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Half-life is half the story
This week the STM Frankfurt Conference was told that a shift away from gold Open Access towards green would mean some publishers would not be ‘viable’ according to a story in The Bookseller. The argument was that support for green OA in the US and China would mean some publishers will collapse and the community will ‘regret it’. It is not surprising that the publishing industry is worried about a move away from gold OA policies. They have proved extraordinarily lucrative in the UK with Wiley and Elsevier each pocketing an extra £2 million thanks to the RCUK block grant funds to support the RCUK policy on Open Access. But…
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Openness, integrity & supporting researchers
Universities need to open research to ensure academic integrity and adjust to support modern collaboration and scholarship tools, and begin rewarding people who have engaged in certain types of process rather than relying on traditional assessment schemes. This was the focus of Emeritus Professor Tom Cochrane’s* talk on ‘Open scholarship and links to academic integrity, reward & recognition’ given at Cambridge University on 7 October. The slides from the presentation are available here: PRE_Cochrane_DisruptingDisincentives_V1_20151007 Benefits of an open access mandate Tom began with a discussion about aspects of access to research and research data and why it should be as open as possible. Queensland University of Technology introduced an open access mandate 12…
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Archiving webpages – securing the digital discourse
We are having discussions around Cambridge about the research activity that occurs through social media. These digital conversations are the ephemera of the 21st century, the equivalent of the Darwin Manuscripts that the University has spent considerable energy preserving and digitising. However, to date we are not currently archiving or preserving this material. As a starting point, we are sharing here some of the insights Dr Marta Teperek gained from attending the DPTP workshop on Web Archiving on 12 May 2015, led by Ed Pinsent and Peter Webster. Digital dissemination Increasingly researchers are realising that online resources are important to disseminate their findings – the subject of our recent blog ‘What is ‘research impact’…
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Joint response on the draft UK Concordat on Open Research Data
During August the Research Councils UK on behalf of the UK Open Research Data Forum released a draft Concordat on Open Research Data for which they have sought feedback. The Universities of Bristol, Cambridge, Manchester, Nottingham and Oxford prepared a joint response which was sent to the RCUK on 28 September 2015. The response is reproduced below in full. The initial main focus of the Concordat should be good data management, instead of openness. The purpose of the Concordat is not entirely clear. Merely issuing it is unlikely to ensure that data is made openly available. If Universities and Research Institutes are expected to publicly state their commitment to the Principles…
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What is ‘research impact’ in an interconnected world?
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…
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It’s time for open access to leave the fringe
The Repository Fringe was held in Edinburgh on 3-4 August. With the theme of “Integrating repositories in the wider context of university, funder and external services”, the event brought together repository managers across the UK to discuss practice and policy. Dr Arthur Smith, Open Access Research Advisor at the University of Cambridge, attended the event and came away with the impression that more needs to be done to embed open access in scholarly processes. In his keynote speech to Repository Fringe 2015, titled ‘Fulfilling their potential: is it time for institutional repositories to take centre stage?’ David Prosser, Executive Director of Research Libraries UK (RLUK) gave a concise overview of the history surrounding…
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Data sharing – build it and they will come
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…
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Tips for preparing and presenting online learning
This week we had a group of library staff contribute to a roundtable discussion about online training. We were lucky to have visiting Australian Tom Worthington* talk to the group. These are some notes from the wide-ranging discussion. Online approaches In face-to-face teaching, a unit in philosophy taught over a semester is very different to a single training session in how to find something in a library catalogue. However in practice in the online world they are the same. Tom noted that five years ago he decided to stop giving lectures and only deliver courses online. It has taken that time for him to feel comfortable with the online delivery.…
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Dutch boycott of Elsevier – a game changer?
A long running dispute between Dutch universities and Elsevier has taken an interesting turn. Yesterday Koen Becking, chairman of the Executive Board of Tilburg University who has been negotiating with scientific publishers about an open access policy on behalf of Dutch universities with his colleague Gerard Meijer, announced a plan to start boycotting Elsevier. As a first step in boycotting the publisher, the Association of Universities in the Netherlands (VSNU) has asked all scientists that are editor in chief of a journal published by Elsevier to give up their post. If this way of putting pressure on the publishers does not work, the next step would be to ask reviewers to stop working for Elsevier. After that, scientists could be asked to stop publishing in…
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Libraries of the future – insights from a talk by Lorcan Dempsey
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.…
