In what has now become a tradition, we are sending out our annual summary of the activities of the Office of Scholarly Communication. Our first year, in 2015, the summary was a stock take of where we were at. By the following year, 2016, we were implementing a strategy. What followed in 2017 was a year of numbers.  Last year was really a year of consolidation allowing us now for the first time in four years to take a step back and breathe. REF, what REF? It is impossible to be in this space in the UK and not be highly focused on the Research Excellence Framework. While our team has been…

As anyone who administers an institutional repository can tell you, repeatedly looking up journals’ policies and attributes is a pain in the neck. We have discussed this problem a few times, noting in 2017 the complex embargo situation and the confusion about publication dates. Indeed it has been clear since 2013 that this is so complicated it is unrealistic to expect researchers to navigate this situation. This means considerable amounts of repository staff time are typically spent traversing a confusing landscape of complex, inconsistent and fluid policies. To stop or at least mitigate this pain, wouldn’t it be great if those policies and attributes were available in a structured, machine-readable format,…

Clair Castle, Librarian at the Department of Chemistry, describes how during her secondment to the Office of Scholarly Communication (OSC) as Research Data Coordinator, she collaborated with Clare Trowell, Data Champion and Marshall Librarian at the Faculty of Economics, to design some cartoons to use to advocate for the Data Champions Programme. I have been collaborating with the OSC on various RDM (Research Data Management) activities since it was established in 2015. I was fortunate enough to be appointed on secondment to the OSC from May to October 2018, as Research Data Coordinator. One of my main responsibilities was to manage the Data Champions Programme (with which I was already…

As we move into 2019 it is a good time to look back at another year spent training the library community, both in Cambridge and more widely. Over the last 12 months, the Office of Scholarly Communication has held nearly 50 training sessions for Cambridge staff on topics ranging from navigating copyright issues to the mechanics of the publishing process.   Face to face We have continued to deliver high-quality face-to-face training sessions on many topics. Sometimes sessions just work better when participants are all together in a room, especially if there are a lot of activities. For example, our sessions looking at Research Data Management and Data Management Plans are designed to be interactive…

Last month we put out a call for people working in scholarly communication to record and send us their views on what it takes to work in this area. After a slow start we now have a few uploaded. As a head’s up, here’s the combined responses from four Jisc sessions held over summer to the question: Which personal attributes do you think are most valuable in scholarly communications roles? With words like ‘persistence’, ‘communication’, approachability’ and ‘negotiation’, this word cloud starts to reflect some of the advice we published recently for new starters in open access. But it’s not all scary – some of it is even fun! Take…

Followers of this blog will remember various posts over the last year about the OSC’s work as part of the Scholarly Communication Professional Development group. This group of interested parties from across the information sector aims to look at the training needs of those working in (or wanting to work in) scholarly communication and how these can best be met. Although it’s an expanding area of academic librarianship with a rapidly growing number of roles, those hiring for these positions often report that it can be hard to recruit from within the library community. Too often those from a library background, both new and more established professionals, don’t know enough…