Baking in disciplinary and epistemic diversity in open research training workshop responses and readout

On 31 March 2025 at 13:00 BST (UTC+1), the UK Reproducibility Network (UKRN) train-the-trainer community held an online event discussing the need to recognise diverse disciplines and epistemologies in open research training. The hour began with a brief reflection on the topic presented by Pen-Yuan Hsing (“Pen”) from the University of Bristol. The video recording of this presentation, along with additional notes and further reading, are published here: https://write.as/naclscrg/epistemic-and-disciplinary-diversity https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10643245 The rest of the session was split into three breakout rooms to discuss two prompts: How can the open research community better engage with and learn from disciplines that have different methodological and epistemological approaches? With disciplinary and epistemic diversity in mind, how could we deliver open research training to different and mixed audiences in an inclusive way? The first few minutes of each breakout session was a quiet time when we asked participants to type their responses into collaborative Etherpads hosted by Framasoft. For the rest of the session, the host of each room facilitated a verbal discussion of the responses and took additional notes. As a wrap-up activity at the end, we also asked participants to share on the Etherpads their thoughts on possible next steps (for UKRN, themselves, or anyone else) on elevating disciplinary diversity in open research training. Before leaving, they could also comment on the design of the event itself. For those who could not make the event, we gave them a chance to feed into the discussion through an online survey hosted by Liberaforms. This item contains the written feedback from both the breakout sessions and the pre-event survey in various file formats. There is also a "readout" document that groups the feedback into key messages and themes (`readout from event 2025-03-31.docx`) and as a PDF file.