Tag Archives: scholarly communication

The value of embracing unknown unknowns

March 11, 2016Uncategorizedcompetence, Information Systems, open access, publication, scholarly communicationOffice of Scholarly Communication

This blog accompanies a talk Danny Kingsley gave to the RLUK Conference held at the British Library on 9-11 March 2016. The slides are available and the Twitter hashtag from the event was #rluk16

The talk centred around a debate piece written with my long standing collaborator, Dr Mary Anne Kennan, published in August 2015: Open Access: The Whipping Boy for Problems in Scholarly Publishing. This original 10,000 word article was the starting point for a debate where five people provided rebuttals to our position and we were then given the opportunity to write a rejoinder to these. All the articles were published together.

I have included a précis of the article below as Annex 1, but that is not what the talk was about – what I wanted to discuss was the unexpected progression of the piece and what that revealed to us as authors working in Scholarly Communication.

After we submitted the original piece we sent through several suggestions (including names and contact details) to the Editor for people who might want to contribute. These primarily included practitioners in the Open Access space:

Funders
Library staff
Research managers
Editors
Publishers
Policy makers

There was considerable difficulty in locating people who were prepared to contribute. We are still unsure why this was the case – it may have been a time issue, the fact that this was an academic publication and we were asking administrative professionals, or that it was potentially politically sensitive. On the Editor’s suggestion we sent some personal requests to contacts to ask them to participate. However, in the end four of the five people who wrote rebuttals were researchers in the Information Systems field.

This process made the whole production very protracted. There was a two-year period between the first approach from the journal and publication. The production process from the start of the writing period was 18 months – the actual dates are listed as Annex 2 below.

Same old, same old – the responses

Reading the rebuttals from the four Information Systems researchers, two things become obvious. First, none of them actually addressed the posits we had presented in our original debate piece – which, after all was the point of the exercise.

Second, a theme began to emerge, demonstrated by these snippets:

“Before discussing that in detail we need to know what the current situation is regarding OA publishing in IS”
“We now discuss four fundamental points regarding scholarly communication. We begin by asking what constitutes the main building blocks of the scholarly communication system”
“Before examining the current state of scholarly publication, let us set some parameters for this discussion”
“I think the argument would benefit from more systematically analyzing the current system of scholarly publishing…”

In each case the authors chose to undertake their own analysis of scholarly publishing – sometimes apparently unaware that this is a long established area of research.

So what does this tell us?

Lesson 1 – ‘Engagement’ is not working

One thing that was striking about this process was that each contributor came to their own conclusion that Open Access is something we should aim towards. While this is a ‘good thing’ for Open Access advocacy, it is not scalable. If we wait for every researcher to come to their own personal epiphany about Open Access we will never have high levels of uptake.

There has been a long standing belief and practice in Open Access that if the research community were only more aware of the issues in scholarly publishing then they would come on board with Open Access. I am entirely guilty of this myself. However after a decade of trying, it is fairly safe to say that engagement has not worked.

One conclusion to take away from this experience is we must enable the academic community to disseminate their work openly. It must happen around them.

Lesson 2 – The research area of scholarly communication is not well recognised

The concept of an academic discipline is fairly slippery, but it is reasonably safe to say that two things define a discipline – the scholarly literature and language.

Academic ‘communities’ manifest in the form of journals or learned societies. But Scholarly Communication research is traditionally discussed either in a disciplinary specific way in a disciplinary journal (such as part of an editorial), or are published in journals in the sociology of science, communication, librarianship or the information sciences disciplines.

There are two journals that do specifically look at Scholarly Communication – the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication and Scholarly and Research Communication. I should note that Publications also looks at many issues in this area too.

There are now Offices of Scholarly Communication in universities, especially in the US & increasingly in the UK – the Office of Scholarly Communication at Cambridge being a classic example. However there are no Faculties or Departments or Professorial Chairs of Scholarly Communication in existence – that I can find. I am happy to hear about them if they do exist.

And yet people do undertake research in this area. They publish articles, peer review each other’s work, present at conferences. This is academic work.

It might well be a problem of language. Michael Billing’s book ‘Learn to Write Badly: How to succeed in the social sciences’ makes the argument that creating a language that is impenetrable to others is a way of boundary stamping a discipline.

But in the area of Scholarly Communication, many of the words are vernacular – with common meanings that might be different to their specific meaning in the context of the research. A classic example is ‘publish’ which simply means ‘make public’, but within the academic context means that there has been a process of review and revision, branding and attribution. Words like ‘repository’ and ‘mandate’ have caused me some professional grief.

And we are having some trouble with terminology in the Open Access space with publishers. For example the conflation of ‘deposit’ with ‘make available’ – Wiley instructs authors that they cannot deposit until after the embargo. This is wrong. Authors can deposit whenever they like, as long as they don’t make it available until after the embargo. Green Open Access – which means making a copy of the work freely available – has been rather bizarrely interpreted by Elsevier in their Open Access pages as providing a link to the (subscription) article.

The reason there can be such a high level of inaccuracy around language is because it is not ‘officially’ defined anywhere. I should note that the Consortia Advancing Standards in Research Administration Information (CASRAI) may be doing some work in this area.

Problem 1 – Practice versus study

We concluded in our rebuttal that the practice of scholarly communication (as distinct from the study of it) is shared among all academic fields, librarians, publishers, and administrators. Each of these bring their own levels of understanding, perspectives, and involvement in the scholarly communication system.

This can create a problem because practitioners often think they have a good understanding of the issues surrounding the publication process. But according to a 2012 article in the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication researchers are generally held to have a low awareness of publishing issues and open access opportunities and are confused over copyright issues.

This is a case of the ‘Unknown Unknowns’ – a term coined (to much ridicule) by Donald Rumsfeld in 2003.

Regardless of where individuals sit, however, in all instances there needs to be a base level of competence in this area. Yes I know, I have just said we should not try and engage academics to convert them to Open Access. However what we should be doing is ensuring they have at least a basic understanding of this area for their own professional wellbeing.

One of the conclusions of my 2008 PhD The effect of scholarly communication practices on engagement with open access: An Australian study of three disciplines – where I undertook in-depth interviews with 43 researchers about their publication and communication practices – was that the Master/Apprentice system is broken (see pp177 – 188). We are not equipping our researchers with the information they need to navigate the publication process successfully. This need for education was echoed in a 2014 paper about open access journal quality indicators (itself published in the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication – notice a pattern?)

Problem – library community also needs to know

But this is not just an issue for the research community. Librarians in the academic space also need to know about these issues. Last year the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) released their (excellent) Scholarly Communication Toolkit. The introductory pages note that the “ACRL sees a need to vigorously re-orient all facets of library services and operations to the evolving technologies and models that are affecting the scholarly communication process.” The reason, they say, is because in order for academic libraries to continue to succeed we need to integrate our work into all aspects of the full cycle of scholarly communication.

The toolkit also notes that there is ‘wide variance’ in the levels of understanding of these issues within our community. If we consider the ‘four stages of competence’ as a rough tool:

Unconsciously unskilled – we don’t know that we don’t have this skill, or that we need to learn it.
Consciously unskilled – we know that we don’t have this skill.
Consciously skilled – we know that we have this skill.
Unconsciously skilled – we don’t know that we have this skill (it just seems easy).

It would be an ideal situation to have our academic library community sitting at stages three and four. In reality many are at stage two and even at stage one.

But bringing everyone up to speed is a huge challenge. Our experiences in Australia have demonstrated it is extremely difficult to get issues related to scholarly communication into curricula for library training. Many of the skills in this area are learnt ‘on the job’.

There are almost no courses on repository management as demonstrated in this 2012 study published in the (here it is again) Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication. There is a now slightly out of date list of courses in scholarly communication here. Professor Stephen Pinfield did point out after my talk that he is incorporating open access into his library courses. Discussions about open access are also included at Charles Sturt University in subjects where it is related such as Foundations for information Studies, Collections and Research Data Management, but there has been difficulty in securing a subject explicitly on Open Access or even more broadly on scholarly communication.

Even professional training is limited – CILIP offers ‘Institutional repositories and metadata’ and ‘Digital copyright’ but nothing on publishing or open access. One of the positive outcomes of the conference has been an offer to discuss some of these needs with CILIP.

Solution?

So what is the solution? We must shift from managing the academic literature to participating in the generation of it. Librarians can begin by engaging with the academic literature in their area. Suggestions include:

Reading research that is being published (in your area of librarianship)
Writing an academic article
Presenting work at conferences
Offering your services as a peer reviewer
Serving on an editorial board
Collaborating with your academic community on a project and writing about it

When I suggested this at the conference there was some push-back from the audience, defending the benefits of learning on the job. Afterwards, I was approached by a participant who said she had recently published a paper and found the process incredibly instructive. Interestingly, the same thing happened when a speaker urged colleagues to publish an academic paper at LIBER last year. There was again push-back from the audience until one participant said they seconded her statement. He said he thought he knew all about journals because he worked with them but when he published something he realised ‘I didn’t really know anything about it’.

We might have some way to go.

Annex 1 – The original debate piece

In the original debate piece we provided a background to OA’s development and current state – we did not go into great detail because we were limited by the 10,000 word count and we had made some assumptions about prior knowledge.

The piece examined some of the accusations leveled against OA and described why they were false and indeed indicative of a wider set of problems with scholarly communication:

that OA publishers are predatory,
that OA is too expensive,
that self-depositing papers in OA repositories will bring about the end of scholarly publishing.

We then proposed discussions we considered we should be having about scholarly publishing to take advantage of social and technological innovations and move it into the 21st century. These were the monograph issue, management of APCs, improving institutional repositories, needing to make scholarly publishing inclusive and the reward system.

Annex 2 – The times involved in publication

Here are the dates involved in getting the full debate piece to ‘print’:

First approach from the journal – September 2013
Agreed to write the piece and first discussion – 10 February 2014
Submitted the first argument – 26 May 2014
Submitted amendment based on editor’s comments – 29 May 2014
Rebuttals sent to us – 18 November 2014
Deadline for rejoinder – 19 December 2014
Rejoinder sent (!) – 16 February 2015
“Publication is with the production editor and will be out ‘anytime’” email – 6 May 2015
Copy editor’s questions sent to us – 4 June 2015
Corrected pieces (original & rejoinder) sent to editors – 26 June 2015
Date of acceptance – 4 July 2015
Date of publication – 17 August 2015

Published 11 March 2016
Written by Dr Danny Kingsley

2015 – that was the year that was

January 11, 2016Uncategorizedfunders, open access, RCUK, research data management, researcher, scholarly communication, Wellcome TrustOffice of Scholarly Communication

This time last year, the Office of Scholarly Communication at Cambridge University had been in existence for one week. As the inaugural Head of the Office, I had landed in the UK from Australia on 1 January, and was still battling jet lag. What a difference a year makes. This blog is a short run down of what has happened in 2015 and a brief peek into our plans for 2016.

The OSC has three primary foci – managing compliance with funders, external engagement and working with the Cambridge community to ensure awareness of broader scholarly communication issues. In our spare time we have also taken on a few projects.

Managing funder compliance

Open Access

The University of Cambridge is engaging its research community with open access with a broad approach, both offering solutions for compliance management and determining ways in which the community can continue their normative communication behaviours while increasing access to their research.

As with all universities in the UK, the Open Access service is managing multiple and conflicting open access policies in a complex publishing landscape. The RCUK open access policy has been in effect since April 2013, and the COAF policy continues the longstanding Wellcome Trust open access policy. In all the OSC manages annual funds from these of approximately £2 million to support open access compliance. HEFCE announced its upcoming open access REF policy in March 2014.

In October 2014 the University introduced a user experience evidence-based new system for compliance with the tag line “Accepted for publication? Send us your manuscript“. This is a system designed to ensure that the researcher only has to act once in order to comply with multiple policies. Researchers use an attractive and simple interface where they are asked to upload their manuscript, complete a short form and submit. Our OA team then check funder and publisher policies and deposit the work in the repository for HEFCE compliance and determine the payment options required and funds available for the article, using a decision tree. The team manage the article payment processes and contact the author once the work is complete. From the author perspective this is a simple and much liked system.

Outreach has included contacting departmental administrators, speaking to research communities, attending Committee meetings and so on to spread the word. Despite this, the team processes an average of 240 unique HECFE eligible papers per month, representing approximately 30% of research output. While this may be cause for concern in relation to future REF compliance, a brief analysis of the open access publication activities of Cambridge researchers indicates that 60% of Cambridge research is being made available – including through our system.

We continue to have challenges relating to publishers not making articles open access under the correct licence (or even at all) despite our payment of Article Processing Charges. The checking and chasing up of these publishers is extremely time consuming. In an attempt to ensure the publishers did what we were paying for we brought in Purchase Orders for the first half of the reporting period. This has caused serious issues when it came to reporting in terms of matching the articles listed in the Open Access systems against the financial systems of the University for reporting purposes to the RCUK. As it was not making any difference to publisher behaviour we abandoned this approach. The only issues we have encountered have been for articles that are hybrid – Cambridge University (across both the RCUK and COAF funds) spends approximately 74% on hybrid journals as opposed to fully OA journals.

There has been a constant reporting requirement throughout 2015, first to Jisc, then the RCUK, the Wellcome Trust and Jisc a second time. This has been a huge drain on personnel as none of the reporting periods align, requiring several months FTE equivalent’s worth of work. This is due to several issues, of which the Purchase Order problem mentioned above is a minor factor. The large number of articles that are required to be reported on in detail on an individual basis is a complex task.

Research Data Management

2015 has been a big year for Research Data Management, with the EPSRC announcing they would start checking to ensure researchers are making their underlying data available. The Research Data Facility has spent the year focused on increasing awareness, providing support and resources, and managing data with huge success. There have been face to face meetings with over 1300 researchers, and data submissions have risen exponentially (see here for a graphic of the numbers in July 2015). The team provides Research Data Management Plan support, and the data website has had over 16,500 visits.

We have spent a huge amount of time talking to the Cambridge research community. One outcome of these discussions is a deep understanding of the concerns and challenges for researchers in relation to data sharing. To address these we have provided fora for our researchers to meet with the funders to find solutions. Our meetings with EPSRC and BBSRC resolved many concerns and resulted in an endorsed set of FAQs about research data sharing.

We have contributed to policy development by working with our contemporaries at many institutions to provide a coordinated response to the proposed UK Concordat on Research Data.

Systems management

A perennial issue with open access is the integration of systems within the institution to achieve the holy grail of ‘deposit once, use many times’. We are not there yet, although we have made good inroads. Cambridge University was one of the testbed institutions for DSpace, and the repository has been in place since 2005. The repository had suffered from a lack of attention and by the beginning of 2015 was not functioning properly and contained a large amount of bespoke coding.

The upgrade of DSpace from Version 3.4 to Version 4.3 took many months because it involved an associated standardisation of the base code to ensure future upgrades will be smooth. We also needed to create a new server platform for the repository to sit in which has stabilised our operations. The repository policy has been revisited and the agreements and licenses associated with minting DOIs are now in place, and the next step is to look at integration with other University systems.

We held a repository naming competition during the year, with the winning name being ‘Apollo’ – the god of logic. The new name and logo will be launched when the repository interface is upgraded in early 2016. The repository now holds 13,269 articles and manuscripts, 359 datasets and 713 working papers. In total there are more than 200,000 items held in the repository – 175,429 of these are chemical structures.

Engagement and awareness

Within Cambridge

Cambridge University is a large and complex many-headed beast. Engaging this community is extremely challenging. The Office of Scholarly Communication runs a large number of electronic communication channels to ensure researchers are able to stay up to date and informed about open access and research data management, including the Research Data Management website, the Office of Scholarly Communication website and the Open Access website.

We send out monthly newsletters on Research Data Management to over 1000 subscribers, and at the end of 2015 launched a monthly Open Access newsletter – you can sign up here. We use Twitter extensively (see @CamOpenData, @CamOpenAccess and @dannykay68). In addition the OSC has produced a series of advocacy materials to support their work.

But it is not all electronic – we have also have presented to over 1600 researchers and administrative staff during 2015 through events, presentations and workshops. Highlights have included workshops on software licensing, an Open Access week joint event with Cambridge University Press addressing the question: ‘Can society afford open access?’ (see a video summary here), and an Open Data panel discussion ‘Open Data – moving science forward or a waste of money and time?‘. The video of this event is here.

More broadly

This Unlocking Research blog provides information and analysis on issues relating to Scholarly Communication, Open Access, Research Data Management and Library matters. The blog is well used, with over 16,000 visits since launching.

The post with the greatest impact was Dutch boycott of Elsevier – a game changer? with over 3,500 visits in the first week before it was reblogged by the London School of Economics. [Late news added 22 Jan 2016: This blog was listed as one of the Top Ten Posts for 2015: Open Access. It was also listed as one of the blogs that had an average minute per page measurement of over 6 minutes and 30 seconds.]

Members of the OSC are increasingly being invited to speak at conferences both within the UK and beyond. Topics have included:

Be careful what you wish for – unexpected policy consequences – LIBER conference in June
What is Research Impact in an Interconnected World? at the Cambridge Alumni Festival in September
The purpose, practicalities, pitfalls and polices of sharing research data at the Royal Society in Chemistry in October
Open Access to research data Westminster Briefing in London in December

We are also active participants in the discussions held amongst our communities within and outside of the UK. There is a high level of cooperation amongst those working in the area of scholarly communication and open access. The OSC contributes to meetings and initiatives organised by the League of European Research Universities, SPARC Europe and the UK Council of Research Repositories amongst others.

Training and support

Supporting Researchers in the 21st century

The OSC launched the ‘Supporting Researchers in the 21st century’ programme – aimed at library and other administrative staff – with three introductory workshops held over six weeks from May to early July. 103 people attended. Working from feedback obtained at these events the programme began offering training and workshops from late July.

Topics covered to date include Research Data Management for Librarians, a Primer on Open Access, Information Security in a Research Environment, Introduction to Metrics and a Day in the Life of Researcher and Meet an Open Access publisher. In addition there have been several opportunities to hear from visiting international experts including:

Professor Tom Cochrane (QUT) Openness, integrity & supporting researchers
Professor Susan Gibbons (Yale) Evolution of Library Ethnography Studies – notes from talk
Lorcan Dempsey (OCLC) Libraries of the future
Tom Worthington (ANU) Tips for preparing and presenting online learning

Research Support Ambassadors

The Research Support Ambassador programme began as an idea of a ‘crack team’ of people who could be deployed across the University to present workshops on Scholarly Communication issues. The general philosophy was that this was a way to encourage staff across the library community and across the grade range to step up.

We have had 18 brave souls volunteer to be the first group in what has frankly been a rather ‘organic’ process given we had no idea how this was going to play out. The reasons members of the group gave for participating included the opportunity to learn more and gain skills, be able to support researchers better and several people wanted more face to face interactions. We ran two sets of intensive training sessions where we decided to focus on four areas:

Researcher Support in Cambridge
Managing your online presence
Making your thesis open access
The Research Lifecycle

We have taken a constructivist approach to learning – where learners take charge of their own learning. The group has worked with a mixture of self education and team work to try and develop ‘modular’ outputs that can be presented by others. There is a blog listing the progress on these topics to date here.

There have been significant challenges to the process with a mixture of new material and technologies, working in teams with new colleagues and limited time. In addition they have had to self direct as the recruitment process for an Research Skills Coordinator took eight months. To the Ambassador’s credit they have stuck through a confusing process with very little direction. There is a blog post on an insider’s view of the programme here.

Other projects

Unlocking Theses project

This project is the first step to dramatically increase the number of open access theses in the repository, which stood at about 600 at the beginning of 2015. On average one in ten PhD students deposit their thesis to make it available. The repository currently does not allow any other type of thesis to be deposited.

This system has meant that when a researcher requests a copy of a thesis for research purposes, the bound version needs to be scanned. In 2015 the Library held over 1200 scanned theses on an internal server. The Unlocking Theses project added all of these scanned theses held by the Library into the University repository, Apollo which now holds 2176 theses, of which 1,021 are openly accessible. The Development and Alumni Office were able to provide contact details for just over 600 of these authors. The majority of these authors have now been contacted and we have had a 35% positive response rate from them. We are in the final process of opening these theses. The remaining 1155 theses are currently held in a Restricted Theses Collection but the biographical information about these theses is searchable.

Managing Cambridge Journals project

Cambridge University Libraries are interested in supporting new forms of open access publishing. In 2015 a search revealed that at least seven research and 13 student self-published journals and magazines currently circulate within the Cambridge community. These range widely in quality from almost professional publications to literally photocopied pages. The Managing Cambridge Journals project is working with Cambridge University Press to offer support to Cambridge researchers who are publishing outside of the traditional channels. Three areas of potential support have been identified – a publishing platform, information and support and possibly an internal Cambridge publishing ‘brand’. Work is already underway to ingest the full decade of articles published in the Cambridge Journal of China Studies into the repository from their currently unstable home on a website.

The team

To achieve all of this has required a huge effort on many people’s behalf. In January 2015 the OSC had three staff plus the Head – two Open Access Research Advisors and a part-time Repository Manager. Now the team sits at 12 people and this number is relatively fluid.

This sounds like a huge group – which it is. But with only two exceptions – of which the Head is one – all staff are either temporary staff or on extremely short term contracts. This is primarily related to (a lack of) funding and has two effects. First, a disproportionate amount of time is spent on managing recruitment, writing job descriptions, advertising, interviewing and so on. Almost all HR requirements are still enforced regardless of the brevity of contracts – including monthly probation interviews.

The second effect is the constant need to lobby for financial support which requires creating business cases, new organisational charts and many, many meetings. The Library has been nothing but supportive throughout this process, but there is a need for the broader institution to recognise that much of the work done in the OSC falls in the University rather than Library camp.

Looking forward to 2016

This upcoming year is shaping up to be as busy and productive as the first year of operation. Some of the planned activities include:

Negotiation with Research Council UK funders on possible funding options for the Research Data Facility.
The Communication across the Research Lifecycle project aims to join up communication with researchers by Cambridge administrative departments. This requires scoping the current communication channels and developing advocacy materials across the University administrative departments. There is currently no financial support for this project.
Participating in the JISC Shared Research Data Management Shared Services pilot
Increase the collaboration with Cambridge University Press on the Managing Cambridge Journals project to develop this project to operational level.
The second tranche of upgrades to DSpace are underway. This will involve an upgrade to V5 and implement ‘request a copy’ buttons, minting DOIs, registering the repository to wider aggregation systems and updating the look and feel of the interface. This work is expected to be completed by Easter 2016.
A Repository Integration Manager will start work on the interoperability of DSpace with Symplectic and other systems in the University. New forms and simple deposit processes will be developed.
Increase theses deposit by developing a new form, and amendment to the policy to allow all theses types to be deposited.
Pilot with selected departments to require the deposit of a digital thesis at the same time as the printed and bound version, with the option of making the work available.
Complete the first round of the Research Support Ambassador programme with some skills training and finalisation of training products before the group is released into the wild.
Negotiate with arXiv and other open access providers to allow researchers to meet funder requirements within their usual communication norms.
Develop a comprehensive Research Data Management training program for PhD students.
Build on the Supporting Researchers in the 21st century programme.
Present at conferences in the UK and abroad.

So, watch this space!

Published 11 January 2016
Written by Dr Danny Kingsley

Research Support Ambassadors – an insider’s view

December 14, 2015Uncategorizedlibrary, Research Support, scholarly communication, TrainingOffice of Scholarly Communication

In 2015 the Office of Scholarly Communication (OSC) started two related programmes. The Supporting Researchers in the 21st century programme is an ongoing series of talks, events and training sessions for the library staff in Cambridge. Some of these we have blogged to share the insights with the wider community – see: Openness, integrity & supporting researchers, Tips for preparing and presenting online learning, Evolution of Library Ethnography Studies – notes from talk, Libraries of the future – insights from a talk by Lorcan Dempsey, Software Licensing and Open Access, Open Data – moving science forward or a waste of money & time as a few examples.

The second programme is the Research Support Ambassadors. This began as an idea for people, gathered from across the diverse community in over 200 libraries in Cambridge, to be trained up and develop resources for our research community. As with all nebulous ideas what we began with and where we are now are different, but the programme is taking good shape and after consolidation in Lent Term 2016 will be launched across the University.

This blog is an insider’s view of the Ambassador programme from Claire Sewell, a member of the first group to sign up to the programme. Claire has recently taken on a new role in the OSC as Research Skills Coordinator and will have responsibility for driving the future direction of the Ambassador Programme.

An insider’s view

Joining the rapidly moving world of Scholarly Communication can be daunting for even the most qualified information professional. Library staff must absorb a wealth of information at the same time as trying to educate users on the latest developments and it can be difficult to know where to start. The Research Ambassador Programme at Cambridge University provides one approach by upskilling library staff at the same time as creating experienced trainers.

Who are the Research Ambassadors?

The Programme was launched over the summer with a view to implementation during the Michaelmas term. Ambassadors would be given training and support to develop and deliver a range of training products in areas covering the Scholarly Communications remit. Staff from a range of backgrounds across Cambridge were quick to sign up and the first cohort began its preparations. For me the Programme came along at exactly the right time and fulfilled a number of needs as I was able to improve both my subject knowledge and more practical aspects such as teaching skills. The Programme also gave me a chance to work with colleagues I might not ordinarily get a chance to interact with which helped to broaden my perceptions.

Library staff at all levels were encouraged to get involved in a variety of roles from administrative duties to content delivery. This inclusive approach has been one of the key strengths of the Programme as it helps to encourage those who may not normally sign up. There is no pressure to take on a particular task so participants are able to stay within their comfort zone. I knew from the start that there were areas I could work on easily and areas where I would challenge myself and decided to focus on the latter as for me that is what makes a learning experience.

Getting started

The first stage of the Programme involved observing an existing teaching session delivered by colleagues in the Office of Scholarly Communication. I found the observation sessions really interesting as they gave me a chance to reflect on the different ways people approached similar tasks. Our observations were guided using a prompt sheet which covered everything from setting up the room upon arrival to how well the content was explained by the presenter. Watching a session with a critical eye like this is a great way to improve your own practice as a trainer and something I will be looking to do more of in the future.

It was then time to turn our attention to our own training needs by attending two intensive training sessions. The first session looked at knowing your audience, how to deliver a presentation on a practical level and how to avoid basic mistakes. Next we looked at the actual content of the session we would be delivering in more depth. The biggest decision to make was which aspects of such a huge area as Scholarly Communications we would cover in our final information products.

Topic selection

With the needs of our users and ourselves in mind we selected the following areas:

the research lifecycle
research support services across the University
managing your online presence
Open Access to theses

We felt this was a good mixture of the topics we felt confident teaching and those we wanted to know more about. We divided into groups looking at individual areas and I chose to go with something I was less familiar with (research support services across the University) in order to broaden by knowledge. As the Programme progresses there will be a chance to explore working in other groups.

The groups then got together to discuss what sort of product they would produce. The results ranged from formal presentations to interactive websites and the variety of products showcased the diverse range of talents participating in the Programme. At the end of this process we presented our ideas to the wider library community and received some valuable feedback which we can use to adapt and improve our products before releasing them into the wild. See ‘Research Support Ambassadors – a Project Update‘ for a discussion of the presentation.

Where do we go from here?

Overall the Programme has been a real professional highlight of 2015 for me. As well as developing new skills, meeting new people and learning about a developing area of librarianship I gained a new role when I became Research Skills Coordinator with the Office of Scholarly Communication! As part of this role I will be helping to lead the Research Ambassadors Programme forward to its next stage and possible future runs. I am very much looking forward to seeing where it can take us!

Published 14 December 2015
Written by Claire Sewell with introduction by Dr Danny Kingsley