In April I attended the Practitioner Day at the London Open Science & Scholarship Festival 2026<\/a>, which took place at the Francis Crick Institute. It was an engaging and useful day, and I got a lot out of some really thoughtfully designed sessions. This Spring felt like a tipping point in how UK research organisations approach open science and scholarship, back towards repository support, closely followed by UKRI’s announcement of changes to its block grant terms and conditions<\/a> and an energising Research Libraries UK-organised Repositories Symposium<\/a> at the British Library.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I wanted to share the practical takeaways I picked up, with a core theme being how open research policies are maturing, while challenges in implementing policy, monitoring activity and achieving large-scale behavioural change remain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The first session considered different perspectives, starting with Gareth Knight, Research Data Manager at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. Two points he made thoroughly resonated with me. The first was understanding your audience and using approachable language – sometimes we need to sacrifice relentless accuracy for intelligibility! The second was researchers feeling like they are “getting homework from multiple teachers” with research data priorities diverging between stakeholders. It’s so important we align and simplify as much as possible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The second speaker in the session was Paul Richards, Open Research Lead at UKRI. Last year, while working at Research Consulting, I helped kick off some work with UKRI on their approach to data management plans within the review of the UKRI Research Data Policy. I believe we’re expecting an update soon<\/a>. It was reassuring to hear Paul talking about how UKRI is considering FAIR data, digital research infrastructure, trusted research, future research talent and artificial intelligence in a linked up way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sarah Molloy, Head of Library Research Support at Queen Mary University of London, did a great job in taking a mixed group of practitioners through the topic of rights retention. Sarah spoke about how valuable communities of practice have been to her work in this area, with a session that paid this forward by giving attendees a space to discuss ideas and plan next steps.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Over the last seven months I’ve been heavily involved with the second phase of implementing rights retention at Loughborough University<\/a> – our authors started automatically retaining their rights just three weeks before the workshop, and the Library is seeing more and more articles deposited with immediate rights retention every week. Communicating a complex policy in a simple way is an ongoing challenge, so the practitioner day was a great space to bring people together, identify shared struggles, and even highlight a few areas where I realised our own local implementation had been comparatively straightforward.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I stepped into the spotlight for this third session, leading a discussion on cOAlition S and Plan S. The research funders represented by the Session 4 panel were all members of cOAlition S so it felt very topical! My workshop aimed to take participants on a journey around how Plan S has changed and developed since cOAlition S first formed in 2018. My slides: Plan S and its implications<\/a> are available if you’d like to check them out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n From a show of hands in the room, the community was very aware of the original Plan S launch, but far less aware of the consultation ‘Towards Responsible Publishing’ that took place in 2023-24, and even less aware of the updated strategy cOAlition S launched in November 2025. I invited the group to discuss the bold proposals in ‘Towards Responsible Publishing’ in some detail before revealing the course correction that followed, which I’d recommend reviewing. I’m watching with interest to see what follows, with cOAlition S having since appointed Curt Rice as its new Director<\/a> and OPERAS as its new host secretariat<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The final session for the day brought together a panel of research funders (listed in full below) representing varied strategic approaches to publishing and open access. The Gates Foundation’s shift to preprints is the most radical shift in funder policy for quite a while, and it has been interesting to see Howard Hughes Medical Institute follow in a similar direction.<\/p>\n\n\n\nSession 1: Research perspectives on data sharing and reproducibility expectations<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Session 2: Rights Retention workshop<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Session 3: Plan S and its implications<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Session 4: Funder perspectives panel<\/h2>\n\n\n\n