Open and Responsible Research - Celebrating our Research and Knowledge Exchange Awards 2025

First Prize: Dr Sofia Persson (School of Humanities and Social Sciences)

Dr Sofia Persson was nominated for her work as LBU's UK Reproducibility Network (UKRN) Local Network Lead. In this role, Sofia promotes engagement with reproducible and rigorous research practices within LBU and liaises with UKRN through online communications and meet-ups.

Sofia explained: "The UKRN was officially launched in 2019, with a formal aim of improving the reproducibility and reliability of research in the UK. The UKRN relies heavily on grassroots support and provides a light-touch framework for organising and co-ordinating open research engagement and activities across institutions.

"My main motivation for becoming a UKRN local network lead is that I am passionate about promoting open scholarship, and I believe that this is something that should filter through in our own research endeavours, as well as in our pedagogy."

Some of the ways that Sofia's engagement with UKRN and open scholarship has had a positive impact at LBU include:

• Establishing the Centre for Psychological Research (PsyCen) Open Research and Scholarship (ORES) initiative
• Setting up the 'consortium' dissertation project for final year undergraduates in Psychology to use open research principles to collaborate with students from other universities on their research.
• Forging closer links between LBU and UKRN through conferences and networking events.

Speaking about winning the Open and Responsible Research Award, Sofia added: "I am delighted! It is fantastic to know that my open science engagement has been noticed and appreciated by the university."

Second Prize: The Library Academic Support Team

The Library Research Services team is made up of colleagues Thali Bento, Lindsey McDermott, Liz Mann, Ahmed Ghaith and Anna Gower, led by Helen Howard, Ellie Clement and Debbie Morris. The team have developed LBU's Open Research Policy and Rights Retention policy.

Helen and Thali reflected: "Open research at LBU is not only about making outputs visible, but also about celebrating the people behind them. This year, we played a key role in implementing Discovery Profiles, the new platform that enables colleagues to showcase their research, professional activities, impact and collaborations through Symplectic. As of November 2025, the platform hosts over 1,200 live profiles, all created, edited, and controlled directly by LBU researchers themselves.

"In 2024-25 we delivered more than 30 training sessions for postgraduate researchers and academic staff, produced video tutorials, webinars, Open Access webpages and supported countless one-to-one conversations. These interactions have helped shift our culture towards openness, collaboration and confidence in sharing research responsibly.

"We've also been representing LBU in the national Jisc 'Next Generation Open Access' negotiations, helping to shape the future of the UK's largest publishing agreements with Elsevier, SAGE, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis and Wiley.

"Being shortlisted for the Open and Responsible Research Award means a great deal to us. It recognises the collective effort, creativity and persistence that go into building a sustainable open research environment at Leeds Beckett. We're proud to see open and responsible practice recognised as central to research excellence and as a reflection of the supportive, forward-thinking culture we strive to nurture."

Third Prize: Dr Lewis Simpson (School of Humanities and Social Sciences)

Dr Lewis Simpson's research focuses on prisons management and experiences. Reflecting on the importance of responsible research, Lewis said: "A large factor in doing research is addressing how our research can be used towards developing moral goodness, that is, by recognising that we all do research that has the capacity for positive transformation to the world around us.

"I think prison research requires this focus on moral responsibility, as we research those who are otherwise seen as unwanted and neglected, who experience the dark realities of issues like violence, self-harm, and suicide regularly. Also, with research, we have the responsibility to be critical of others (like politicians) to help develop practices and policies. These are core values that I strive for developing and maintaining as a researcher."

Speaking about the positive impacts of his work, Lewis added: "I've been working towards embedding these values within the school through two recent projects. I have developed a new research cluster with Dr Alexandria Bradley, called HEART (Humanity, Empathy, Action, Research, and Transformation). We aim to focus on supporting the level of moral engagement that researchers have for their areas of investigation. Investigating emotionally heavy subjects can often require a level of shared compassion for researchers to continue their work.

"With the support of the charity, Sense About Science, I have built my research findings into a policy brief which I delivered to politicians as part of Evidence Week. I am working with Juliet Harrison in the Research and Enterprise service to build more support for LBU researchers in transforming their research into impactful policy, and developing training for Early Career Researchers.

"I feel honoured to be recognised by my peers as a responsible and open researcher. I consider myself very early in my career stage of research, and to know that my core values as a researcher are seen positively by my colleagues is very humbling."