-
Hot topics – research integrity and open research
Research integrity is the current discussion topic at many levels in the research sector. This week, the Council of the European Union will adopt conclusions on the European Open Science Cloud, including the Open Science agenda. To complement this, the League of European Research Universities (LERU) released its advice paper Open Science and its role in universities: A roadmap for cultural change, which discusses the cultural change that is needed for universities – and other stakeholders – to embrace it. This is hot on the heels of two events I spoke at last week. The first was “Towards cultural change in data management – data stewardship in practice” held at TU Delft in the Netherlands, and…
-
Overcoming the Barriers: CILIP Copyright Conference
The annual CILIP Copyright Conference is a highlight in a busy conference season for those in the information profession with a responsibility for this area. Held in London on April 5th, this event brought together colleagues from across the UK and further afield to discuss the latest developments in copyright and intellectual property and how we move forward from our current position. I was lucky enough to be able to attend this year in order to find out about recent changes and feed this back to the Cambridge (and wider) library community. There were many excellent presentations but in the interests of brevity, I’m going to highlight my top three themes from…
-
Tales of Discovery: stories inspired by Cambridge research
Five research papers and five traditional stories were combined during Cambridge Science Festival in March 2018 to make Tales of Discovery. The session was aimed at families, to show them that there is a world of research available to the general public stored on Apollo, the University’s repository – and it’s all cool stuff. It was also aimed at researchers, to get them thinking about new ways to make their research available to a general public – including uploading their research on to the Apollo repository. At the end of each story the audience were challenged to interpret the stories and research in their own way. Here’s what happened during…
-
Perspectives on the Open future
‘More cash, more clarity and don’t make this compulsory’ is the take home message from a recent workshop held with Cambridge researchers on the question of Open Research. The recent session, called “An Open Future? How Cambridge is Responding to Challenges in the Open Landscape” was with a group of new Cambridge lecturers at a seminar organized by Pathways in Higher Education Practice. This event offered us an opportunity to go beyond the usual information we provide in our training workshops*. This session provided a unique opportunity to speak with researchers from various disciplines further along in their career who already had a basic knowledge of Open Access and Research Data sharing…
-
Skills in scholarly communication – needs & development
This blog post is part of the write-up of an investigation into the background of people working in scholarly communication, with a specific focus on skills. Introduction Library staff need to have a wide range of skills in order to undertake their roles. Whatever type of library they work in and whatever their individual role there is a range of both generic and specialist skills which staff need to acquire over the course of their career. In the Office of Scholarly Communication our focus is on making sure library staff are equipped to work in research support roles but we also have a wider interest in who makes up the…
-
Scare campaigns, we have seen a few
In a sister post, I identified the latest scare offensive in the ongoing discussions around open access as: ‘restricting choice of publication’. In this, there is an implied threat from editorial boards and publishers that if the UK Scholarly Communication Licence (UKSCL) were to be in place, then these journals would refuse to publish articles from affected researchers. In this post I want to look at other threats that have been or are lurking in the shadows in the open access debate. The first is tied fairly closely to the ‘restricting choice of publication’ threat. The new scare – threats to ‘Academic Freedom’ The term ‘Academic Freedom’ comes up a fair…
-
The ‘restricting choice of publication’ threat
When you work in the open access space, language matters. It is very easy to distract the academic community from the actual discussion at hand and we are seeing an example of this right now. The emerging narrative seems to be that open access policies, and specifically the UK Scholarly Communication Licence (UKSCL), are going to threaten academics’ ability to choose where they publish. The UK-SCL Policy Summary is explicitly “an open access policy mechanism which ensures researchers can retain re-use rights in their own work, they retain copyright and they retain the freedom to publish in the journal of their choice (assigning copyright to the publisher if necessary)”. Let’s…
-
In Conversation with the Wellcome Trust – sharing & managing research outputs
In July 2017, the Wellcome Trust updated their policy on the management and sharing of research outputs. This policy helps deliver Wellcome’s mission – to improve health for everyone by enabling great ideas to thrive. The University of Cambridge’s Research Data Management Facility invited Wellcome Trust to Cambridge to talk with their funded research community (and potential researchers) about what this updated policy means for them. On 5th December in the Gurdon Institute Tea Room, the Deputy Head of Scholarly Communication Dr Lauren Cadwallader, welcomed Robert Kiley, Head of Open Research, and David Carr, Open Research Programme Manager, from the Wellcome’s Open Research Team. This blog summarises the presentations from…
-
Developing the staff of the future: training librarians in 2017
2017 was an exciting year for training our library community. As well as continuing to cover the basics of research support, the OSC was able to introduce new topics and new methods of delivery to ensure that Cambridge library staff have all the information they need to support the research community. In this blog post our Research Support Skills Coordinator Claire Sewell reflects on the successes of the past year and her plans to make 2018 even better. This time last year I was reflecting on my first full year in my role, having started in November 2015. After more than two years in the role some things have remained…
-
2017 – That was the year that was
The fact that we are sending this out in the fourth week of January reflects how busy 2018 is already shaping up to be. But it is important to take stock and reflect on the achievements of the past year. In many ways 2017 was a year of numbers for the Office of Scholarly Communication. Some of them were large – we celebrated 1000 datasets deposited to the repository and 1 million downloads of items in the repository in 2017. Other numbers were enormous, like the overwhelming tide of people who tried to access Professor Stephen Hawking’s PhD thesis when we released it, and the very impressive Almetrics score of…
