Category Archives: Open Research at Cambridge Conference

Cambridge University spend on Open Access 2009-2016

September 16, 2016UncategorizedAPC, article processing charges, COAF, compliance, gold open access, green open access, open access, RCUK, Wellcome TrustOffice of Scholarly Communication

Today is the deadline for those universities in receipt of an RCUK grant to submit their reports on the spend. We have just submitted the Cambridge University 2015-2016 report to the RCUK and have also made it available as a dataset in our repository.

Compliance

Cambridge had an estimated overall compliance rate of 76% with 46% of all RCUK funded papers available through the gold route and 30% of all RCUK funded papers available through the green route.

The RCUK Open Access Policy indicates that at the end of the fifth transition year of the policy (March 2018) they expect 75% of Open Access papers from the research they fund will be delivered through immediate, unrestricted, on‐line access with maximum opportunities for re‐use (‘gold’). Because Cambridge takes the position that if there is a green option that is compliant we do not pay for gold, our gold compliance number is below this, although our overall compliance level is higher, at 76%.

Compliance caveats

The total number of publications arising from research council funding was estimated by searching Web of Science for papers published by the University of Cambridge in 2015, and then filtered by funding acknowledgements made to the research councils. The number of papers (articles, reviews and proceedings papers) returned in 2015 was 2080. This is almost certainly an underestimate of the total number of publications produced by the University of Cambridge with research council funding. The analysis was performed on 15/09/2016.

Expenditure

The APC spend we have reported is only counting papers submitted to the University of Cambridge Open Access Team between 1 August 2015 and 31 July 2016. The ‘OA grant spent’ numbers provided are the actual spend out of the finance system. The delay between submission of an article, the commitment of the funds and the subsequent publication and payment of the invoice means that we have paid for invoices during the reporting period that were submitted outside the reporting period. This meant reconciliation of the amounts was impossible. This funding discrepancy was given in ‘Non-staff costs’, and represents unallocated APC payments not described in the report (i.e. they were received before or after the reporting period but incurred on the current 2015-16 OA grant).

The breakdown of costs indicates we have spent 4.6% of the year’s allocation on staff costs and 5.1% on systems support. We noted in the report that the staff time paid for out of this allocation also supports the processing of Wellcome Trust APCs for which no support is provided by Wellcome Trust.

Headline numbers

In total Cambridge spent £1,288,090 of RCUK funds on APCs
1786 articles identified as being RCUK funded were submitted to the Open Access Service, of which 890 required payment for RCUK*
785 articles have been invoiced and paid
The average article cost was ~£2008

Caveats

The average article cost can be established by adding the RCUK fund expenditure to the COAF fund expenditure on co-funded articles (£288,162.28) which gives a complete expenditure for these 785 articles of £1,576,252.42. The actual average cost is £2007.96.

* The Open Access Service also received many COAF only funded and unfunded papers during this period. The number of articles paid for does not include those made gold OA due to the Springer Compact as this would throw out the average APC value.

Observations

In our report on expenditure for 2014 the average article APC was £1891. This means there has been a 6% increase in Cambridge University’s average spend on an APC since then. It should be noted that of the journals for which we most frequently process APCs, Nature Communication is the second most popular. This journal has an APC of £3,780 including VAT.

Datasets on Cambridge APC spend 2009-2016

Cambridge released the information about its 2014 APC spend for RCUK and COAF in March last year and intended to do a similar report for the spend in 2015, however a recent FOI request has prompted us to simply upload all of our data on APC spend into our repository for complete transparency. The list of datasets now available is below.

1. Report presented to Research Councils UK for article processing charges managed by the University of Cambridge, 2014-2015

2. Report presented to the Charity Open Access Fund for article processing charges managed by the University of Cambridge, 2015-2016

3. Report presented to the Charity Open Access Fund for article processing charges managed by the University of Cambridge, 2014-2015

4. Report presented to Jisc for article processing charges managed by the University of Cambridge, 2014

5. Open access publication data for the management of the Higher Education Funding Council for England, Research Councils UK, Charities Open Access Fund and Wellcome Trust open access policies at the University of Cambridge, 2014-2016

Note: In October 2014 we started using a new system for recording submissions. This has allowed us to obtain more detailed information and allow multiple users to interact with the system. Until December 2015 our financial information was recorded in the spreadsheet below. There is overlap between reports 5. and 6. for the period 24 October and 31 December 2015. As of January 2016, all data is being collected in the one place.

6. Open access publication data for the management of Research Councils UK, Charities Open Access Fund and Wellcome Trust article processing charges at the Office of Scholarly Communication, 2013-2015

Note: In 2013 the Open Access Service began and took responsibility for the new RCUK fund, and was transferred responsibility for the new Charities Open Access Fund (COAF). At this time the team were recording when an article was fully Wellcome Trust funded, even though the Wellcome Trust funding is a component of COAF.

7. Open access publication data for the management of Wellcome Trust article processing charges from the School of Biological Sciences, 2009-2014

Note: Management of the funds to support open access publishing has changed over the past seven years. Before the RCUK open access policy came into force in 2013, the Wellcome Trust funds were managed by the School of Biological Sciences.

Published 14 September 2016
Written by Dr Danny Kingsley & Dr Arthur Smith

Making the connection: research data network workshop

September 16, 2016UncategorizedJisc, Open Research, preservation, replicability, research data, research data managementOffice of Scholarly Communication

During International Data Week 2016, the Office of Scholarly Communication is celebrating with a series of blog posts about data. The first post was a summary of an event we held in July. This post looks at the challenges associated with financially supporting RDM training.

Following the success of hosting the Data Dialogue: Barriers to Sharing event in July we were delighted to welcome the Research Data Management (RDM) community to Cambridge for the second Jisc research data network workshop. The event was held in Corpus Christi College with meals held in the historical dining room. (Image: Corpus Christi )

RDM services in the UK are maturing and efforts are increasingly focused on connecting disparate systems, standardising practices and making platforms more usable for researchers. This is also reflected in the recent Concordat on Research Data which links the existing statements from funders and government, providing a more unified message for researchers.

The practical work of connecting the different systems involved in RDM is being led by the Jisc Research Data Shared Services project which aims to share the cost of developing services across the UK Higher Education sector. As one of the pilot institutions we were keen to see what progress has been made and find out how the first test systems will work. On a personal note it was great to see that the pilot will attempt to address much of the functionality researchers request but that we are currently unable to fully provide, including detailed reporting on research data, links between the repository and other systems, and a more dynamic data display.

Context for these attempts to link, standardise and improve RDM systems was provided in the excellent keynote by Dr Danny Kingsley, head of the Office of Scholarly Communication at Cambridge, reminding us about the broader need to overhaul the reward systems in scholarly communications. Danny drew on the Open Research blogposts published over the summer to highlight some of the key problems in scholarly communications: hyperauthorship, peer review, flawed reward systems, and, most relevantly for data, replication and retraction. Sharing data will alleviate some of these issues but, as Danny pointed out, this will frequently not be possible unless data has been appropriately managed across the research lifecycle. So whilst trying to standardise metadata profiles may seem irrelevant to many researchers it is all part of this wider movement to reform scholarly communication.

Making metadata work

Metadata models will underpin any attempts to connect repositories, preservation systems, Current Research Information Systems (CRIS), and any other systems dealing with research data. Metadata presents a major challenge both in terms of capturing the wide variety of disciplinary models and needs, and in persuading researchers to provide enough metadata to make preservation possible without putting them off sharing their research data. Dom Fripp and Nicky Ferguson are working on developing a core metadata profile for the UK Research Data Discovery Service. They spoke about their work on developing a community-driven metadata standard to address these problems. For those interested (and Git-Hub literate) the project is available here.

They are drawing on national and international standards, such as the Portland Common Data Model, trying to build on existing work to create a standard which will work for the Shared Services model. The proposed standard will have gold, silver and bronze levels of metadata and will attempt to reward researchers for providing more metadata. This is particularly important as the evidence from Dom and Nicky’s discussion with researchers is that many researchers want others to provide lots of metadata but are reluctant to do the same themselves.

We have had some success with researchers filling in voluntary metadata fields for our repository, Apollo, but this seems to depend to a large extent on how aware researchers are of the role of metadata, something which chimes with Dom and Nicky’s findings. Those creating metadata are often unaware of the implications of how they fill in fields, so creating consistency across teams, let alone disciplines and institutions can be a struggle. Any Cambridge researchers who wish to contribute to this metadata standard can sign up to a workshop with Jisc in Cambridge on 3rd October.

Planning for the long-term

A shared metadata standard will assist with connecting systems and reducing researchers’ workload but if replicability, a key problem in scholarly communications, is going to be possible digital preservation of research data needs to be addressed. Jenny Mitcham from the University of York presented the work she has been undertaking alongside colleagues from the University of Hull on using Archivematica for preserving research data and linking it to pre-existing systems (more information can be found on their blog.)

Jenny highlighted the difficulties they encountered getting timely engagement from both internal stakeholders and external contractors, as well as linking multiple systems with different data models, again underlining the need for high quality and interoperable metadata. Despite these difficulties they have made progress on linking these systems and in the process have been able to look into the wide variety of file formats currently in use at York. This has lead to conversations with the National Archive about improving the coverage of research file formats in PRONOM (a registry of file formats for preservation purposes), work which will be extremely useful for the Shared Services pilot.

In many ways the project at York and Hull felt like a precursor to the Shared Services pilot; highlighting both the potential problems in working with a wide range of stakeholders and systems, as well as the massive benefits possible from pooling our collective knowledge and resources to tackle the technical challenges which remain in RDM.

Published 14 September 2016
Written by Rosie Higman

Championing RDM training

September 14, 2016Uncategorizedconcordat, Jisc, metadata, open data, RDM, research data management, TrainingOffice of Scholarly Communication

The problem

There is a desperate need for training in research data management. Our significant engagement with researchers at the University of Cambridge over the past 18 months has indicated to us that research data cannot be effectively shared if it has not been properly managed during the research lifecycle. Researchers cannot be expected to share their data at the end of their research project if they are unable to locate their data, if the data is not correctly labelled or if it lacks metadata to make the data re-usable. We have stated that on several occasions, including our response to the draft UK Concordat on Open Research Data which was released in its final form on the 28th July this year.

To test whether our beliefs were in-line with researchers’ needs, last year we conducted a short survey on research data management needs among our academic community. Of those responding, 94% of researchers indicated that it would be ‘useful’ or ‘very useful’ to have workshops on research data management (see our earlier blog post for the full discussion of the survey results). In response to this we developed a 1.5 hour introductory workshop to research data management and started delivering this to researchers in Cambridge in July 2015.

Train early, train often

Our workshops have evolved substantially since the initial sessions, through responses to the feedback we collect. The workshops are now considerably improved, not only more interactive, but also have been extended to 2.5 hours to allow time to provide more practical examples of good data management.

The feedback from our workshops was overwhelmingly positive. As a result, many departments identified research data management skills as core competencies needed by every PhD student and asked us to deliver our workshops as part of their compulsory training for PhD students. This is fantastic news for both our team and the awareness of RDM at Cambridge, and we have therefore accepted all these individual requests.

But sometimes you can be a little too successful. We recently received another request from the Graduate School of Life Sciences to make our workshop compulsory for all their PhD students. While this is great news, there are 400 new PhD students every year at the Graduate School of Life Sciences. The maximum capacity at our workshop is 20 attendees, which means we would need to deliver 20 workshops throughout the year to cover this cohort. And when we consider the Graduate School of Life Sciences is one of five schools accepting PhD students in Cambridge, we need to look at how we would respond if other schools approached us with similar requests.

Another issue is that while our improved workshop on research data management covered the basic research data management needs, researchers have told us they need more in-depth discipline-specific training. We recognise this, and do try to provide training that is directed at the audience – a challenge when we need to serve all researchers across the University – from arts and humanities through social and life sciences, to medical research and particle physics (and many, many other disciplines).

So we have identified a broad need for RDM training, a specific need for training for PhD students as they begin their research, as well as discipline-specific support for all researchers. But there are only two staff members in the Research Data Team who can deliver RDM training, and delivering training is only one of many tasks which we need to undertake for the Research Data Facility to function. We simply do not have the capacity to meet this obvious need. After discussion we have agreed to deliver four workshops out of the requested 20 for the Graduate School of Life Sciences and to reconsider the situation in the summer break next year.

The plan – Data Champions

We have begun to think both about how we can meet RDM training needs given current staff capacity and how we can link the experts in different aspects of data management that we know exist around the University of Cambridge. There is already an active OpenCon Cambridge group which promotes the benefits of Open Access, Open Data and Open Education; but we wanted to focus on all aspects of RDM.

We have started to develop the idea of having Data Champions in each department, institute or college who can act as the local experts as well as delivering some discipline-specific training to their community. This has the advantage of increasing the number of trainers across the University, making the workshops tailored to the relevant audience, and building a community of experts.

The University of Cambridge is not alone in facing this problem and the several other universities are pursing, or already have, Data Champions in some form. The idea was recently discussed on both Jisc RDM mailing lists and at the Research Data Network meeting which was held at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge last week. At this meeting several different models were proposed, including a national network of champions who could advocate within disciplines at a senior level.

Whilst a national network of champions would be great in the long term we still have an immediate problem within the University of Cambridge and so we have launched a Call for Data Champions to help us raise awareness and increase the amount of training available. The call is open until 17^th October and we would welcome any research or support staff or research student with an interest in RDM. There will be support available in learning how to deliver RDM training, a template workshop provided, the opportunity to influence the future of RDM services and a website built to showcase our Data Champions.

We hope to bring all the Data Champions together towards the end of the Michaelmas term so they can start delivering workshops in 2017. We hope to foster a community of experts who can share their knowledge with each other and the Research Data Team so we are in a better position to support our researchers.

The future

The community of Data Champions we hope to bring together at Cambridge will begin to ameliorate some of the problems we are facing with regards to RDM training. However, we will still struggle with staff capacity and at some point researchers will need to be appropriately rewarded for sharing data and supporting others to do the same, a theme of our recent Open Research discussion event.

So we have a temporary solution, and one which we hope will significantly improve the RDM training available at Cambridge, but the issue will not be solved until the underlying incentives for sharing data, publications and all the other research outputs have been addressed.

Published 14 September 2016
Written by Rosie Higman and Dr Marta Teperek