All posts by Gareth Knight

Research Data Manager at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine

Celebrate Love Data Week 2025 with us!

Love Data Week is here, and it's time to celebrate the power of data! Whether you're a data enthusiast, a curious student, or just looking to learn something new, the Library, Archive & Open Research Services has a great line-up of events to help you dive into the world of data. Check out the following training events.

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Open Research Seminar: Enhancing the speed and impact of science communication using BioRxiv and MedRxiv

THURSDAY MARCH 13, 2025. 13:00 – 14:00 BST

Attendance link: https://lshtm.zoom.us/j/98105867994

The widespread adoption of preprints provides opportunities to revolutionize how scientific discoveries are communicated with the wider research community. Preprints enable scientists to share the latest developments and findings in their research and obtain community feedback that can be used to support decision making on how it is be developed in the future. As a citable scientific output, they also provide authors with proof of progress and productivity, which can be used to advance their careers through grant and job applications.

This webinar, hosted by LSHTM in partnership with members of the bioRxiv and medRxiv team, will outline how the sharing of preprints can aid researchers in enhancing the impact of their scientific research and comply with established and emerging community requirements, such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s mandate on preprints.

Professor Kat Holt from LSHTM’s Department of Infection Biology will share some personal reflections from over a decade of posting preprints, and invite fellow academics to share their own experiences or concerns. Presenters from bioRxiv and medRxiv, two non-profit preprint services that host more than 200,000 preprints on topics spanning fundamental biology and clinical research and are visited by a combined figures of ~9 million readers every month, will provide an interactive demo of the platforms, and discuss potential gains for LSHTM academics and their research.

To help the presenters to tailor the session to your needs, please complete the Interest in Preprints survey form.

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Large CRUK logo

Open Research seminar: Cancer Research UK’s Registered Reports Funding Partnership: lessons to improve research quality, transparency and reproducibility

THURSDAY JULY 18, 2024. 12:00–13:00 BST
Attendance Link: https://lshtm.zoom.us/j/99442400497

This online seminar will introduce Registered Reports and a new pathway being piloted at Cancer Research UK (CRUK) to submit Registered Reports to journals for peer review, alongside the grant application and review process. CRUK’s unique pilot is being performed in consortium with 12 journals and the University of Bristol.

Attendees will gain an understanding of Registered Reports, the rationale for CRUK’s pilot, how the Registered Reports Funding Partnership pathway works and the process for preparing a report for publication. The seminar will share different consortium partner perspectives and requirements – from a publisher, a funder and an academic institution – and highlight insights, feedback from researchers about opting-into to the pilot, advice on putting together a report and how to avoid common pitfalls.

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A member of the AMIS Hub research team interviewing a local resident

Open Research seminar: Qualitative Data Presentation, Secondary Analysis and Ethics

THURSDAY JUNE 20, 2024. 12:00 - 13:00 BST

Seminar recording: The seminar recording is hosted in the Panopto video platform (LSHTM users only) and Data Compass repository.

Qualitative research can provide a rich understanding of people’s lived experience that goes beyond what is possible through quantitative approaches. However, the sharing of complex qualitative outputs in a form that maintains research context and protects participant confidentiality remains a challenge for many research studies.

In this seminar, Kahryn Hughes, Professor of Sociology at the University of Leeds, will consider the key ethical challenges for the reuse and sharing of qualitative research data. She will highlight the ethical value of qualitative data preservation and archiving, as part of a broader ethical temporal sensibility towards social research data and integrity. She explores the rise of qualitative data re-use in the context of the ‘data turn’ and explores how the qualities of qualitative data present distinctive challenges for and within the global drift towards open science and open access. With particular attention to questions of how and why ethical concerns may change over time, she explores what the implications of qualitative data re-use might be for current research practice. In so doing, she explains how social and qualitative researchers can achieve good practice by attending to questions of data integrity and legacy. She will signpost to relevant resources to support good practice in the preparation and organisation of qualitative datasets for the purposes of reuse.

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Open Access publication

Open Research seminar series: Open publishing and peer review with Wellcome Open Research

Thu, May 23, 2024 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM BST.

Seminar recording
The recording can be accessed by completing the registration form at https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/2890971650647376730.

This online seminar will introduce the open publishing and peer review model used by Wellcome Open Research, alongside other F1000-supported platforms, such as Gates Open Research, Open Research Europe, NIHR Open Research and F1000Research.

Attendees will gain an understanding of the publication requirements for Wellcome Open Research, and the workflows for submission, revision, and post-publication open peer review. It will provide advice for authors on how to address challenges in open access publication, and engage with the revision and peer review process that follows.

The seminar will also highlight several emerging trends in open publishing and research, including the use of pre-print servers, and the newly announced verified pre-print platform, VeriXiv – a partnership between F1000 and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

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Eye Health: Operating spectacles

Finding LSHTM data and other reusable resources

LSHTM Data Compass is a digital repository of research items produced by LSHTM researchers – staff and students alike – that have been made available for analysis and use in further research. The repository lists almost 1,500 item, including databases & spreadsheets, interview and focus group transcripts, software tools and processing scripts, as well as questionnaire and interview guides. This includes items hosted in the repository itself and those held in third party systems.

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World Digital Preservation Day 2018

World Digital Preservation Day at LSHTM

November 29th 2018 was the date of the 2nd World Digital Preservation Day. We explore the role of digital preservation in health research, describe the digital preservation activities currently performed by the LSHTM Library & Archives Service, and outline our future plans. Read more

Love Data Week

Love Data Week – free events in Bloomsbury during Feb 12-16th

To celebrate the 3rd international Love Data Week, a series of research data-related events will be held during the week of February 12-16th across Bloomsbury. The following events are open to LSHTM research staff and students: Read more

GDPR for Research Data Management – workshop report

This blog post provides a brief overview of a workshop organised for the London Area Research Data (LARD) group on the implications of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) for research data management. The event was held at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine on November 17, 2017. It was organised by Gareth Knight (LSHTM), in conjunction with Helen Porter (SOAS) and Laurence Horton (LSE). A second write-up of the session has been produced by Laurence Horton. Read more

Gain new insight into your health research using text mining

An abundance of scholarly resources are available to the researcher, easily discoverable through use of a few search terms. However, this opulence comes at a price: there is too much literature for a researcher to find and read themselves. Text and Data Mining (TDM) offer a solution for health researchers wishing to analyse a large corpus of resources, including research papers, medical records, and other material, even when the information is held in an unstructured form. The resultant output may be used to identify hidden patterns that emerge over time and across geographic regions, predict and address gaps within the data, and convert content into a form better suited to modern research. Read more