The Our Handbook user guide!
🚧 Thank you for your patience while we develop this repository 🚧
Welcome to the Our Handbook user guide GitHub repository! This repository is part of the Our Handbook project, and contains code for the how-to-guide that tells you how to get the most out of the Our Handbook template - a template for an RSE or research group handbook.
The Our Handbook project
Very Good Science is working with researchers to build the Our Handbook resources: a research group staff handbook template and materials to help you use it. We hope research group leaders and members will work together using these resources to:
- build a healthy, inclusive, enjoyable research culture in their group
- produce the most ethical and rigorous research possible
We welcome contributions in order to create a richer resource for others.
The Our Handbook template, and therefore the research group handbook you will make from it, are Jupyter Books.
Group leaders and members edit the book together to create a living document which works for them. The Our Handbook template has a variety of different sections, your group might not use all of them, and each section has a variety of solutions that you can choose from.
Why should you create a research group staff handbook?
A group handbook can be used to ensure the following practical aims:
- Everyone knows how to access the available help and support (be it computational/statistical support, counselling, administrative/communications support...), by providing a one-stop-shop for up to date signposting of help and support available to group members.
- Responsibilities and expectations of group leaders and group members are explicit (e.g. "PhD students send a weekly email detailing their weekly progress using this email template", or "Group leaders will be available for one-to-ones with each group member once per fortnight", or "It is Jennifer's (Group leader) responsibility to organise the group meetings, which happen twice monthly"). These expectations can be as broad, or exact as your group finds useful.
- Standards for research outputs are clear (e.g. "In this group, we make data FAIR wherever possible", or "We ensure privacy for research participants"), and the barriers to meeting these standards is as low as possible (i.e. by including or linking to how-to-guides)
- Group members have agency to impact the research culture of the group (as they can continue to edit the handbook), potential future group members can easily get a flavour of the research culture (the handbook is shared in job adverts), and it's easy to welcome them when they arrive as everything is in one place (in the handbook).
- Everyone knows who to go to to ask all kinds of questions (e.g. "Ask Katy about GitHub Actions", "Ask Matt about multilevel modelling", "Ask Jessica about contracts"), and where to find important documents (as they are linked to).
Your handbook can be used for as many or as few of these purposes as you like, but it should be a living document that the group continues to author together.
Why are we making these things (template handbook and how-to-use guide)?
Research culture can be a hellscape:
- researchers often feel stressed, unsupported, and isolated
- a lack of guidance in how to do research can contribute to untrustworthy research outputs
A lot of this can come down to the research culture within a group. By research culture, we mean the often unspoken processes which impact both how it feels to work there and the quality of research outputs. There is little support for group leaders who wish to improve the research culture in their groups. We want to change that.
We hope that, by reducing the barriers for groups to consider their research culture, we will support group leaders in taking responsibility for it: to help them set standards for the quality of research that comes out of their group, and to create ways of working that protect the health and wellbeing of their group members and themselves. Your handbook might help you and your group in any of the practical ways described above.
In addition to the benefits to the research groups that are working this way, we also hope this will impact on broader research culture. We want to normalise the idea that spending some time to building a healthy research culture is worthwhile. We would love universities to consider commitment of researchers to creating a healthy research culture in hiring and promotion decisions.
How to use
Thank you for taking this opportunity to create a considered and healthy research culture for your group ✨
A basic run down of how to use our template repository is below, but detailed instructions can be found here in our deployed handbook.
1. Make your own copy of the template repository
- Fork the repo (if your group doesn't have a GitHub organisation, perhaps make one and fork to there).
- Make all members of your team collaborators of the forked repo
2. Edit the book with your team
- Clone the forked repo locally
- Set up an away day, a hack day, or a series of team meetings where you edit the book together - detailed suggestions and guidance for what to edit and how to run the sessions here!
3. Make your handbook available online
- Follow the instructions here to make your handbook available online.
- Make sure that you link to the handbook on your group website, and in any job (including PhD studentship) openings.
- Please tell us if you use this handbook!
4. Keep the book updated
4A. Onboard new team members using the handbook when they join
- Show them around the handbook and the current expectations for group members.
- Show them how to edit the handbook, and ask them to edit themselves in to the team members section (using the instructions for new members page).
4B. Review the book
- Review the book as a team regularly (we suggest once per year). Set aside a session at an away day or a team meeting to do this. This is an opportunity for the team to share new expertise that they've learned in the last year, and to decide as a group to adapt new group-wide policies or processes.
- Review the book with team members individually (we suggest every 6 months for new staff, or once per year for others). This is an opportunity to check that the groups research culture is working for everyone.
Contact us
We would love 💖 you to contact us if you'd like to any of the following:
- Make suggestions for improvements
- Talk about this project
- Ask for help
- Let us know about your deployed handbook, or how it has worked for you.
Opening a GitHub issue is our favourite way, but you can also email us.
The Mozilla Open Leadership Training Series was used to help plan this project. It is inspired by efforts to increase the accessibility of science such as The Turing Way and The Carpentries.