Initiatives: UKRN & Octopus.ac – making change in publishing | UK Reproducibility Network

"UKRN provides seed-funding and in-kind support to a range of initiatives aimed at improving open research practices. Alexandra Freeman from Octopus.ac explains what this partnership has meant to them.

Octopus.ac is a publishing platform that is designed specifically to incentivise best research practice. It is free to read and publish to, instant (like a pre-print server), and has open post-publication peer review. It also doesn’t publish ‘papers’, but smaller, linked units of work – like datasets, analyses, research problems. This allows faster sharing of work, more specialist and timely peer review, more fluid collaboration and smaller author groups (giving recognition to who did what work).

Support for Octopus’ principles is overwhelming – but it faces two huge challenges. One is ‘getting the word out’ to researchers around the world, in all disciplines. The other is changing the policies of those who set the incentive system for researchers to recognise these newer research outputs: funders, journals, institutions. This is where UKRN comes in...."