Tag Archives: repository

What is ‘research impact’ in an interconnected world?

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Perhaps we should start this discussion with a definition of ‘impact’. The term impact is used by many different groups for different purposes, and much to the chagrin of many researchers it is increasingly a factor in the Higher Education Funding Councils for England’s (HECFE) Research Excellence Framework. HEFCE defined impact as:

‘an effect on, change or benefit to the economy, society, culture, public policy or services, health, the environment or quality of life, beyond academia’.

So we are talking about research that affects change beyond the ivory tower. What follows is a discussion about strengthening the chances of increasing the impact of research.

Is publishing communicating research?

Publishing a paper is not a good way of communicating work. There is some evidence that much published work is not read by anyone other than the reviewers. During an investigation of claims that huge numbers of papers were never cited, Dahlia Remler found that:

  • Medicine  – 12% of articles are not cited
  • Humanities – 82% of articles are not cited – note however that their prestigious research is published in books, however many books are rarely cited too.
  • Natural Sciences – 27% of articles are never cited
  • Social Sciences – 32% of articles are never cited

Hirsch’s 2005 paper: An index to quantify and individual’s scientific research output, proposing the h index – defined as the number of papers with citation number ≥h. So an h index of 5 means the author has at least 5 papers with at least 5 citations. Hirsch suggested this as a way to characterise the scientific output of researchers. He noted that after 20 years of scientific activity, an h index of 20 is a ‘successful scientist’. When you think about it, 20 other researchers are not that many people who found the work useful. And that ignores those people who are not ‘successful’ scientists who are, regardless, continuing to publish.

Making the work open access is not necessarily enough

Open access is the term used for making the contents of research papers publicly available – either by publishing them in an open access journal or by placing a copy of the work in a subject or institutional repository. There is more information about open access here.

I am a passionate supporter of open access. It breaks down cost barriers to people around the world, allowing a much greater exposure of publicly funded research. There is also considerable evidence showing that making work open access increases citations.

But is making the work open access enough? Is a 9.5MB pdf downloadable onto a telephone, or through a dail-up connection?  If the download fails at 90% you get nothing. Some publishing endeavours have recogised this as an issue, such as the Journal of Humanitarian Engineering (JHE), which won the Australian Open Access Support Group‘s 2013 Open Access Champion award for their approach to accessibility.

Language issues

The primary issue, however is the problem of understandability. Scientific and academic papers have become increasingly impenetrable as time has progressed. It’s hard to believe now that at the turn of last century scientific articles had the same readability as the New York Times.

‘This bad writing is highly educated’ is a killer sentence from Michael Billig’s well researched and written book ‘Learn to Write Badly: How to Succeed in the Social Sciences‘.  This phenomenon is not restricted to the social sciences, specialisation and a need to pull together with other members of one’s ‘tribe‘ mean that academics increasingly write in jargon and specialised language that bears little resemblance to the vernacular.

There are increasing arguments for scientific communication to the public being part of formal training. In a previous role I was involved in such a program through the Australian National Centre for the Public Awareness of Science. Certainly the opportunities for PhD students to share their work more openly have never been more plentiful. There are many three minute thesis competitions around the world. Earlier this year the British Library held a #Share your thesis competition where entrants were first asked to tweet why their PhD research is/was important using the hashtag #ShareMyThesis. The eight shortlisted entrants were asked to write a short article (up to 600 words) elaborating on their tweet and explaining why their PhD research is/was important  in an engaging and jargon-free way.

Explaining work in understandable language is not ‘dumbing it down’.  It is simply translating it into a different language. And students are not restricted to the written word. In November the eighth winner of the annual ‘Dance your PhD‘ competition sponsored by Science, Highwire Press and the AAAS will be announced.

Other benefits

There is a flow-on effect from communicating research in understandable language. In September, the Times Higher Education recently published an article ‘Top tips for finding a permanent academic job‘ where the information can be summarised as ‘communicate more’.

The Thinkable.org group’s aim is to widen the reach and impact of research projects using short videos (three minutes or less). The goal of the video is to engage the research with a wide audience. The Thinkable Open Innovation Award is a research grant that is open to all researchers in any field around the world and awarded openly by allowing Thinkable researchers and members to vote on their favourite idea. The winner of the award receives $5000 to help fund their research. This is specifically the antithesis of the usual research grant process where grants “are either restricted by geography or field, and selected via hidden panels behind closed doors”.

But the benefit is more than the prize money. This entry from a young Uni of Manchester PhD biomedical student did not win, but thousands of people engaged in her work in just few weeks of voting.

Right. Got the message. So what do I need to do?

Researcher Mike Taylor pulled together a list of 20 things a researcher needs to do when they publish a paper.  On top of putting a copy of the paper in an institutional or subject repository, suggestions include using various general social media platforms such as Twitter and blogs, and also uploading to academic platforms.

The 101 Innovations in Scholarly Communication research project run from the University of Utrecht is attempting to determine scholarly use of  communication tools. They are analysing the different tools that researchers are using through the different phases of the research lifecycle – Discovery, Analysis, Writing, Publication, Outreach and Assessment through a worldwide survey of researchers. Cambridge scholars can use a dedicated link to the survey.

There are a plethora of scholarly peer networks which all work in slightly different ways and have slightly different foci.  You can display your research into your Google Scholar or CarbonMade profile. You can collate the research you are finding into Mendeley or Zotero. You can also create an environment for academic discourse or job searching with Academia.edu, ResearchGate and LinkedIn. Other systems include Publons – a tool to register peer reviewing activity.

Publishing platforms include blogging (as evidenced here), Slideshare, Twitter, figshare, Buzzfeed. Remember, this is not about broadcasting. Successful communicators interact.

Managing an online presence

Kelli Marshall from DePaul University asks ‘how might academics—particularly those without tenure, published books, or established freelance gigs—avoid having their digital identities taken over by the negative or the uncharacteristic?’

She notes that as an academic or would-be academic, you need to take control of your public persona and then take steps to build and maintain it. If you do not have a clear online presence, you are allowing Google, Yahoo, and Bing to create your identity for you. There is a risk that the strongest ‘voices’ will be ones from websites such as Rate My Professors.

Digital footprint

Many researchers belong to an institution,  a discipline and a profession. If these change your online identity associated with them will also change. What is your long term strategy? One thing to consider is obtaining a persistent unique identifier such as an ORCID – which is linked to you and not your institution.

When you leave an institution, you not only lose access to the subscriptions the library has paid for, you also lose your email address. This can be a serious challenge when your online presence in academic social media sites like Academia.edu and ResearchGate are linked to that email address. What about content in a specific institutional repository? Brian Kelly discussed these issues at a recent conference.

We seem to have drifted a long way from impact?

The thing is that if it can be measured it will be. And digital activity is fairly easily measured. There are systems in place now to look at this kind of activity. Altmetrics.org moves beyond the traditional academic internal measures of peer review, Journal Impact Factor (JIF) and the H-index. There are many issues with the JIF, not least that it measures the vessel, not the contents. For these reasons there are now arguments such as the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) which calls for the scrapping of the JIF to assess a researcher’s performance. Altmetrics.org measures the article itself, not where it is published. And it measures the activity of the articles beyond academic borders. To where the impact is occurring.

So if you are serious about being a successful academic who wants to have high impact, managing your online presence is indeed a necessary ongoing commitment.

NOTE: On 26 September, Dr Danny Kingsley spoke on this topic to the Cambridge University Alumni festival. The slides are available in Slideshare. The Twitter discussion is here.

Published 25 September 2015
Written by Dr Danny Kingsley
Creative Commons License

Data sharing – build it and they will come

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If a tree falls in the forest and no one was there to hear it, did it happen? You could ask the same philosophical question of research – if no-one can see the research results, what was the point in the first place?

Moving science forward and increasing the knowledge of the world around implies exchange of findings. Society cannot benefit from research if there is no awareness of what has been done. Managing and sharing research data is a fundamentally important part of the research process. Yet researchers are often reluctant to share their data, and some are openly hostile to the idea.

This blog describes the research data services provided at Cambridge University which are attempting to encourage and assist researchers manage and share their data.

A tough start

The Data Management Facility project at Cambridge began operations in January 2015. At the time there was very little user support for data management in place.  There was no advocacy, no training and no centralised tools to support researchers in research data management.

There had been a substantial body of work undertaken in 2010-2012 as part of the ‘Incremental’ project into research data management, but once the project money ended, the resources remained available but were not updated.

One of the initial challenges was an out of date institutional repository. Cambridge University was one of the original test-bed institutions for DSpace in 2005. While there had been considerable effort invested in the establishment of the repository, it had in recent years been somewhat neglected. The lack of both awareness of the repository and support for researchers was reflected in the numbers: during the first decade of the repository, only 72 datasets had been deposited.

In addition, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) had compliance expectations for funded research kicking in May 2015. This gave us five months to pull the Research Data Facility together. It was a tough start.

Understanding researchers’ needs

Tight deadlines often mean the temptation is to create short-term solutions. But we did not want to take this path. Solutions created without prior understanding of the need have no guarantee they will resolve the actual issues at hand.

So we started talking with researchers. We met and spoke with hundreds of researchers across all disciplines and fields of study – Principal Investigators, postdocs, students, and staff members. These were both group sessions and individual meetings. We told them about the importance of sharing research data, and in return we listened to what researchers told us about their worries and possible problems with data sharing.

To date, we have spoken with over 1000 researchers, and from each meeting we kept detailed notes of all the questions/comments received.

We have additionally conducted a questionnaire to better understand researchers’ needs for research data management support. Of the researchers surveyed, 83% indicated that it is ‘very useful’ for the University to provided both information about funders’ expectations for research data sharing and management, and support.

Screen Shot 2015-08-24 at 06.45.55

Solution 1 – Providing information

In March 2015 we launched the Research Data Management website which is a single location for solutions to all research data management needs. The website contains:

and much more.

The key idea behind the website is to provide an easy to navigate place with all necessary information. The website is being constantly updated, and new information is regularly added in response to feedback received from researchers.

Concurrently we have been conducting tailored information sessions about funders’ requirements for sharing data and support available at the University of Cambridge. We run these sessions at multiple locations across the University, and to audiences of various types. The sessions ranged from open sessions in central locations to dedicated sessions hosted at individual departments, and speaking with individual research groups. Slides from information sessions are always made available for attendees to download.

Solution 2 – Assistance with data management plans and supporting data management

In the survey 82% of researchers said it would be very helpful if there were someone at the University available to help with data management plans. To address this, we have:

  • Added tailored information about data management plans to our information sessions.
  • Linked the DMPonline tool from our data website. This allows researchers to prepare funder specific data management plans
  • Organised data management plan clinic sessions (one to one appointments on demand)
  • Prepared guidelines on how to fill in a data management plan.

Additionally, 63% researchers indicated that it would be ‘very useful’, and further 31% indicated that it would be ‘useful’ to have workshops on research data management. We have therefore prepared a 1.5 hour interactive introductory workshop to research data management, which is now offered across various departments across the University. We are also developing the skill sets within the library staff across the institution to deliver research data management training to researchers from their field.

Solution 3 – Providing an institutional repository

Finally, 79% of researchers indicated that it would make data sharing easier if the University maintained its own, easy to use data repository. We therefore had to do something about our repository, which had not been updated for a long time. We have rolled-out series of updates to the repository, taking it to Version 4.3, which will allow minting DOIs to datasets.

Meantime we also had to think of a strategy to make data sharing as easy as possible. The existing processes for uploading research data to the repository were very complicated and discouraging to researchers. We did not have any web-mediated facility that would allow researchers to easily get their data to us. In fact, most of the time we asked researchers to bring their data to us on external hard drives. This was not an acceptable solution in the 21st century!

Researchers like simple processes, Dropbox-like solutions, where one can easily drag and drop files. We have therefore created a simple webform, which asks researchers for the minimal necessary metadata information, and allows them to simply drag and drop their data files.

The outcomes

It turned in the end it was really worth the effort of understanding researchers’ needs before considering solutions. As of 24 August 2015, the Research Data Management website has been visited 10,992 times. Our training sessions on research data management and data planning have received extremely good feedback – 73% of respondents indicated that our workshops should be ‘essential’ to all PhD students.

And most importantly, since we launched our easy-to-upload website form for research data, we have received 122 research data submissions – in four months we have received more than 1.5 times more research outputs than in ten years of our repository’s lifetime.

So our advice to anyone wishing to really support researchers is to truly listen to their needs, and address their problems. If you create useful services, there is no need to worry about the uptake.

data-plasma4This infographic demonstrates how successful the Research Data Facility has been. Prepared by Laura Waldoch from the University Library, it is available for download.

To know more about our activities, follow us on Twitter.

 

Published 24 August 2015
Written by Dr Marta Teperek and Dr Danny Kingsley
Creative Commons License

 

Libraries of the future – insights from a talk by Lorcan Dempsey

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There is no argument even from traditionalists that the library role is changing. But there is a great deal of confusion and sometimes fear about what that means, and what the future might look like.

On 3 June, Lorcan Demsey*  came to speak to staff at Cambridge University Library about how the role and purpose of libraries are changing. The slides from his talk are available on Slideshare.

The one sentence headline from the talk was that research libraries are moving from licensing published content to managing workflow and research outputs – which means the print collection needs to be managed down to free up resources for the new roles. The subhead is – if we don’t do this, the publishers are waiting in the wings to take over.

Modern libraries in research environments

The Library role is distilling from owned materials to facilitating access to many things. Changing focus to ‘discovery’ in the collection means there must be a loss of some of the items.

Lorcan noted that his sense is that there is still a low uptake of this concept. As someone who has been working in scholarly communications for over a decade. I agree.

The collection as a means to an end rather than an end it itself – in some ways this is obvious but in others it is a huge psychological shift. 

  • In a print world, researchers and learners organised their workflow around the library. The library had a limited interaction with the full process.
  • In a digital world the Library needs to organise itself around the workflows of research and learners. Workflows generate and consume information resources.

In libraries there is a separation of the discovery and the collection – library users are on the global level. The library will make some available and own some of those.

Change of focus

The research endeavour has moved from a focus on outcomes to begin to think about a range of activities around the process and the aftermath.

The traditional role of a library – outside of special collections and manuscripts – deals with outcomes like the books and journals. In this model students and researchers interact with the books and journals and then turn it into classically published works that come back into the library.

But we live now in an online world and the Library is interacting with the content in many different ways. There is interest in the process of research –methods, evidence and research data. There is also interest in the discussion around research through pre-prints, working papers and a variety of prepublication activity. This involves revision, derivative works and reuse. Copyright is important in these cases to let people know how things will be used.

This means that ‘collections’ from a library perspective now include the process, methods, discussions and outputs as well as books and journals.

From curation to creation

Mediated access to licensed material is becoming more streamlined, and other items becoming more available. Libraries are supporting creation, not just consumption.

Libraries need to be seen as a source for collaboration. There needs to be a partnership between the Library and the Faculty. The library is a partner in terms of the creation activity. The mediating role will continue.

Managing this transition is often done opportunistically – when people retire they are replaced with new skill sets.

The repository was seen by the Libraries initially as something in relation to artefacts but now it is seen as part of the workflow of the research lifecycle. There is less attention on what is coming in and more focus on sharing material back out.

Show me the money

There is a question around how much of this activity will be supported by the institution? And how is the resource shifting occurring in the libraries?

Lorcan said that while libraries talk about a growing interest in special collections and archives, there is no evidence from a budget perspective that this is being supported.

Publishers are trying to muscle in

Managing online identities

There is considerable interest amongst researchers in having a carefully tended online presence. This is time consuming, and would appear to be important to the researchers. This process is becoming intimately tied to publication – it is where people are announcing their publication.

Lorcan mentioned a study in Nature which was a survey of 3,000 scientists and engineers. They found 6% used Google Scholar, but more than half were using ResearchGate more regularly than LinkedIn. Not surprisingly this behaviour can be broken down by discipline. The social sciences tend to use Google Scholar, and academic.edu has low use by engineering and sciences. There are many solutions to the workflow to help researchers. Many of these will go away, but some are quite heavily used.

Thinking historically, a catalogue covers the material a library owns. The library has a discovery layer and a license. However this activity will have to shift to support creation. We have repositories, Google Scholar, ResearchGate etc. The incentive to use the repository is very low compared with these services.

A gap in the market?

Workflow is the new content – managing identity is where a lot of the focus is. Publishers are trying to position themselves as the service provider in this space.

Many libraries do not see their role as managing evolving scholarly records – the research and learning material. The curation of identity for researcher profiles is a big interest. This is often currently managed by research offices.

However this is a space into which publishers are moving. Several big publishers are now trying to be part of the full cycle for researchers.

For example Elsevier has two products – Pure is a content management system for research reporting and Mendeley is an academic social network. It is no coincidence that the word ‘solution’ is in the url thread. Similarly, Macmillian (publishers of Nature) recently bought Digital Science the company that created the equivalent products Symplectic and figshare. Digital Science was not included in the Macmillan Springer merger, possibly because they still need substantial investment. Lorcan noted that people see them as ‘plucky start-ups’ but they are owned by big publishers. There has been a big take-up of these services.

Lorcan showed a quote from Annette Thomas, CEO of Macmillian Publishers about ‘A publisher’s new job description’.

Her view is that publishers are here to make the scientific research process more effective by helping them keep up to date, find colleagues, plan experiments, and then share their results. After they have published, the process continues with gaining a reputation, obtaining funds, finding collaborators, and even finding a new job. What can we as publishers do to address some of the scientists’ pain points? 

As Lorcan observed – you can take out the word ‘publisher’ and replace with the word ‘library’.

Managing down collections

Libraries are increasingly wanting to organise their space around the student experience not around collections. Lorcan used a grid to illustrate the changing focus. The two distinctions were:

  • Whether items are in many collections or are rare or unique.
  • Whether items require stewardship. Items that are high stewardship items are looked after and resources are spent on them. Items that are low stewardship don’t get looked after in Libraries.

At one extreme is licensed materials which are high stewardship/many collections. The opposite corner is research materials which are only available in a few collections and are low stewardship.

Lorcan said he thinks in the future there will be a focus on distinctive collections. There needs to be a lot more money to do this. So licensed purchased material will be more streamlined. Management attention 15 years ago was on highly managed, licensed items, but now the focus has shifted to items of low stewardship.

Inside out library

Market materials: licensed/purchased stuff. Library as broker and telling users that these things are available in a special way.

Distinctive collections: Library is provider and want to maximise discoverability. Want other people to know about faculty expertise, and research data. Putting into own discovery layer doesn’t help there. Think about metadata and which aggregators are important. Been slow to realise that discoverability is vital.

These have very different dynamics. We want to share material held within the library with the rest of the world. The licensed stuff is external and libraries bring it in to share internally. This is inside out.

Traditionally libraries deal with published, purchased material (including special collections). However there is a shift away from acquisitions to demand. This means that libraries need to redirect their resources towards research support. One way of doing this is to manage down the print collection.

There was an explosion of publishing after the Second World War. In the same way that baby boomers are all retiring at the same time, we are now faced with the challenge of managing these collections down.

Challenges for identity

The managing down of print collections coincides with the push to repurpose space in libraries. There are many discussions with architects – managing down print means there must be refurbishment.

One of the issues emerging for libraries is: Without the books, does the campus see this as the Library? Is the space needed for the Library – could they be replaced by learning commons or the student union?

We can see the identity discussion about libraries emerging now. If we are managing down collections, what is the space for? What are the new services we offer? Lorcan mentioned media stories where librarians are being attacked by historians who see this as managerial, technocratic activity.

Lorcan described some of the shared collection activities happening in the USA.

Conclusion

We used to think of the Library as a collection. Now we need to think of the Library in terms of the user and their workflows.

We must move to more facilitated access to items, also move to the management and disclosure of curated materials. The print and digital scholarly record needs curation and co-ordination at a conscious national level.

The job is about restructuring the means but we need to make decisions about moving resources or bets on the future. Libraries must shift from an organisation where the end was known to one where we must take some risk.

Published 6 June 2015
Written by Dr Danny Kingsley
Creative Commons License

* Lorcan coordinates strategic planning and oversees Research, Membership and Community Relations at OCLC. He has worked for library and educational organizations in Ireland, the UK and the US. His influence on national policy and library directions is widely recognized. He is on Twitter – @LorcanID