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Promoting Open Access in a department – what works
At Cambridge University, the Open Access team offers a centralised service to help our researchers make their work open access and comply with their funder requirements. But getting researchers to visit www.openaccess.cam.ac.uk and engage with the service is proving to be a challenge. We estimate that only around a third of the University’s journal articles are currently being uploaded within the three-month window allowed by HEFCE. We’re working hard to publicise the message at our end, but centralised services can’t reach all academics in the same way as their departments and colleges can. If we’re to ensure that as much of the University’s output as possible is available Open Access and…
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Is CC-BY really a problem or are we boxing shadows?
Comments from researchers and colleagues have indicated some disquiet about the Creative Commons (CC-BY) licence in some areas of the academic community. However, in conversation with some legal people and contemporaries at other institutions (some of these exchanges are replicated at the end of the blog) one of the observations was that generally academics are not necessarily cognizant with what the licences offer and indeed what protections are available under regular copyright. To try and determine whether this was an education and advocacy problem or if there are real issues we had a roundtable discussion on 29 February at Cambridge University attended by about 35 people who were a mixture of…
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Sharing personal/sensitive research data
Sharing research data comes with many ethical and legal issues. Since these issues are often complex and can rarely be solved with one size fits all solutions, they tend not to be addressed as topics of conferences and workshops. We therefore thought that gathering of data curation professionals at IDCC 16 would be an excellent opportunity to start these discussions. This blog post is our informal report from a Birds of a Feather discussion on sharing of personal/sensitive research data which took place at the International Digital Curation Conference in Amsterdam “Visible data, invisible infrastructure” on 23 February 2016. The need for good models for sharing personal/sensitive data Many funders…
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‘It is all a bit of a mess’ – observations from Researcher to Reader conference
“It is all a bit of a mess. It used to be simple. Now it is complicated.” This was the conclusion of Mark Carden, the coordinator of the Researcher to Reader conference after two days of discussion, debate and workshops about scholarly publication.. The conference bills itself as: ‘The premier forum for discussion of the international scholarly content supply chain – bringing knowledge from the Researcher to the Reader.’ It was unusual because it mixed ‘tribes’ who usually go to separate conferences. Publishers made up 47% of the group, Libraries were next with 17%, Technology 14%, Distributors were 9% and there were a small number of academics and others. In addition to talks and panel discussions…
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In conversation with Wellcome Trust and CRUK
On Friday 22 January Cambridge University invited our two main charity funders to discuss their views on data management and sharing with Cambridge researchers. David Carr from the Wellcome Trust and Jamie Enoch from Cancer Research UK came to the University to talk to our researchers. The related blog ‘Charities’ perspective on research data management and sharing‘ summarises the presentations Jamie and David gave. After this event, a group of researchers from the School of Biological Sciences and from the School of Clinical Medicine at the University of Cambridge were invited to ask questions about the Wellcome Trust data management and sharing policy and CRUK data sharing and preservation policy directly…
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Charities’ perspective on research data management and sharing
In 2015 the Cambridge Research Data Team organised several discussions between funders and researchers. In May 2015 we hosted Ben Ryan from EPSRC, which was followed by a discussion with Michael Ball from BBSRC in August. Now we have invited our two main charity funders to discuss their views on data management and sharing with Cambridge researchers. David Carr from the Wellcome Trust and Jamie Enoch from Cancer Research UK (CRUK) met with our academics on Friday 22 January at the Gurdon Institute. The Gurdon Institute was founded jointly by the Wellcome Trust and CRUK to promote research in the areas of developmental biology and cancer biology, and to foster…
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What does a researcher do all day?
Recently, Paul Jervis-Heath* came to speak to Cambridge Libraries staff about work he had done as part of the Cambridge Libraries user centred design programme during the previous academic year. This project was trying to establish how Cambridge University administrative services would manage the RCUK block grant provided to the University to support the RCUK Open Access policy. The end goal of the project was to design products and services, so the team of six working on the programme needed to start by trying to understand what academics did and what services they needed. Information gathering process During the project the team worked with 56 academics including contextual interviews with 34 academics. Paul noted however…
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Could the HEFCE policy be a Trojan Horse for gold OA?
The HEFCE Policy for open access in the post-2014 Research Excellence Framework kicks in 9 weeks from now. The policy states that, to be eligible for submission to the post-2014 REF, authors’ final peer-reviewed manuscripts of journal articles and conference proceedings with an ISSN must have been deposited in an institutional or subject repository on acceptance for publication. Deposited material should be discoverable, and free to read and download, for anyone with an internet connection. The goal of the policy is to ensure that publicly funded (by HEFCE) research is publicly available. The means HEFCE have chosen to favour is the green route – by putting the AAM into a repository. This…
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2015 – that was the year that was
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…
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Time to act together?
On 9-10 November 2015 Marta Teperek attended the fourteenth Research Data Management Forum (RDMF#14) in York organised by the Digital Curation Centre. Research Data Management Fora are organised twice yearly to bring together the community of people supporting research data management across different institutions in the UK. This was the second RDMF meeting Marta has attended and these meetings offer an excellent opportunity for the community to get together and think strategically about how to best support research data management needs of our researchers. Below are Marta’s impressions from the meeting. Battling inertia While the title of the meeting was ‘Research Data (and) Systems’, a more appropriate title could have been ‘Time to…
