Thomas is a Reader for Control Engineering in the Department of Aeronautical and Automotive Engineering, and the Open Research Lead for the School of Aeronautical and Automotive, Chemical and Materials Engineering.

What sparked your interest in Open Research? 

My interest in Open Research is driven by a desire to make research more collaborative, more transparent, and more accessible. I strongly believe that transparency is the best answer to the replication crisis. As we share our methods, our research data, and our code, replicating results becomes simpler, and that in turn makes it easier to innovate, at least incrementally, based on existing work.  

On Open vs confidentiality 

In our School of Aeronautical, Automotive, Chemical and Materials Engineering, the approach to Open Research often meets confidentiality concerns from partner companies. It is not unusual to publish graphs without axis labels, or with normalised axes, to overcome this, and consequently, research data is often not published. At the same time, we have managed to create and publish important open datasets based on non-confidential work, and I hope we can extend this in the future.

Where do you see Open Research going in the future? 

I always say that my interest goes beyond Open Access. Personally, I have contributed to Open-Source projects for many decades, and I have a few Open-Source projects going myself. I even managed to get a small line into the Linux kernel at some point. What I never really achieved was to create a vibrant open-source community, and I still hope that I will eventually find the right area.

Thomas’s top 10 by downloads in the Loughborough University Research Repository