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‘No free labor’ – we agree.
[NOTE: The introductory sentence to this blog was changed on 27 June to provide clarification] Last week members of the University of California* released a Call to Action to ‘Champion change in journal negotiations’ which references the April 2018 Declaration of Rights and Principles to Transform Scholarly Communication. This states as one of the 18 principles: “No free labor. Publishers shall provide our Institution with data on peer review and editorial contributions by our authors in support of journals, and such contributions shall be taken into account when determining the cost of our subscriptions or OA fees for our authors.” Well, this is interesting. At Cambridge we have been trying to look…
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Observations on a data gathering project
The Office of Scholarly Communication provides information, advice and training on research data management. So when faced with running a research project that involves a considerable amount of data, it is telling to see if we can practice what we preach. This blog post is a short list of how we have approached managing data for analysis. Judging by our colleagues’ faces when we described some of the advice here, this is blindingly obvious to some people. But it was news to us, so we are sharing it in case it is helpful to others. Organising and storing the data As is good practice we have started with a Data Management…
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Cambridge’s RCUK/COAF Open Access spend January 2017 – March 2018
It’s been reporting season for institutions in receipt of RCUK Open Access block grant awards, so we’ve been busy preparing data for both RCUK (now UKRI) and Jisc about how Cambridge has spent its funding allocation over the past 15 months (January 2017 – March 2018). In this blog post I’ll focus mainly on the Jisc Open Access article processing charge (APC) report as it includes both RCUK and COAF expenditure, which we’ve made available in Apollo (the RCUK report is available there too). We’ve had to make a few tweaks to the data to perform the analysis that follows, but that shouldn’t substantially affect the figures. Unless stated otherwise,…
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Compliance is not the whole story
Today, Research England released Monitoring sector progress towards compliance with funder open access policies the results of a survey they ran in August last year in conjunction with RCUK, Wellcome Trust and Jisc. Cambridge University was one of the 113 institutions that answered a significant number of questions about how we were managing compliance with various open access policies, what systems we were using and our decision making processes. Reading the collective responses has been illuminating. The rather celebratory commentary from UKRI has focused on the compliance aspect – see the Research England’s press release: Over 80% of research outputs meet requirements of REF 2021 open access policy and the…
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What’s new in OA?
The world of Open Access moves fast and it can be difficult to keep up. We run regular updates for our community here at Cambridge and following a recent webinar, figured a blog about it might be a good idea too. Strap yourselves in, this is a bumpy ride. Sweden draws the line After a breakdown in negotiations, the Bibsam Consortium in Sweden cancelled the agreement with Elsevier on 16 May. It is anticipated that after 1 July 2018, Swedish universities will not have access to new articles in Elsevier’s journals. Articles published before this date will remain accessible. In his blog, The circuitous road towards open access: Swedish universities to pull…
