Fast, good, cheap… pick any two

I've always argued that change requires two things – both bottom-up and top-down efforts (that hopefully join up), and a range of arguments (moral, pragmatic and selfish). In the context of open research, the UK Reproducibility Network (disclosure: I helped co-found it!) attempts the former, through a combination of grassroots communities of practice (Local Networks), university senior management teams (Institutional Members), and other sectoral organisations (our Stakeholder Engagement Group – the funders, publishers, learned and professional societies and so on).

In terms of the latter, the moral argument is that most of our work is publicly funded and it's therefore appropriate that those who fund it should be able to access it (and not just the end product). The pragmatic argument is that open research can facilitate knowledge transfer, collaboration and reuse in a variety of ways (some of which may not yet be known). The selfish (for the individual researcher) is that it can make our own research process more efficient – as Meghan Duffy put it in a 2015 blog, 'Your primary collaborator is yourself from six months ago, and that person doesn't answer emails…'.

But sometimes things happen that don't fit into these neat ways of thinking. Covid is the perfect example of that.

Collaboration and inverted workflow

Covid was a genuinely disruptive event that transformed how we worked literally overnight and brought about much more rapid change than could have ever been achieved via conventional means.

One Vice Chancellor even quipped that they'd achieved their ten-year emission reduction goals in a matter of weeks (sadly, it didn't last). And the impact on academic research was no less profound. As well as changes to daily working practices, vast amounts of funding were suddenly available.

A key part of the academic response to the pandemic was collaboration. Genomic data was shared worldwide to enable more effective tracking of the outbreak and development of new strains, for example. Open research practices and infrastructure made much of this possible and highlighted the importance of investing in the infrastructure and policies – globally – to support this. There will be other pandemics. Being in a position to share interoperable data rapidly across research groups and countries will be key to how we respond to these.

To do this requires us to invert the traditional academic research workflow that culminates in a peer-reviewed journal article, and release the intermediate research outputs we generate as we go. Of course, open research practices and infrastructure enable exactly this. The most obvious example during the pandemic was the rapid increase in the use of preprints to disseminate findings whilst peer review was ongoing. One of the most prescient, posted on 17 February 2020, concluded that '[Covid] will … spread globally and become a fifth endemic coronavirus within the human population'.

The bandwagon

Of course, there was also a lot of low-quality research. Almost every discipline jumped on the pandemic research bandwagon, and how much of this genuinely contributed to the sum of human knowledge is unclear. The pandemic also proves the adage 'Fast, good, cheap – you can pick any two'. Some outstanding research was done with great speed that informed the pandemic response, with the development of effective vaccines being the paradigmatic case, but it was eye-wateringly expensive. A lot was simply done quickly and cheaply.

We are all familiar with the changes the pandemic brought about – most obviously, hybrid working and the ability to give talks remotely rather than make an airborne day trip to do so. But the pandemic also highlighted what open research can do for us – the much more rapid dissemination of novel findings, and the facilitation of large-scale collaborative efforts. If we need to make a business case for investing in the infrastructure and training to embed open research practices into our daily work, this insurance against future pandemics must surely be part of the equation.

Beyond pandemics, will Covid end up having a lasting impact on how research is conducted and shared? Some of the changes it brought about may turn out to be enduring but subtle – greater openness to collaboration, for example. However, for the most part, I think the pandemic didn't so much change things as highlight existing tensions and accelerate trends that were already underway. An example of the former is preprints – the pandemic showed both their advantages (rapid dissemination) and their potential shortcomings (lack of peer review).

For now, perhaps we simply need to remember the positives – that the cooperation and transparency that the pandemic fostered ultimately advanced knowledge and saved lives. We should try to embed those principles in our everyday work, pandemic or no pandemic.

Marcus Munafò is Professor of Biological Psychology and MRC Investigator, and Associate Pro Vice-Chancellor - Research Culture, at the University of Bristol. 
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The best of ourselves in the worst of times

Early in March 2020, I was at a meeting in Chicago when I realised that daily life was about to be rather different for the foreseeable future. Upon arrival at a downtown restaurant my international colleagues and I greeted each other with a combination of elbow and fist bumps. 

I can safely say this was the first time I had greeted anyone in this way. Over dinner, there was much talk of social distancing, lockdowns and the likely closure of airspace. A couple of days later I found myself stranded in a large, empty hotel in Long Beach, California, processing the news that the conference I was due to attend had been cancelled as a result of the clear and present danger that was the developing pandemic. 

I went for dinner at a nearby eatery which had a band playing that included a guitarist wearing a motorcycle helmet to protect himself against the 'scary virus'. We were about to enter unusual and unsettling times.

Not long after returning to the UK, we entered a lockdown and it became clear that the collective and individual responses to the COVID-19 pandemic and the countermeasures were about to fundamentally change how societies function; how we work, educate, parent, socialise, shop, communicate and travel. In short, profound effects on human behaviour. It didn't take long for a Covid-19 Coordinating Group to be set up within the British Psychological Society, chaired by David Murphy (then BPS President) and myself (then Chair of the BPS Research Board).

The Covid-19 Coordinating Group's purpose was to facilitate collaboration and joined-up working across the Society. This was an excellent Society-wide initiative which yielded an enormous amount of outputs in terms of advice and guidance in areas such as adaptation, bereavement, community action, behavioural science, staff wellbeing, rehabilitation and working differently.

Looking back, this initiative represents an important lesson learned, should we be faced with any future national emergencies – priority number one should be to swiftly establish a core leadership team to oversee and support collaborative, joined-up efforts.

From a research point of view, another key lesson learned was the importance of providing guidance on how psychological science could play an integral role in helping the response to, and recovery from the pandemic. To this end, Chris Armitage (University of Manchester) and I convened the BPS Covid-19 Research Priorities Group that included an expert panel of national and international psychological scientists. The aim of this Group was to publish a Position Paper that highlighted the many ways in which psychological science, its methods, approaches and interventions could be harnessed to support the pandemic effort.

As well as a call to action, we also wanted to highlight the need to ensure, despite the pace we were all working at, that our scientific research maintained high ethical standards, was high quality and rigorous, and that it was made as open, transparent and reproducible as possible.

We were also acutely aware of the fact that the effects of the pandemic were disproportionately impacting different groups. Covid-19 was not a single pandemic, but multiple parallel pandemics with some people facing numerous severe challenges and others experiencing few or none. Therefore, we wanted to ensure that a clear priority for psychological scientists was to understand how best to help those in need and to consider the following factors in their research efforts: ethnicity, socioeconomic status, health, age and sex, social exclusion and social support, and intersectionality.

Lockdowns, social distancing, Omicron variants, and visiting mass vaccination centres have now largely receded in our memories. However, I look back on Covid times with mostly positive emotions (for which I am thankful), including a real of sense of pride in what our profession achieved and contributed. We showed the best of ourselves during the worst of times.

Daryl O'Connor, Professor of Psychology at the University of Leeds