a break, planning summer conference trips and projects, as well as shifting focus to the next academic year.

A really useful task that we can schedule for ourselves at this time of year is reflection. For some, this will come very naturally, for others perhaps not so much, but regardless of your viewpoint on reflective practice, it can help to have a focussed approach.

There are a multitude of different reflective tools and models to support reflective practice such as Gibbs, Kolb etc, and I recently read an interesting summary blog by Tom Barrett, ‘From Awareness to Action: A Complete Guide to Reflective Practice Cycles for Teachers‘. I was particularly drawn to the ideas and simplicity of a model they describe which breaks reflective practice into three parts: retrospective, introspective and prospective reflection.

Image from Tom Barrett

Let’s take a look together at how to use these three aspects to support a focussed actionable reflection process.

Retrospective reflection – What have I learnt?

Looking back over past experience may be what you first think about when you read the term ‘reflection’. This process of evaluating what has gone well and what things we might do differently in future is a great learning technique. However, if we reflect on a whole academic year, that can be challenging.

One way to compartmentalise the process is to use the “Start-Stop-Continue” model.

  • What do you want to start doing?
  • What do you want to stop doing?
  • What do you want to keep doing?

This gives you three categories allowing you to: celebrate your successes, consider how to learn from challenging experiences and to focus in on your future goals. This gives you a considered plan which you can take to an annual review or meeting with your line manager, and discuss your current journey in a constructive and forward-thinking way.

Introspective reflection – What do I want?

Once we have identified what we want to learn from past experiences, the next step is thinking about how we feel, using introspection to look inward. Thinking deeply about our feelings in relation to our work, can help us focus on why certain aspects of our jobs give us the most joy, the so called ‘finding our passion’. This can be done with reference to different time points, for example, how did a past experience make me feel, or how do I feel right now?

One of the most popularised ways of conceptualising this, is a diagram by Marc Winn based on the Japanese concept of ‘Ikigai’ (roughly translated to ‘reason for being’). The diagram proposes your reason for being or sense of purpose at work, can be found at the intersection of what you love, what you are good at, what the world needs and what you can be paid for. Thinking about this in the context of your current role can help you to think about what you want and hope for from your career, identifying potential gaps in your development, and thinking about how to move towards your future vision.

Prospective reflection – What’s next?

From thinking about what we want, prospective reflection needs to occur both at a personal level – where am I headed and how do I get there, but also what does the future landscape of my discipline look like. This forward thinking phase of the reflective process is where you put your learning, focus, priorities and ambitions into action.

Prospective reflection may be as simple as thinking about where you want to be in six months, 12 months, five years, 10 years etc., but you also need to think about where your discipline is headed. What is going to be needed for the future and how do you make sure that you are well placed to serve that future. To make prospective reflection actionable, you really only need to think about one thing – the next step. So, we end with a simple question to move your reflection to action:

What is the next actionable step that can move you forward in your academic journey?

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Have you had success using reflective techniques? What are your favourite focussed reflection techniques and why? Comment below:

Conference Report: TICC 2024: The Inaugural CTF Conference, 5th April, Bristol

Posted on by sarah.allsop

The latest blog is a conference report celebrating the work of clinical teaching fellows across our region. Ed Luff reflects on this event and shares exciting plans for TICC 2025.

On Friday the 5th of April, the University of Bristol, in collaboration with BMERG, hosted TICC 2024: The Inaugural CTF Conference. TICC 2024 provided an opportunity to see and share the valued work of Clinical Teaching Fellows (CTFs) from across the region. Building on the successes of last year’s local CTF Conference for University of Bristol-affiliated CTFs, this year’s expanded meeting had presenters travelling from 10 organisations spanning Southern England, ranging from Surrey to Somerset.

The objectives of the conference were:

These objectives were excellently delivered through a combination of timetabled events on the day. This included two parallel streams of CTF presentations, comprising headline 20-minute showcase presentations, shorter 10-minute oral presentations and 3-minute e-Poster presentations, all with time for Q&A from the audience.

All 22 CTF presentations were extremely well received, and there was excellent engagement and discussion from the audience, highlighting the passion, interest and quality of the work presented. An intuitive electronic platform allowed delegates to provide feedback to presenters, which was shared with them following the conference. This approach to feedback facilitated further development of presentations prior to work being taken onto national or international conferences.

The day also included eight medical education-themed workshops, which attendees were able to choose from, across two parallel streams. These covered topics such as the future of undergraduate medical education, facilitating student-led medical education innovation, sculpting change, demystifying ethics, writing for publication, and the application of qualitative research to medical education. The day also included a showcase workshop presentation titled “From Innovation to Transformative Education”, highlighting how we can sustain and build on novel ideas and implement them into future practice in an educational setting.

One of the other highlights of this year’s expanded interinstitutional conference was a keynote address from Dr Jo Hartland, Senior Lecturer and Deputy Education Director at Bristol Medical School. They presented an account of their work in the field of Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion and shared reflections on their medical education journey to date, including their move from clinical work into medical education, policy work, and leadership.

All those involved in teaching or supporting medical students, whether clinical, academic, or administrative, were welcome to attend the conference. The day saw 63 delegates attend from a variety of backgrounds including those in academic and professional support roles, clinical staff, and educational roles.

On the day, the conference had a fantastic atmosphere, with much talk and networking amongst colleagues and peers regarding teaching, collaboration, innovation, and reflections on the past year as CTF. Energy levels were high, and although the programme was busy,  the variety and diversity of presentations, workshops and talks was extremely well received.

Prizes were awarded on the day for the best oral presentation and runner-up, scored on the day by senior academics and the conference committee; best e-poster presentation, voted on by conference delegates; and best social media post, decided by the organising committee. The prize winners can be viewed on the TICC conference 2024 page.

For more information and insight into what happened on the day, search X (formerly Twitter) for #TICC24 to find all the social media posts. If you would like to find out more information about what was happening on the day, or full details of the presentations that were delivered, please do have a look at the conference programme is available here:

TICC 2024 Programme

We will also be sharing all of the presentations that were delivered at TICC online, so if you couldn’t make it along but would like to review some of the amazing work that was presented, we will add a link to this post and to the TICC tab on the BMERG blog page.

Finally, we are excited to announce that TICC will return next year in a new and updated format! The new and revamped Teaching, Innovation, and Collaboration for CTFs Conference 2025 will take place on Friday 25th of April 2025. So make a note in your diaries, with more information to follow soon, and start sharing your excitement online by using #TICC25.

Building Community: BMERG Journal Club Review, Playful Learning

Posted on by sarah.allsop

The BMERG blog series on building community continues to grow, with our journal club meeting bi-monthly. This month our BMERG Journal Club lead Dr Claire Hudson reflects on the discussion from our March journal club on Playful Learning.

Paper reviewed: Macdonald I, Malone E, Firth R. How can scientists and designers find ways of working together? A case study of playful learning to co-design visual interpretations of immunology concepts. Studies in Higher Education. 2022;47(9):1980-96. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2021.2020745

I was intrigued by this paper for quite simple reasons; the terms ‘playful learning’ and ‘co-design’ grabbed my attention, as well as the reference to ‘scientists’. Although I am also an educator, I am a scientist at heart. Before everyone with a clinical background switches off, the paper actually discusses concepts that could apply to all disciplines, and it certainly provoked some fruitful discussion within our group.  

At the University of Bristol, we design our academic programmes to align with a Curriculum Framework, which includes a set of six interconnected dimensions that convey the educational aspirations of the University. Ideas of how to embed these dimensions within our teaching are always welcome, and this paper aligned with at least two of these dimensions: Disciplinary and Interdisciplinary (allowing students to engage beyond their discipline)and Inspiring and innovative (challenging, authentic and collaborative learning). So, I read this paper hoping to find some inspiration.

What was the research?

In summary, the authors designed an interdisciplinary activity with Biological Science students and Product Design students, aiming to communicate an immunology concept (for example allergies, vaccination or transplantation) using digital storytelling. Initially, the scientists pitched their immunology concepts to the designers, and then both sets of students took part in regular co-design workshops held in the design studios to create their final products. The researchers conducted semi-structured interviews with the students and collected Likert questionnaire data, to explore their “preconceptions, experience and future learnings of working in interdisciplinary groups”, analysed using thematic analysis.

What were the findings?

Four themes emerged from their research, summarised below:

1. The influence of environment –Being in the design studio fostered creativity in the Science students and developed different ways of thinking.

2. Playfulness as a creative approach –Freedom from assessment (this activity was outside of the curriculum) allowed for risk taking.

3. Storytelling as a means of expression –Translating information in a visual form enhanced understanding of the immunology material.

4. Recognition of the value of Interdisciplinary working – Relevance to authentic working relationships, exploiting individual strengths.

What did we think?

Limitations of the study

We did have some concerns about the study, such as not being explicit about the objectives and the possibility of confirmation bias. At the end of the introduction the authors state “This study aimed to use interdisciplinary co-design workshops to create opportunities for bringing scientists and designers to work together”; this may have been the purpose of the learning activity, but this didn’t explain the objectives of their research. What did they want to find out?

We discussed the limitations of case studies, however, we agreed that this type of study is useful to disseminate practice and generate ideas, provided the researchers are transparent about the wider relevance. We noted that the findings closely matched the themes presented in their introduction, thereby reconfirming previous assumptions rather than generating novel data, which led us to question the depth of the thematic analysis. This confirmation bias could also have arisen due to the nature of the sample; this was a voluntary task, and it is likely that the participating students were highly motivated. 

How could this be relevant to our own practice?

We all agreed that this was an interesting learning experience for the students, and I love hearing about novel ideas for communicating complex scientific concepts. Often, we retain and understand information with the use of a good metaphor, so perhaps we should all integrate more storytelling into our teaching!

However, since this activity was purely extra-curricular, how relevant is it? Do we really have the time/scope to create these opportunities ‘just for fun’? Creating a genuine interdisciplinary task within a curriculum seems challenging, with potential inter-Programme/School/Faculty logistics to navigate. Some of these perceived obstacles arise from imagining a summative task, however we all agreed that creating formative interdisciplinary tasks would be simpler; and in agreement with the authors, would allow students the freedom to experiment and be ‘playful’, stepping out of their comfort zones without being assessed. A great example of this freedom is the ‘creative piece’ produced by our medical students during year 1 Foundations of Medicine. Students are required to take part, but not awarded an explicit grade, which enables risk taking.

Overall reflections

This paper certainly sparked some great discussion about interdisciplinary and group working (clinical perfusion and medical students, medical and nursing students…), but how do we measure the benefit of such collaborations? At BMERG, our focus is turning these ideas into opportunities for research, so watch this space!

Read more of our journal club reflections:

Publishing in Medical Education: Conference Series – Writing effective conference abstracts

Posted on by sarah.allsop

Building on our previous BMERG Publishing in Medical Education blogs, in this post Dr Sally Dowling introduces our Writing for Publication Conference Series. Here she talks about a different sort of writing and dissemination of your work – responding to calls for conference presentations and posters.

Image: The Climate Reality Project/Unsplash

Why should you present your work at academic conferences?

Academics choose to present their work at conferences and meetings for a range of reasons. It’s an important part of the dissemination of finished research projects, but it can also be an opportunity to gain feedback on ‘work in progress’, as well as to hear from and meet others in your field and those whose work may be related to yours.

If you are an early career researcher it can be a good way to build connections and network. If you are able to obtain funding to attend a conference it can be a good way to have some ‘time-out’ from everyday pressures to think about, and discuss, your work. You may also get the opportunity to visit some interesting places! Post-covid, some conferences now offer hybrid attendance and others have remained online.

What’s the difference between a paper presentation and a poster?

A paper presentation, sometimes called an oral presentation (or if you are the main speaker, a ‘keynote’ presentation) is where someone delivers a talk to an audience. In some disciplines this might mean literally reading a paper (similar to a journal article); in others it is more usual to deliver a talk accompanied by a slide presentation.

This may be to a large lecture hall full of people or to a smaller audience in parallel sessions – depending on the type and structure of the conference. Length of presentations varies and may or may not include time for questions. Sometimes all presenters in a session will give their presentations and questions will follow, addressed to the speakers as a panel.

Conference posters are usually displayed for the duration of the conference – they are large (often A1 or A0) posters presenting reports of a research project or other work, usually including words and images. Recently the use of electronic posters is also becoming more common, either made available to view online or physically on large screens at the conference venue.

The aim is to give conference attendees the chance to find out about a range of relevant work and, usually, to ask questions of the researcher or representative of the research team. Some conferences expect poster presenters to stand with their posters at specific times (coffee breaks or lunchtimes, or an early evening session, for example) in order to ‘talk to’ their poster if required.

What is a ‘call for papers’?

Many conferences publish a ‘call for papers/posters’ well in advance of the conference. These will usually be on the websites of relevant organisations (such as AMEE or ASME). You can keep an eye out and find out what time of year these usually appear by visiting our BMERG Abstract Calls! page.

When you look at the call there will be important information to note:

  • Submission format: Some conferences will want you to submit your abstract as an attachment – others will use an online platform, which may require you to register.
  • Deadline: There will usually be a strictly-enforced deadline.
  • Word count: This is usually very specific and may be constrained by allowances of online text boxes.
  • Structure: It is important to note whether the abstract should be structured or unstructured. If they require that the abstract is structured it will often follow a Background, Aim, Methods, Results, Conclusions format (see figure 1 below) – if there are different headings to be used make sure you are aware of this.
  • References: Instructions may also specify whether or not you can use references and, if so, may give a limit (usually a small number).
  • Themes and Streams: Details should be on the conference website of themed conference streams or specific types of sessions you can submit to; make sure you are clear about these and indicate which you prefer if asked.
  • Presentation format: You may be asked if you are submitting for an oral or a poster presentation, and if there is more than one author you will usually be asked to indicate who will be the presenter.
Example of conventional headings for a structured abstract
HeadingContent
BackgroundSpecify the nature and size of the problem; outline its importance to practice, and the gap that needs to be addressed. This section should emphasise the relevance and significance of the issue to the conference delegates and should embrace a relevant theme
AimSpecify this clearly and simply, including study design/approach
MethodsSample
Data collection Data analysis Ethical issues
Results/ FindingsReport this clearly and succinctly to provide the reader with a fair impression of the data
ConclusionIt is important to be specific and produce a balanced conclusion based on the results and how it captures the selected conference theme
Figure 1: Example of conventional headings for a structured abstract. From Albarran and Dowling (2017, p.325).

What should I put in my abstract?

Writing a good abstract will maximise your chances of acceptance. It’s also a way for people to read about your project in advance, or after the conference. Some conferences publish abstracts after the event; sometimes as a supplement to a journal connected to the conference.

What you say in your abstract will act as a ‘hook’ to bring people to your presentation or poster, or to want to contact you to find out more about your work. Use an engaging and academically persuasive tone, take time to refine what you have written and proof-read carefully before submission. Asking a critical friend to read through your abstract can be helpful.

Guidance on how to format your abstract
Guideline
Name of lead presenter and contact detailsYou will be required to provide details of your place of work and qualifications
Name of authors, titles and contact detailsObtain full addresses, titles, professional qualifications and contact details including email address
TitleThis should be kept to 12 words or less. If reporting the results of a study, audit or service improvement, it is good practice to include methodology in the title. A good title should provoke interest, curiosity and relate to the chosen theme
HeadingsEmploy the headings as suggested and in the order recommended
Word limitThis will range between 200–300 words maximum—abbreviations are often discouraged, check this out
Key termsYou may be invited to provide 4–6 search terms that embrace the content of your abstract
Font size and typeThis will normally be prescribed—ensure you follow the recommendations.
Referencing style and numberConfirm the referencing style permitted prior to drafting the abstract, and how many are allowed; some will limit the number to a maximum of three
Conflicts of interestIf you have any conflicts of interest, declare these
FundingSome scientific committees expect you to state whether your project was externally funded; if it has, confirm this
Permission to publish your abstractShould you be accepted to present, the abstract may be published as part of conference proceedings. Note that you may not have the opportunity to revise
AbbreviationsGenerally these are discouraged, so it is sensible to check the guidelines; it is likely that only universally accepted abbreviations may be permitted
Figure 2. Guidance on how to format your abstract. Table adapted from Albarran and Dowling (2017, p.326).

What happens to my abstract after submission?

Most conferences will have a conference committee who will review abstracts received before the deadline (so this is a form of peer review). Depending on the conference preparation timeline, it can take some time to hear, so be patient! Some conferences will give a date on their webpages, telling you when you will hear from them; others don’t do this. Wait to hear and then start preparing for your conference!

The next blog in this series coming soon: Tips on how to produce your conference poster

Further reading:

Albarran, J. & Dowling, S., 2017, Writing an effective conference abstract British Journal of Cardiac Nursing. 12, 7, pp. 324-328

Higgins, M., Eogan, M., O’Donoghue K., Russell, N. (2013) How to write an abstract that will be accepted. BMJ, 346: 2974 doi:10.1136/bmj.f2974 

Pieper, P. (2014) Writing Your Journal or Conference Abstract. Journal of Pediatric Surgical Nursing. 3(2), pp. 47-50

More about this blog’s author

Sally is a Lecturer at Bristol Medical School, working both for the Health Professions Education programme and as Co-Director of the MSc Reproduction and Development. She also runs a series of writing for publication workshops (see programme here) for the Faculty of Health Sciences at the University of Bristol.

Check out our previous Publishing in Medical Education Posts

BMERG News: Award Win for one of our Bristol Medical Education Researchers!

Posted on by sarah.allsop

We are hugely pleased to share another amazing success for the fantastic Dr Grace Pearson, who is this year’s winner of the Association for the Study of Medical Education Trainees TASME Mentorship Prize.

The TASME Mentorship Prize is an individual award that provides resources for early career health professions educators to develop a mentorship relationship that will support their development as an educator.

Grace is this year’s winner of this prestigious award with her submission ‘Improving the care of older people in Zimbabwe through undergraduate and postgraduate teaching innovation.’ Grace shares that,

“this prize will help towards work with clinicians at the University of Zimbabwe Medical School, strengthening collaborative efforts to innovate teaching in geriatric medicine.”

Congratulations Grace, we look forward to hearing all about this exciting work in the future.

Read more about this award at www.asme.org.uk/news/tasme-mentorship-prize-2024-winner/

Trainees in the Association for the Study of Medical Education (TASME) is a career group of ASME. TASME’s mission is to foster interest and support development in medical education amongst early career doctors (up to 5 years post foundation training) – and early career allied healthcare professionals (up to 7 years post graduation). 

Read more about Grace’s work on the BMERG profiles page and follow her on X @GraceInvaders

BMERG Work: New Educator Profile

Posted on by sarah.allsop

This month’s highlighted Educator Profile is Dr Ed Luff

Ed is an Emergency Medical Doctor and Bristol Medical School graduate. His role is currently split between working as a Clinical Lecturer at Bristol Medical School and Speciality Teaching Fellow and Tutor at South Bristol Academy, based in the Bristol Royal Infirmary.

He is also finishing his MSc dissertation exploring students’ experiences and perceptions of using simulation as a method to teach human factors and non-technical skills, as part of his studies on the Health Professionals Education (TLHP) course.

Read more about Ed and some of our other Bristol Medical School Educators by visiting our: BMERG Educator and Researcher Profile Page

Building Community: Spotlight on the Incubator for Clinical Education Research

Posted on by sarah.allsop

This weeks BMERG blog is a spotlight on the Incubator for Clinical Educator Research (ClinEdR). Hosted by the University of Newcastle, the Incubator is an NIHR initiative launched in 2020 to develop ClinEdR as an academic field.

Image (c) UX Indonesia on Unsplash

What is the Incubator?

The mission and aim of the ClinEdR Incubator is to support and promote careers in clinical education research through building a multi-professional community of practice. It extends across all health professions and aims to bring people together to develop their ideas, build collaborations and provide a network of developing experience in the field.

What is Clinical Education Research?

This is one of the most fundamental questions and tends to have a myriad of different definitions and terms including clinical, medical, and healthcare professionals education research to name just a few. Often the word ‘clinical’ can drive the idea that this sort of research must have a direct impact in clinical practice and thus can seem to exclude certain areas of research in education.

The team at the Incubator have tried to broaden this idea, embracing all sorts of different research that can and does have an impact on societal health needs by “enhancing the education, training and development of health and social care practitioners, and the organisations within which they work and learn“. They highlight a number of different areas in which individuals and teams may be undertaking clinical education research such as:

  • Pedagogical research
  • Planning and design of educational programmes
  • Regulation processes
  • Organisation context of learning, such as learning environments and workforce inclusivity
  • Learner experience and careers

They also consider that this whilst this type of research may have a direct clinical impact for patients it may achieve impact in other ways such as benefiting clinicians in their training, influencing health and education systems and through challenging and developing standards.

How can the Incubator help those who want to engage in Clinical Education Research?

The incubator is a fantastic place to start regardless of where you are in your ClinEdR journey. It offers a variety of resource and links via it’s website such as:

So why not take a look at their resources, find out who works in ClinEdR in your area and sign up to be part of the growing Incubator network!

You can learn more about the Incubator at clinicaleducationresearch.org/ on Twitter/X at @ClinEdResearch or email the team at clinical.education.incubator@newcastle.ac.uk

Event News: TICC GW4: The Inaugural CTF Conference

Posted on by sarah.allsop
Dr Ed Luff
Dr Sam Chumbley

In this blog Dr Sam Chumbley and Dr Ed Luff invite you to The Inaugural CTF Conference: TICC GW4, hosted by the University of Bristol in collaboration with BMERG.

TICC GW4 provides an opportunity to see and present the valued work of Clinical Teaching Fellows (CTFs) from across the GW4 Alliance Medical Schools of Bristol, Cardiff, and Exeter. Building on the successes of last year’s Inaugural CTF Conference at the University of Bristol, which brought together CTFs from Bristol Medical School’s regional academies, we have expanded this year’s meeting, to invite presenters from the GW4 Alliance Medical Schools, Bristol, Cardiff, and Exeter.

One of the highlights of this year’s expanded interinstitutional conference will be a keynote from Dr Jo Hartland, Senior Lecturer and Deputy Education Director at Bristol Medical School. They will be presenting an account of their work in the field of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion.

There will also be presentation options for CTFs from the GW4 Alliance, in a variety of formats, including Research, Innovation and Opinion Pieces. Authors can choose to submit abstracts for consideration as a Showcase presentation (20 minutes), Oral presentation (10 minutes), Poster presentation (3 minutes) or for display as an e-Poster, which requires no presentation on the day. Opinion Pieces can also be considered for an Open Forum (30-minute) platform of discussion. There will also be a variety of workshops run on the day, to help develop delegates’ research and clinical academic skills.

All those involved in the teaching or support of medical students, be that clinical, academic, or administrative, are welcome to attend the conference. However, presentations will only be open to Clinical Teaching Fellows from the GW4 Alliance Medical Schools.

Registration is free and lunch will be provided. TICC GW4 will be held in Bristol on the 5th of April 2024. Further details will be sent following registration.

To register for the conference or to submit your abstract for consideration for presentation at the conference, please follow this link: TICC GW4 Registration

Registration will close nearer to the conference date.

The deadline for submission of abstracts is 12:00 on Friday 8th March 2024.

For further information visit https://bmerg.blogs.bristol.ac.uk/ticc-gw4/ or for queries please contact med-leadctf@bristol.ac.uk

Publishing in Medical Education: Harnessing Open Access to Communicate your Research Effectively

Posted on by sarah.allsop

This latest blog in our publishing series is a must read for all researchers, not just those in medical education.

In this blog research support librarian Kate Holmes will introduce you to Open Access publishing, why it matters, a few handy tools, and how it might influence where you decide to place your article.

Open sign by Viktor Forgacs (Unsplash)

You’ve decided you want to write an article. You’ve thought about your structure, maybe using some of the support and advice from this blog. Maybe you’ve even begun to think about where you’d like to place it. So, how might publishing Open Access influence the process?

What is Open Access?

Open Access (OA) is free, unrestricted online access to research outputs.

This means that anyone with an internet connection can read your work because it is available without someone having to go through a paywall or log into a system.

There are two common routes to Open Access:

Gold: where the library pays the publisher to make the article available on the publisher’s website free of charge to readers, with their formatting and copyediting.

Green: where you upload the Author Accepted Manuscript to an online data repository such as Pure for anyone to read. (This is the last word document you sent the publisher prior to copyediting and typesetting.)

The UK Reproducibility Network have a great introducing the open research practice of open access and why it is important:

Why do it?

  • Research Culture

Paywalls prevent people from reading your research because not every institution can afford to pay for subscriptions to every journal. This means that much of the research conducted is inaccessible to researchers who don’t have access to libraries with large budgets, such as those in the global south, or to patients who want to learn more about their own conditions.

Unsurprisingly, Open Access articles are read and cited more, allowing them to make more impact in the academic community and to interested parties, such as patients.

Choosing to publish Open Access means that you are participating in open research practices and a movement that aims to improve research culture. These practices improve research rigour by being as transparent as possible about how research is done.

Publishing Open Access is one element of open research; you can see it as the front door to wider open research practices.  

  • Funder requirements

Publishing Open Access is required by some funders like the UKRI’s Medical Research Council, British Heart Foundation, Wellcome Trust and Cancer Research UK. These organisations provide funds to cover Gold Open Access costs for the research they have funded. You can find out if you can request these funds by contacting your institutions library and filling out an open access form (see also University of Bristol Article processing charge guidance).

If this is the case, your funder will commonly ask you to:

  • apply a CC-BY licence,
  • acknowledge your funding by quoting their name and the grant number in the article
  • provide a data access statement for any data you created to write the article.

It is important that you include this information and that you publish your article Gold Open Access because this is a condition of their funding your work. Seek advice from your institutional OA team for the specific details of funder requirements so that they can help you understand them more (see also University of Bristol Open Access Policies). Note, not complying may lead to a funder blacklisting an institution or imposing financial penalties.

  • Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2029

The Research Excellence Framework (REF) is the UKs system for assessing the quality and impact of UK research. We’re still waiting to hear exactly what the Open Access requirements are going to be for REF 2029. However, we currently need to ensure that we upload the Author Accepted Manuscript to Pure within 3 months of its acceptance for the article to be eligible to be submitted as part of REF.

Many institutions, including Bristol, have developed policies to support researchers to make their work more accessible. At Bristol this is the University’s Scholarly Works Policy, which supports researchers to post the accepted version of articles to the online repository (Pure) in a way that meets REF and funder requirements. If you do not manage to upload your article in time, then there are sometimes ‘exceptions’ that can be applied, and your library team can help you with this.

What might this mean for choosing where you place your work?

Publishing Open Access benefits society and is part of your duty as a good researcher. The good news is that you can choose how your work appears by making choices about where you publish.

Although Green Open Access publication is great and can be cited in the same way as a journal’s formatted article, most people prefer to have a free version of their article available on the publisher’s website.

If you want this to happen, there are a couple of different routes you can take:

Diamond Open Access: no fees to authors or to readers, making all research free to read and free to publish. These journals are typically funded by libraries and scholarly organisations.

Gold Open Access: final published version of the research is made open access on the publisher’s webpage in exchange for a fee. If you don’t have funding, you can often still publish Gold Open Access (where the library pays a fee). As part of the journal packages your library buys for you to read, OA teams can make articles in certain journals Gold Open Access. These are known as ‘Read and Publish’ agreements. Your library will often have a directory where you can check whether the journal you are interested in is covered, e.g. UoB Read and Publish deal finder tool.

If you want to make the most of your research, then incorporate choices about Open Access into your journal selection process. That way, it can support you to communicate your research as widely as possible!

More author the blog author:

Dr Kate Holmes advocates for Open Access as a Research Support Librarian. She uses her experience in research to help academics understand more about the benefits of Open Access and the requirements they need to fulfil.

News: February’s featured BRMS Educator and Researcher is Dr Grace Pearson

Posted on by sarah.allsop

Have you seen our educator and researcher profile page? As part of our objective to ‘Innovate and Inspire’, this page is dedicated to showcasing not only the work of individuals working as educators and researchers in medical education at Bristol, but also a bit about their journey and their top tips for working in the discipline.

This month our featured educator is Dr Grace Pearson, a clinical lecturer and specialty doctor in Severn deanery.

Following her recent completion of a Ph.D. Fellowship in undergraduate education in geriatric medicine, Grace is actively innovating and evaluating geriatrics curricula on both local and national scales. This strategic approach ensures the continual enhancement of medical education in geriatric medicine.

To learn more about Grace’ Pearson’s work and that of other educators at Bristol Medical School, we invite you to explore their profiles on our BRMS Educator Profiles page.