Open Research and Medieval Studies: what is it, how to do it and why is it important? (Friday 21 November, 2025)

Description

Emerging researchers face many barriers to open research practice, especially in the field of Medieval Studies. As such, the workshop ‘Open Research and Medieval Studies’ was delivered on 21st November 2025 for a SCRAMS session (an informal presentation of a paper by a current student and then Q&A) at Centre for Medieval Studies (CMS). The session was aimed at the CMS student community and participants included both postgraduate researchers and postgraduate taught students.

The workshop aimed to provide an overview of different routes into open research practice, highlighting relevant examples for those in Medieval Studies and which might not have been considered by researchers. For instance, large scale participatory transcription projects like Deciphering Secrets: Unlocking the Manuscripts of Medieval Spain, or how researchers might follow the open research principle of reproducibility by adding transcripts of Latin documents to appendixes for other researchers to use. While open publishing and public engagement take centre stage in the open practice of medievalists, the workshop provided an opportunity to discuss what kinds of open research would be valuable for Medieval Studies, and there were particularly interesting discussions around the benefits of sharing research proposals, methodologies and negative results.

Also discussed were the benefits of open research, for the individual researcher, research communities and the wider public. Benefits to the researcher include increased visibility of work, but also opens opportunities to collaborate in and outside of academia. Easier access to research is an especially important benefit to the research community and wider public, especially given the global, interdisciplinary, and practice-led (in institutions such as galleries, libraries, archives, and museums) nature of Medieval Studies. As discussed, open research offers recourse to issues of precarity in academia and GLAM institutions, and how the medieval period can be appropriated problematically in public discourse.

Materials