DrHamid Khan

Hamid joined Imperial College London as Open Research Manager in December 2022, after a four-year stint at the charity Sense about Science. Before that, he was a researcher, and he considers himself a "recovering academic".

Hamid is based in the Scholarly Communications Management team in Library Services. He works with researchers, academics and professional staff across Imperial to equip the university community with the confidence and skills to embed Open Research into their work, and understand how Open Research can benefit them, the institution, the wider academic world and society at large.

As well as this, Hamid works closely with the Early Career Researcher Institute (ECRI) to deliver PhD and postdoctoral training. He teaches a Library course on 'Open Research: Preprints and Peer Review' via ECRI and is a tutor in 'Trust and Trustworthiness' on the MSc Bioscience Futures via the Faculty of Medicine. His teaching responsibilities include termly training sessions on Open Research for new starters and administrative staff. 

Along with Ruth Hibbert, Senior Scholarly Communications Assistant, Hamid is co-editor of the quarterly Imperial Open Research newsletter.

A major focus of Hamid's current work is on fostering a positive research culture that promotes transparent, equitable, accessible and reliable practices throughout the research lifecycle. He leads the 'Beyond Open Research' project, supported by Vice-Provost Mary Ryan and funded via Research England's Enhancing Research Culture grant. The aim of the project is to foster a research culture at Imperial that recognises and incentivises high-quality research.

(1) What is Open Research?

Open Research is the collective name for the principles and practices that help make research meaningfully accessible and reusable by others. In turn, openness helps to improve the visibility, quality and impact of research.

In contrast to Open Access, which deals with the point of publication, Open Research looks at the whole research lifecycle and beyond. At Imperial, we ask how we can embed the principles of transparency, equity, accessibility and reliability at every step from the conception of the research all the way through to application. Aspects of Open Research include:

• Open methodology
• Open data
• Open source
• Open hardware
• Open peer review
• Open access
• Open educational resources

Hamid can work with you to understand these principles, how they work in practice, the benefits of engaging with them, and how you can incorporate them into your work.

Some examples of Open Research practices that Hamid advocates:

• pre-registration of methods, protocols and analyses (e.g., Registered Reports)
• research data management, licensing and data transparency
• peer review reports and methodological studies
• public involvement in research
• the development and sharing of teaching and learning resources.

By using these practices to embed openness into your research, you can help address key challenges that affect research and researchers all over the world:

• the so-called “reproducibility crisis”
• publication bias
• research waste
• “publish-or-perish” research culture

(2) Hamid's university positions

(3) Hamid's other activities

In addition to his main role, Hamid has served on the international Peer Review Week steering committee since 2019, contributing to the strategic direction of the event each year and organising and co-hosting webinars on topics related to the year's Peer Review Week theme.

As of January 2024, he sits on the Board of Directors of SPARC Europe, an international organisation promoting Open Science, Open Scholarship and Open Education. He is vice-chair of the board as of 2025.

Since May 2025, Hamid has been the UK Reproducibility Network's Local Network Lead for Imperial. In this role, Hamid represents the grassroots network of researchers and professional staff who are dedicated to advocating and embedding reproducibility (in all its forms) into Imperial's research. Hamid is one of many LNLs at institutions around the UK. However, Imperial is not yet a full member of UKRN. Hamid is actively advocating and campaigning for that to happen.

Hamid is a firm believer in the power of meaningful public engagement and involvement to transform the quality of societal discourse about things that really matter in people's lives. Therefore, he is an enthusiastic member and supporter of Imperial's Societal Engagement Champions network.

A recovering academic, Hamid holds a PhD in nanomaterials chemistry from the University of Southampton and the A*STAR Institute of Materials Research and Engineering, Singapore.

In his spare time, he is an avid quizzer, film buff and sports fan, and has dabbled in almost everything, including ballroom dancing, creative writing, model-making and a rapidly abandoned attempt to be selected as goalkeeper for England.