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In the latest instalment of our Open Research Spotlight series focusing on the work of our , OR Fellow Dr. Georgia Vesma and John Hynes, Research Librarian and OR Fellowship Programme Community Manager, discuss Georgia鈥檚 Fellowship experiences and insights from her funded project.

Why did you want to do a Fellowship? 

I鈥檝e been in a non-academic role since completing my PhD. I have long been interested in how interdisciplinary research works, and the opportunity to have some time to investigate this alongside my substantive role was exciting. It was also nice to have the opportunity to do research again, in a very different area to my PhD research, and learn some new methods in the process.

What did you do during your Fellowship? 

I surveyed self-identified interdisciplinary researchers from across the University on their experiences of co-authoring and publishing papers with contributors from multiple disciplines. I focused on two main strands: co-authoring as a practice (negotiating roles, producing and refining manuscripts) and peer review (from the perspective of authors, reviewers and editors.)

After the survey I conducted follow-up interviews with 12 respondents to gain some qualitative depth and gain a greater understanding of some of the barriers and enablers to publishing co-authored interdisciplinary research, and I held two small focus groups to work through these barriers and enablers with researchers from a variety of disciplines.

What did you find out? 

That 鈥榯raditional鈥� anonymised and double-anonymised peer review processes aren鈥檛 working well for interdisciplinary research publications. Editors, reviewers and authors all reported challenges in getting fair, informed peer review for publications that integrate two or more disciplines. Reviewers in particular found themselves under pressure to review publications where they felt they could not provide fair comment on all aspects, and fell back on informal strategies to address this. In some cases reviewers asked non-reviewer colleagues to assist with the reviewing, which is at odds with the objectives of anonymised peer review. I published some findings on this in Research Integrity & Peer Review.

I also found that co-authoring across disciplinary boundaries comes with research culture issues. Earlier-career researchers are more likely than senior colleagues to have had a negative experience co-authoring. Female academics report lower satisfaction with the process of interdisciplinary co-authoring on average than their male counterparts, and this seems to be driven by a few strongly negative experiences. When I dug deeper into the enablers of and barriers to positive co-authoring, I uncovered evidence that the perceived major barriers are institutional in nature. While universities claim to be supportive of interdisciplinary research, material support often ends before the writing-up period. I have an article on this topic under review at Exchanges.

What challenges did you face? 

Fitting Fellowship activities in around my day job, especially in the later months when I should have been focused on writing up. Keeping the time protected was challenging.

It was also hard to 鈥榮witch modes鈥�. Even though I have a research background, I鈥檓 not in a research role, so I had to move between two quite different ways of working. My background is photographic history, and most of my experience is in solitary archival research, rather than the more social-science based methods I employed for this project. I had to learn quite a lot quite quickly, and I also had to drop quite a few proposed elements of my project to ensure I could deliver anything!

All of this was made possible by having a wonderful and supportive academic mentor (Dr Helen Holmes.) She encouraged me to try new things and we scheduled regular co-writing days to ensure I stayed on track with outputs.

What will you be doing next with the project and Open Research generally? 

My Open Research Fellowship got me more deeply involved with research culture issues at the University, so I鈥檓 now collaborating with Dr. Julia Schoonover to plan some research around the role of 鈥榬esearch-enabling roles鈥� in driving research project success. This does still have some Open Research implications, like the inclusion of 鈥渘on-academic鈥� collaborators on published outputs. So I鈥檓 maintaining an interest in how Open Access publishing works (and doesn鈥檛 work) for people involved in interdisciplinary research.

Find out more

• Read about our Open Research Fellowship Programme via our and .
• Check out our first blog post in this series, featuring OR Fellow Dr. Ellen Poliakoff.