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Blood: in short supply?
Two years ago (almost to the day) we called out Blood for their misleading open access options that they offered to Research Council and Charity Open Access Fund (COAF) authors. Unfortunately, little has changed since then: Blood continues to demand a $1000 ‘service fee’ to deposit manuscripts in PubMed Central (PMC). Nature, for sake of comparison, will do this for free. Their ASH Author Choice option, which costs $2500, offers no form of Creative Commons licence in return. Neither of these routes is sufficient to comply with either Research Councils’ or COAF’s open access policies which require that the accepted text be made available in PMC within 6 months of…
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In their own words: working in scholarly communication
Last month we put out a call for people working in scholarly communication to record and send us their views on what it takes to work in this area. After a slow start we now have a few uploaded. As a head’s up, here’s the combined responses from four Jisc sessions held over summer to the question: Which personal attributes do you think are most valuable in scholarly communications roles? With words like ‘persistence’, ‘communication’, approachability’ and ‘negotiation’, this word cloud starts to reflect some of the advice we published recently for new starters in open access. But it’s not all scary – some of it is even fun! Take…
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Where are we now? Cambridge theses deposits one year in
As the nights draw in and the academic year 2018/19 begins, we are preparing to enter our second year of compulsory e-theses deposits. Our university repository, Apollo, is close to holding 6000 digital PhD theses and it is the intention of the University that this valuable research asset continues to grow into the future. The Apollo repository will play a large part in making this happen. Until recently only hardbound copies of theses were collected and catalogued by the University Library. Users could read theses on-site in Cambridge or order a digitisation of the thesis, but the introduction of e-thesis deposit to Apollo has meant that University of Cambridge theses are more…
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What do you want, and why do you want it? An update on Request a Copy
As part of Open Access Week 2018, the Office of Scholarly Communication is publishing a series of blog posts on open access and open research. In this post Dr Mélodie Garnier provides some new insights into our Request a Copy service. 4,416. This is the number of requests for copies of material in our repository we’ve received over the past 12 months. Daunting, isn’t it? And definitely on the rise, with a 33% increase from the previous year. Two years and a half after its implementation in June 2016, our Request a Copy service is now more popular than ever. Our institutional repository Apollo hosts thousands of freely available research…
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Text and data mining services: an update
Text and Data Mining (TDM) is the process of digitally querying large collections of machine-readable material, extracting specific information and, by analysis, discovering new information about a topic. In February 2017, a group University of Cambridge staff met to discuss “Text and Data Mining Services: What can Cambridge libraries offer?” It was agreed that a future library Text and Data Mining (TDM) support service could include: Access to data from our own collections Advice on legal issues, what publishers allow, what data sets and tools are available Registers on data provided for mining and TDM projects Fostering agreements with publishers. This blog reports on some of the activities, events and…
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Cambridge Open Access spend 2013-2018
Since 2013, the Open Access Team has been helping Cambridge researchers, funded by Research Councils UK (RCUK) and the consortium of biomedical funders which make up the Charity Open Access Fund (COAF), to meet their Open Access obligations. Both RCUK (now part of UKRI) and COAF have Open Access policies which have a preference for ‘gold’, i.e. the published work should be Open Access immediately at the time of publication. Implementing these policies has come at a significant cost. In this time, Cambridge has been awarded just over £10 million from RCUK and COAF to implement their Open Access policies, and the Open Access Team has diligently used this funding…
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So, what is it really like to work in research support and scholarly communication?
Followers of this blog will remember various posts over the last year about the OSC’s work as part of the Scholarly Communication Professional Development group. This group of interested parties from across the information sector aims to look at the training needs of those working in (or wanting to work in) scholarly communication and how these can best be met. Although it’s an expanding area of academic librarianship with a rapidly growing number of roles, those hiring for these positions often report that it can be hard to recruit from within the library community. Too often those from a library background, both new and more established professionals, don’t know enough…
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Lessons learned from Jisc Research Data Champions
In 2017 four Cambridge researchers received grants from Jisc to develop and share their research data management practices. In this blog, the four awardees each highlight one aspect of their work as a Jisc Data Champion. The project All four Champions embarked on a range of activities throughout the year including creating local communities interested in RDM practices, delivering training, running surveys to understand their department better, creating ‘how-to’ guides for would-be RDM mentors and testing Samvera as part of RDSS. They were excited by the freedom that the grant gave them to try out whatever RDM related activities they wanted, which meant they could develop their skills and see…
