Monthly Archives: November 2016

Creating a research data community

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Are research institutions engaging their researchers with Research Data Management (RDM)? And if so, how are they doing it? In this post, Rosie Higman (@RosieHLib), Research Data Advisor, University of Cambridge, and Hardy Schwamm (@hardyschwamm),  Research Data Manager, Lancaster University explore the work they are doing in their respective institutions.

Whilst funder policies were the initial catalyst for many RDM services at UK universities there are many reasons to engage with RDM, from increased impact to moving towards Open Research as the new normal. And a growing number of researchers are keen to get involved! These reasons also highlight the need for a democratic, researcher-led approach if the behavioural change necessary for RDM is to be achieved. Following initial discussions online and at the Research Data Network event in Cambridge on 6 September, we wanted to find out whether and how others are engaging researchers beyond iterating funder policies.

At both Cambridge and Lancaster we are starting initiatives focused on this, respectively Data Champions and Data Conversations. The Data Champions at Cambridge will act as local experts in RDM, advocating at a departmental level and helping the RDM team to communicate across a fragmented institution. We also hope they will form a community of practice, sharing their expertise in areas such as big data and software preservation. The Lancaster University Data Conversations will provide a forum to researchers from all disciplines to share their data experiences and knowledge. The first event will be on 30 January 2017.

RDMFBreakoutHaving presented our respective plans to the RDM Forum (RDMF16) in Edinburgh on 22nd November we ran breakout sessions where small groups discussed the approaches our and other universities were taking, the results summarised below highlighting different forms that engagement with researchers will take.

Targeting our training

RDM workshops seem to be the most common way research data teams are engaging with researchers, typically targeting postgraduate research students and postdoctoral researchers. A recurrent theme was the need to target workshops for specific disciplinary groups, including several workshops run jointly between institutions where this meant it was possible to get sufficient participants for smaller disciplines. Alongside targeting disciplines some have found inviting academics who have experience of sharing their data to speak at workshops greatly increases engagement.

As well as focusing workshops so they are directly applicable to particular disciplines, several institutions have had success in linking their workshop to a particular tangible output, recognising that researchers are busy and are not interested in a general introduction. Examples of this include workshops around Data Management Plans, and embedding RDM into teaching students how to use databases.

An issue many institutions are having is getting the timing right for their workshops: too early and research students won’t have any data to manage or even be thinking about it; too late and students may have got into bad data management habits. Finding the goldilocks time which is ‘just right’ can be tricky. Two solutions to this problem were proposed: having short online training available before a more in-depth training later on, and having a 1 hour session as part of an induction followed by a 2 hour session 9-18 months into the PhD.

Tailored support

Alongside workshops, the most popular way to get researchers interested in RDM was through individual appointments, so that the conversation can be tailored to their needs, although this obviously presents a problem of scalability when most institutions only have one individual staff member dedicated to RDM.

IMG_20161122_121401There are two solutions to this problem which were mentioned during the breakout session. Firstly, some people are using a ‘train the trainer’ approach to involve other research support staff who are based in departments and already have regular contact with researchers. These people can act as intermediaries and are likely to have a good awareness of the discipline-specific issues which the researchers they support will be interested in.

The other option discussed was holding drop-in sessions within departments, where researchers know the RDM team will be on a regular basis. These have had mixed success at many institutions but seem to work better when paired with a more established service such as the Open Access or Impact team.

What RDM services should we offer?

We started the discussion at the RDM Forum thinking about extending our services beyond sheer compliance in order to create an “RDM community” where data management is part of good research practice and contributes to the Open Research agenda. This is the thinking behind the new initiatives at Cambridge and Lancaster.

However, there were also some critical or sceptical voices at our RDMF16 discussions. How can we promote an RDM community when we struggle to persuade researchers being compliant with institutional and funder policies? All RDM support teams are small and have many other tasks aside from advocacy and training. Some expressed concern that they lack the skills to market our services beyond the traditional methods used by libraries. We need to address and consider these concerns about capacity and skill sets as we attempt to engage researchers beyond compliance.

Summary

It is clear from our discussions that there is a wide variety of RDM-related activities at UK universities which stretch beyond enforcing compliance, but engaging large numbers of researchers is an ongoing concern. We also realised that many RDM professionals are not very good at practising what we preach and sharing our materials, so it’s worth highlighting that training materials can be shared on the RDM training community on Zenodo as long as they have an open license.

Many thanks to the participants at our breakout session at the RDMForum 16, and Angus Whyte for taking notes which allowed us to write this piece. You can follow previous discussions on this topic on Gitter.

Published on 30 November
Written by Rosie Higman and Hardy Schwamm
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Changing roles and changing needs for academic librarians

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The Office of Scholarly Communication (OSC) has joined the Centre for Evidence Based Library and Information Practice (C-EBLIP) Research Network, and as part of this commitment has prepared the following blog which is a literature review of papers published addressing the changing training needs for academic librarians. This work feeds into research currently being carried out by the OSC into the educational background of those working in scholarly communication. The piece concludes with a discussion of this research and potential next steps.

Changing roles

There is no doubt that libraries are experiencing another dramatic change as a result of developments in digital technologies. Twenty years ago in their paper addressing the education of library and information science professionals, Van House and Sutton note that “libraries are only one part of the information industry and for many segments of the society they are not the most important part”.

There is an argument that “as user habits take a digital turn, the library as place and public services in the form of reference, collection development and organisation of library resources for use, all have diminishing value to researchers”. Librarians need to adapt and move beyond these roles to one where they play a greater part in the research process.

To this end scholarly communication is becoming an increasingly established area in many academic libraries. New roles are being created and advertised in order to better support researchers as they face increasing pressure to share their work. Indeed a 2012 analysis into new activities and changing roles for health science librarians identified ‘Scholarly communications librarians’ as a new role for health sciences librarians based on job announcements whilst in their 2015 paper on scholarly communication coaching Todd, Brantley and Duffin argue that: “To successfully address the current needs of a forward-thinking faculty, the academic library needs to place scholarly communication competencies in the toolkit of every librarian who has a role interacting with subject faculty.”

Which skill sets are needed?

Much of the literature is in agreement about the specific skill set librarians need to work in scholarly communication. “Reskilling for Research”identified nine areas of skill which would have increasing importance including knowledge about data management and curation. Familiarity with data is an area mentioned repeatedly and acknowledged as something librarians will be familiar with. Mary Anne Kennan describes the concept as “the librarian with more” – traditional library skills with added knowledge of working with and manipulating data.

Many studies reported that generic skills were just as much, if not more so, in demand than discipline specific skills. A thorough knowledge of advocacy and outreach techniques is needed to spread the scholarly communication message to both library staff and researchers. Raju highlighted presentation skills for similar reasons in his 2014 paper.

The report “University Publishing in a Digital Age” further identified a need for library staff to better understand the publishing process and this is something that we have argued at the OSC in the past.

There is also a need to be cautious when demanding new skills. Bresnahan and Johnson (article pay-walled) caution against trying to become the mythical “unicorn librarian” – an individual who possesses every skill an employer could ever wish for. This is not realistic and is ultimately doomed to fail.

In their 2013 paper Jaguszewski and Williams instead advocate a team approach with members drawn from different backgrounds and able to bring a range of different skills to their roles. This was also the argument put forward by Dr Sarah Pittaway at the recent UKSG Forum where her paper addressed the issue of current library qualifications and their narrow focus

Training deficit

Existing library roles are being adapted to include explicit mention of areas such as Open Access whilst other roles are being created from scratch. This work provides a good fit for library staff but it can be challenging to develop the skills needed. As far back as 2008 it was noted that the curricula of most library schools only covered the basics of digital library management and little seems to have changed since with Van House and Sutton identifying barriers to “the ability of LIS educational programs to respond” to changing needs such as the need to produce well-rounded professionals.

Most people working in this area learn their skills on the job, often from more experienced colleagues. Kennan’s study notes that formal education could help to fill the knowledge gap whilst others look to more hands-on training as this helps to embed knowledge.

The question then becomes should the profession as a whole be doing more to prepare their new recruits for the career path of the 21st century academic librarian? This is something we have been asking ourselves in Office of Scholarly Communication (OSC) at Cambridge. Since the OSC was established at the start of 2015 it has made a concerted effort to educate staff at the one hundred plus libraries in Cambridge through both formal training programmes and targeted advocacy. However we are aware that there is still more to be done. We have begun by distributing a survey to investigate the educational background of those who work in scholarly communications. The survey was popular with over five hundred responses and many offers of follow up interviews which means that we have found an area of interest amongst the profession. We will be analysing the results of the survey in the New Year with a view to sharing them more widely and further participating in the scholarly communication process ourselves.

Conclusion

Wherever the skills gaps are there is no doubt that the training needs of academic librarians are changing. The OSC survey will provide insight into whether these needs are currently being met and give evidence for future developments but there is still work to be done. Hopefully this project will be the start of changes to the way academic library staff are trained which will benefit the future of the profession as a whole.

Published 29 November 2016
Written by Claire Sewell and Dr Danny Kingsley

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Are we achieving our OA goals?

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This post was written for Hindawi for Open Access Week and published by them on 28 October. It is reposted here.

Recently I spent a day in two consecutive weeks travelling to London to meet with colleagues to discuss the implementation of the Wellcome Trust (COAF) and RCUKOpen Access policies. In both cases the discussions were centred on compliance with their policies.

Certainly it makes sense that a funder should ensure that its policies are being implemented properly. But this focus on compliance raises the more fundamental question about whether we are actually achieving the underlying goal of these policies – which is to open up access to UK research so more people can access, read and use this work.

After all, having huge swathes of research in repositories under embargoes* or spending literally millions of pounds annually to make particular articles in subscription journals available open access is not in itself the end goal.

We should be taking stock. Have the past three and a half years of the RCUK and over a decade of the Wellcome Trust policies meant our researchers are more engaged in open access? Has there been a movement by publishers towards flipping their journals? Indeed, is UK research being read and used more now? These are very pertinent questions that simply do not appear to be discussed at the moment.

*Cambridge has managed to address this issue by providing a Request a Copy button – see here.

Big bucks

There is a lot of money in this ecosystem. Cambridge University has been allocated £1,269,318.59 by RCUK in the 2016-2017 year, and have a £403,138 underspend which will be directed to this year’s Open Access activities. In addition Wellcome Trust have allocated us £902,243.

So Cambridge University has £2,574,699.59 allocated by funders to pay for Open Access APCs and related staff and systems costs (we recently made all of our expenditure available). Cambridge University spends about £4.8 million annually on subscriptions, so the cost for Open Access at our institution is over half of our subscription cost.

These are serious amounts of money. Surely it is a good idea to ask whether this process is actually achieving what it set out to do.

So what has actually happened?

Embargo changes

The RCUK Open Access policy has allowances for green Open Access with a sufficient embargo period and the decision tree at the Office of Scholarly Communication reflects the actual wording and rules of the policy – that is choose green options if you can. However the emphasis of RCUK is decidedly towards gold Open Access – see their decision tree which is actually slightly misleading.

So when the RCUK announces a policy where cash for article processing charges will flow to publishers dependent on embargo periods, what happens? The embargo periods lengthen.

According to a study published this year “What does ‘green’ open access mean? Tracking twelve years of changes to journal publisher self-archiving policies” (Open Access version here) there is “a clear link between the introduction of Gold open access and the increasing restrictions around Green open access”. The study also includes a graph mapping embargo periods over time which shows a very clear and defined ‘Finch effect’.

This was entirely predictable. When the RCUK Open Access policy was announced in response to the Finch Report I wrote (in my previous role) “Clearly it is advantageous for journals to offer a hybrid option and to extend their embargo periods in response to this policy.” And they did.

Springer and Emerald both extended their embargoes beyond the RCUK limits. (Of course Springer has since redeemed itself by experimenting with new business models).

Those embargo extensions were particularly galling at the time for me because they were worldwide and affected everyone – including in Australia, where I was based. Other publishers have responded to the RCUK rules by creating particular embargoes for UK authors. Elsevier is a clear example.

Institutional pressure

About the time the RCUK policy came into force I wrote about the difficulty of anyone staying up to speed on copyright agreements. Since then it has got worse. At Cambridge we do not expect our researchers to try and wade through this – we provide a service to help them. But this means staff and that costs money.

The pressure on research institutions to manage the UK Open Access policies is significant. Analyses of the total cost of publication (Open Access version here) associated with the administration of making research open access show a huge staffing load. The cost of processing a gold Open Access article was shown to be 2.5 times that for the processes of making an article available in a repository.

The RCUK do allow some of their block grant to be spent on staffing and infrastructure. At Cambridge we have reported that we spent 4.6% of the year’s allocation on staff costs and 5.1% on systems support. The general understanding is that RCUK don’t want the total spend on these costs to be more than 10% of the grant and it appears some institutions have spent more than this in previous years.

This highlights the overall lack of funding for support costs for managing Open Access. There are no specific funds for managing the HEFCE Open Access policy, or the COAF policies. While both the Wellcome Trust and HEFCE provide considerable funds to UK institutions for research, this is not directed to the Libraries. Certainly at Cambridge there is a robust process required to argue for funds to support these types of activities.

The 2012 Finch Report talked about a “transition to open access” and acknowledged that this will mean additional costs. Certainly the funders have channelled significantly more funds to publishers through the institutional block grants, and those institutions are having to channel internal resources to support the staff supporting the policies.

But the Finch Report also mentioned “seeking efficiency savings and other reductions in costs from publishers and other intermediaries”. It is safe to say that this has yet to actually occur.

Taking stock

So, more than four years on from the Finch Report, are we any closer to full Open Access? The answer is yes in the UK – because we have poured millions of extra (taxpayers’) pounds into the system. But if the RCUK policy were to end tomorrow, would the publishing landscape be any different? Has any other country in the world followed this model?

And are the Open Access policies achieving their end goal? Is UK research more visible in the world now? Are people actually finding these articles? Is it being read more?

Is anyone even asking these questions? Who is monitoring this? If we don’t ask and measure these parameters we will never know.

What we do know is we have extended embargo periods, forcing funded researchers down the gold Open Access path, which is more expensive to process in terms of staff time. We have spent millions, the majority of which is spent in hybrid journals – which is itself another issue. And there is little if any evidence that publishers are moving towards fully Open Access models.

A glimmer

Unfortunately the discussions held recently about the Wellcome Trust and RCUK policies were solely focused on compliance. This has become the narrative in the Open Access space in the UK and does nothing to help ‘sell’ the idea of Open Access.

Indeed it would be hugely helpful if there were communication about the underlying goals of these policies and whether they are being met. But the lack of monitoring of these goals means we have nothing to say. We can’t communicate what we don’t know about.

There is some hope. At least one publisher is interested in whether this is making a difference. At the Frankfurt Book Fair last week I attended a discussion of the German Serials Interest Group where a colleague from Springer said that Springer is assessing the success or otherwise of the Springer Compact. They had specifically compared the readership of Open Access articles against subscription only articles. According to this work, the percentage of non-institutional affiliated people reading the Open Access articles was dramatically higher than the subscription-only.

This type of information is hugely valuable to Open Access advocates, and I am hoping that Springer will release these findings publicly.

The team at the Office of Scholarly Communication strongly believe that all Cambridge research should be available, and we are working hard towards that goal (recently celebrating 10,000 submissions to the repository). It would help us enormously if we could offer evidence to our community of the value and benefits of this effort.

Published 3 November 2016
Written by Dr Danny Kingsley

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