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 the second was Nurturing a Culture of Responsible Research in the Era of Open Science, coordinated by LERU and held at Geneva University’s Campus Biotech. Both events were attended by a mix of policy makers, researchers, librarians and administrators.

The slides and accompanying tweets for my TU Delft talk: The ‘end of the expert’: why science needs to be above criticism and the slides from my LERU talk: Institutional Framework and Responsibilities: Facing Open Science’s challenges and assuring quality of research are available.

My talks focused on questions of research integrity – that in this period of ‘post-truth’, where “Britain has had enough of experts” and a US lawyer “alone will decide what is and isn’t acceptable science” – science is very much under attack.

In this environment it is important that research remains above criticism, and that opens up the question of reproducibility of research. The late Professor Stephen Hawking noted “When public figures abuse scientific argument, citing some studies but suppressing others, to justify policies that they want to implement for other reasons, it debases scientific culture”.

We have been here before

This harks back to observations made by sociologist Robert K Merton in a 1942 essay “The Normative Structure of Science” who noted “Incipient and actual attacks upon the integrity of science” stating that “An institution under attack must re-examine its foundations, restate its objectives, seek out its rationale”. Now, 72 years later, the world is once again in a similar position.

Discussion of a ‘reproducibility crisis’ has been circulating for some years now. In 2016, Nature published the results of a survey of researchers asking about this issue, where 90% of the respondents said there was a ‘significant’ or ‘slight’ crisis. The study also asked whether people had been able to replicate results (others’ or their own) and whether they had published their inability to replicate the work.

Reproducibility studies – where specific studies are chosen and attempts were made to reproduce the results – support the argument that published research is not always repeatable. A reproducibility study of 100 psychology experimental and correlational studies showed a substantial decline in the replication effects: 97% of the original studies had significant results (p < .05), but only 36% of replications had significant results.

This issue is significant enough for governments and large bodies to take notice. A UK enquiry into Research Integrity that was halted for a few months last year during the general election has been revived. In December 2017, the US National Academies of Science established a committee on Reproducibility and Replicability in Science.

However, an opinion piece published in March in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science put forward an alternative view, asking “Is science really facing a reproducibility crisis, and do we need it to?”. The piece tracks the recent increase in the frequency of use of the ‘crisis narrative’ in published research. It then asks how common fabricated, false, biased, and irreproducible findings are. The conclusion is there has not been a measurable increase, and that “Instead of inviting greater respect for and investment in research, [the crisis narrative] risks discrediting the value of evidence and feeding antiscientific agendas.”

Either way, this is a narrative that is experiencing a high level of interest currently.

Open Research to the rescue?

One of the proposed solutions to this issue is to increase transparency in the research process – opening up research so that each step of the research process is itself a research output that is citable and can be recognised. The term ‘Open Research’ or ‘Open Science’ (in Europe, meaning all types of research) or ‘Open Scholarship’ has many definitions. A small example includes from FOSTER science, also Wikipedia article on Open Science and in the Open innovation, open science, open to the world report.

Indeed, there are so many different definitions of Open Research/Science that now there is an attempt to define the definitions. One list attempting to collect the declarations and position statements on Open Research from around the world has over 90 entries. However, common to the majority of them is they are effectively based on Robert Merton’s 1942 work. The Mertonian norms of science are:

• Universalism
• Communalism
• Disinterestedness
• Organised scepticism

An example of how Open Research is being put forward as a solution is in the recent National Academies of Science report: “The Irreproducibility Crisis of Modern Science” which recommends: “Researchers should make their data available for public inspection after publication of their results”.

The European Commission Open Science Monitor has three core principles: Open Scholarly Communications, Open Access publications and Open Data. But this is easier said than done. While making underlying data available has been a requirement of some publishers and funders for some years now. Open Data is becoming less contentious, but other aspects of ‘openness’ are still new concepts to the majority of the research community.

There are plenty of actions individual researchers can do to make their work more open. Bianca Kramer and Jeroen Bosman have published 17 open science practices throughout the whole research workflow, including examples of tools that can help, as part of their 101 Innovations project.

As we have noted for some time at the Office of Scholarly Communication, making data and other non-traditional research outputs available is difficult. This requires training of our research community in how to research openly from the beginning of their research activity, rather than asking them to be open as an afterthought.

The institutional imperative

For all of the government enquiries, the funder requirements and the changing publisher processes, at some stage, research institutions need to be part of the process to implement change. In 2012, the Royal Society Science Policy Centre report Science as an open enterprise noted “Universities and research institutes should play a major role in supporting an open data culture”. In a 2016 paper in Royal Society Open Science titled The natural selection of bad science argued: “Improving the quality of research requires change at the institutional level”.

But institutions are slow to act, and reluctant to step outside the global esteem and reward systems that scaffold the research community. In 2017, a Harvard professor in a Nature column Faculty promotion must assess reproducibility referred to “The spectre of irreproducible research haunts the biomedical community”, and argued that “one group that must step up is that to which I belong: academic leadership”.

So are institutions meeting this challenge?

European moves towards Open Research

Well, some are. TU Delft is on the record for leading in this area  – their TU Delft Strategic Framework has implications for Open Science. Even more impressive is Utrecht University which “aims to operate at the forefront of Open Science” according to the University Strategic Plan 2016-2020.

Both universities, of course, are based in The Netherlands, which held the presidency of the European Union during the first half of 2016 with an agenda that included “Europe as an innovator and job creator”, achievable through “better alignment between academia and business through open access and better use of data”. This approach has clearly had deep impacts across the country.

Open Research in the UK

We are behind the curve in the Open Research space in the UK, but there are some moves in this direction.

The University of Reading has recently closed their consultation on their vision statement on Open Research. Discussion with the coordinators of this consultation underlined the  the question of language in this area. Because many of the terms used in scholarly communication are vernacular, interpretation of them varies (‘publish’ anyone?)

There is considerable confusion amongst the research community over questions of openness, even beyond the language question. It is very common for researchers to throw accusations against open access that reflect problems with the whole scholarly communication system, as I argued in 2015 with my research colleague Mary Anne Kennan in “Open access: the whipping boy for problems in scholarly publication“.

Cambridge is working towards a position statement on Open Research. When preparing for the accompanying consultation we are currently running at Cambridge, we considered the ‘Open Typology’ that was proposed by Sheila Corrall and Stephen Pinfield in their 2014 paper, “Coherence of ‘Open’ Initiatives in Higher Education and Research: Framing a Policy Agenda”. This breaks the areas of ‘open’ into three categories: Open Content, Open Systems and Open Development. Given the primary focus, at least initially, is a way of considering the overarching approach behind the Open Access and Research Data Management policy frameworks, the Cambridge consultation is focusing on Open Content and Systems. Open Development may come later but the conversations are not yet mature enough to include them at this stage.

The consultation is still underway, and to date attracting a strong response. The outcomes will be written up and shared after analysis.

However, while decidedly a step in the right direction, a position statement is only the beginning, as we have seen already over the past couple of years. The implementation is where the hard work begins. Change is slow in this space.

Published 31 May 2018
Written by Dr Danny Kingsley

Post script

I have spoken and written about the Open Research question at length. If you are interested, my keynote to the 2017 Conference on Open Access Scholarly Publishing – Is the tail wagging the dog? Perversity in academic rewards is available on video, as is my keynote to the Munin Open Access Conference in 2016 Reward, reproducibility and recognition in research – the case for going Open.

I have also written a series of blogs on the argument for Open Research:

• The case for Open Research: solutions?– 2 August 2016
• The case for Open Research: does peer review work?– 19 July 2016
• The case for Open Research: reproducibility, retractions & retrospective hypotheses– 14 July 2016
• The case for Open Research: the authorship problem– 12 July 2016
• The case for Open Research: the mis-measurement problem – 11 July 2016

There are also a couple of blogs about the Open Agenda at Cambridge:

• Perspectives on the Open future – 27 March 2018
• Could Open Research benefit Cambridge University researchers? – 3 August 2016

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 5^th, 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 the conference:

• Copyright education
• Open data and copyright
• The UK Scholarly Communication Licence(UK-SCL)

Copyright education

Educating both library users and staff in copyright can be a challenge, something I was pleased to see acknowledged at the conference. From my own experience teaching in this area I think this is down to a mixture of complicated terminology and a narrow perception of what copyright actually deals with.

When I’ve talked to library staff about copyright in the past it has often been at cross purposes – I’m usually looking at helping to support researchers in the use of third party material in their thesis or signing copyright transfer agreements whereas most staff are focused on what can be uploaded to the VLE or how much of a text can be legally copied.

Copyright is a multi-faceted concept with a great deal of intersections so it can be hard to know where to start without overwhelming people. Luckily several of the presentations focused on the issue of copyright education.

Copyright is complicated and is often seen as a barrier to helping students and researchers to achieve their goals. When teaching about it we need to turn these perceptions around and promote copyright as a help rather than a hindrance.  One way of doing this is to reframe the message that we are sharing with our user communities. There is no one size fits all message when it comes to copyright and we need to invest the time to make sure that we are tailoring the message to different audiences – for example what a researcher will need to know about copyright is different from what administrators need to know.

Debbie McDonnell from the British Council highlighted an innovative approach in her presentation on Managing Copyright in an International Organisation Working in the Educational and Cultural Sectors. When she began her role she conducted a training survey to better understand the needs of her users. In response to their need for basic information she created several short videos in order to explain key concepts in the context of her service, helping members of staff to understand why copyright is important to them in their roles. As McDonnell rightly points out staff awareness is the biggest barrier to a successful copyright service. We cannot expect staff to manage copyright well if they are not fully informed about the need for it.

This message was echoed by Alex Fenlon from the University of Birmingham who talked about A Day in the Life of a Copyright/Licensing Expert. The University is about to open a new overseas campus which has raised a variety of copyright issues relating to the licensing of material. Fenlon encouraged us not to view copyright as a barrier to teaching and research activity and to pass this message on to our users. When asked if we can do something say yes and then use copyright exemptions and other rules to explore how to make this happen.

Open data and copyright

Keynote Josie Fraser, Senior Technology Advisor in the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, encouraged us not to think of data as the new oil – a metaphor I’ve come across before. Even though both data and oil need to be extracted, both create new industries and have an impact on wider society, and both power their respective industries. there are differences between them. While oil is a finite resource, data is effectively infinitely durable and reusable. That said, both can lead to powerful oligopolies emerging which dominate the landscape, something we have seen in recent times with companies such as Amazon, Google and Facebook.

The economy of data was something also highlighted by Carol Tullo, a consultant at Naomi Korn Copyright and Compliance,  in her talk on Organisational Governance of Information Assets which made the point that data is treated like a currency in today’s society. Companies are already wanting to see information about us in order to build up a picture of our habits and in the future our data may well be how we pay to use services. We can already see examples of this when use public Wi-Fi where there is usually an option to log in with various social media accounts. Many people see this as an easy option as they don’t have to create a new account for something they are only going to use for a short time but how much of our data are we giving away by using this method? The issue of third party access to our data is something which has been in the press a lot recently and serves as a timely reminder of what we could be giving away.

The resulting discussion around the potential conflict between open data and copyright was an interesting one from a scholarly communication perspective. Researchers are actively encouraged to share both their data and their finished papers as widely as possible but are often wary of letting others ‘steal’ their ideas. For many, copyright is seen as a protection mechanism but are they missing the point? Fraser argued that the time we spend locking down data could be better spent making sure it was shared openly. Data is created to be used and “open data and content can be freely used, modified and shared by anyone for any purpose”. Large companies are gathering their own data and are less likely to be interested in the outputs of researchers but the smaller companies and start-ups could find this really valuable and use it to build something new. Using open licenses on data and other materials can help to encourage this innovation and protect the rights of the creator at the same time.

UK-SCL

The final main theme of the day concerned the UK Scholarly Communication Licence which featured in a number of talks. Chris Banks from Imperial College London highlighted the currently confusing policy landscape (referencing our own work in this area). The UK-SCL aims to make the process of open access and the licensing of work more straightforward for all by offering a default license to authors which allows them to retain copyright whilst at the same time allowing the institution to make the author accepted manuscript available via a CC-BY-NC 4.0 license. This means that with a single action the author can publish with their journal of choice, retain more rights to their own work, use it in their teaching, meet the requirements of funders and REF and minimise overall reliance on hybrid Open Access. Quite an achievement!

There has been a positive response from the community and the next steps include working with research funders to see how this can be taken forward. One point that Banks did highlight was that discussions around the UK-SCL had resulted in a lightning rod effect by attracting attention to the wider conversation around Open Access. This can only be a positive as we work to engage more people in these important discussions.

The day also provided plenty of practical tips on rights clearance, dealing with moving images and the potential impact of Brexit. For more information on these, my full (live) notes from the conference can be found here and presentations from all sessions can be found on the CILIP website.

Published 8 May 2018
Written by Claire Sewell

*Note – an amendment to this blog post was made at 17.12 on 8 May to better reflect the emphasis of Josie Fraser’s talk as per her comment below.

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 global scholarly communication workforce.

In late 2016 we conducted a survey to find out more about this issue. We were slightly overwhelmed by the popularity of the survey which gathered over 500 responses from people who self-identified as working in scholarly communication which we defined as:

The process by which academics, scholars and researchers share and publish their research findings with the wider academic community and beyond. This includes, but is not limited to, areas such as open access and open data, copyright, institutional repositories and research data management.

You can read a summary of some of the findings from this research here but we wanted to delve a little deeper and look at which skills scholarly communication staff felt they needed and how they developed them. This blog post looks at that question.

Which skills?

Rather than come up with yet another list of skills that staff should or could have we made the decision to use an existing list from UKeIG – the UK eInformation Group of CILIP. This list is comprehensive in its coverage and we felt that it would provide a good basis for future comparisons as well as providing a list with which the community would be familiar. The list is of course not exhaustive and respondents were invited to add any additional skills which they felt were relevant to their roles.

Skills for current roles

Respondents were asked to highlight the skills which they used in their current roles. Their responses are summarised in Figure 1 (all figures can be viewed at higher resolution by clicking on them).
Figure 1 Skills used in current roles

Institutional repository (management/curation) (72%) and Copyright (63%) were the skills most used, closely followed by Open Access – content discovery (59%) and Understanding metrics (55%).

Some skills were used with much less frequency such as Resource Description and Access (RDA) (10%), Post-cancellation access and archiving (9%) and Mobile technology (8%). Under the option Other skills specified by respondents included knowledge of open educational resources, educating faculty and students about how to get published and electronic theses.

Skills for future roles

Respondents were also asked to select the skills they felt would be important for the future of the profession. The results are summarised in Figure 2:
Figure 2 Future skills

The top four selections had a similar number of responses: Innovations in academic publishing (51%), Research data management (50%), Understanding the user experience (47%) and Copyright (46%). It is interesting to note that Copyright is the only skill to appear in the top five of both current and future skills.

The other end of the scale again included RDA (6%) and Post-cancellation access (7%) as well as working with standards (6%). Under the option Other skills included instruction and education, developing strategic partnerships and gumption!

Developing these skills

What we really wanted to know was how people working in scholarly communication developed these skills – through their formal education, on the job training or self-directed learning. Survey respondents were asked how they had developed the skills included on the UKeIG list, and their responses can be seen in Figure 3 below:
Figure 3 Complete skill list

Almost all of the respondents had some level of either undergraduate or postgraduate education, with 71% either holding or working towards a postgraduate qualification in library and information science. Given this, it is surprising to note that so few felt that they had developed the skills they needed for their role through formal education. This gap could perhaps be attributed to the fact that 74% of respondents have held their qualifications for a significant amount of time and so these subjects were not offered at the time. They would have had little choice but to learn these skills on the job or in their own time as it was unlikely to be practical to return to formal education.

Generic skills on the list scored much higher with participants for formal education, perhaps because library school courses are designed to produce well-rounded information professionals able to work in a variety of sectors and so cover the skills that are most likely to be of use in a broad career.

Looking at the results in more detail we can see that a potential skills gap is being created. Looking at the top five skills respondents’ have identified as using in their current role we can see that the levels of formal learning for each are low (Figure 4).
Figure 4 How are current skills developed?

There is evidence that this skills gap could continue into the future. Figure 5 shows the top five skills respondents think will be of most importance to the future of the profession. Again the numbers developing these skills through formal education are low, showing that those working in scholarly communication are having to rely on either on the job or self-directed learning to develop the skills they identify as being important to the future of the profession.

Figure 5 How are future skills developed?

The results of this analysis seem to tie in with previously shared results which showed that just over half of respondents with an LIS qualification (56%) felt that this did not equip them with knowledge of the scholarly communication process.

Next steps

We will continue to analyse the results of the survey to find out more about how those working in scholarly communication have developed their skill sets and how they see future offerings being delivered. In the meantime the OSC is part of a group which is looking to tackle the provision of dedicated scholarly communication in the UK. As well as sharing our discussions on this blog you can talk to us at various events. We have already visited RLUK and are scheduled to present at LILAC and CILIP Careers Day so do come and chat to us if you have a chance!

Published 23 March 2018
Written by Claire Sewell

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 over 1500 for his thesis because the release “broke the internet”. There were some small but significant numbers too, including farewelling a few integral members of staff.

Celebrations

The OSC held a celebration in September to mark 1000 datasets in the repository. It was supposed to be a ‘garden party’ but inclement weather put paid to that! Apollo now contains the largest body of datasets of any UK HEI and downloads from the site account for a 36% (27,346) of all dataset downloads from 132 UK HEI repositories in 2017, according to IRUS-UK.

Our Repository Integration Manager, Dr Agustina Martinez was a joint winner of a 2017 Professional Services Recognition Award.  The judges used their discretionary powers to make this award that did not fit into the given categories. The award was for a “particularly successful cross-departmental team partnership” between the OSC, the Research Office, and the University Information Service for “preparing, implementing and evaluating the synchronisation of two internal research systems, a complex and challenging project that succeeded because of effective collaborative working”.

This is a prestigious achievement and we are very proud of her.

Open access activity

The Open Access Team within the OSC processes a huge number of articles, datasets and theses into the Apollo repository to ensure the University is compliant with various funder requirements. Over the past few years this work has been a primarily manual process, causing significant backlogs for the team.

A huge 18 month project has been the linking of our DSpace repository to the University’s CHRIS system, Symplectic Elements. In June 2017, the OSC successfully launched a new deposit system for article manuscripts for the research community, with new workflows eliminating the manual uploading of information to the repository.

The Request a Copy function was very popular, with 3108 requests in 2017 alone. The vast majority of these were for articles (1599) and theses (1282). Currently these requests are manually processed and forwarded to the authors manually, a very time consuming process.

Theses fun and games

During 2017 the team developed a new deposit form for theses which has allowed current and past students to easily upload their theses. The University introduced a new policy for PhD students to provide digital versions of their theses and the number of theses in the repository is now increasing exponentially.

In Open Access Week we opened up access to Professor Stephen Hawking’s thesis Properties of expanding universes. The response was incredible, with over 22,000 access an hour at one stage and the story that this thesis had ‘broken the internet’ hit the world news. Over a million unique IP addresses hit the page during and over the weeks after Open Access Week. There were over 42,000 accesses of Professor Hawking’s thesis in December alone.

Possibly off the back of that huge publicity, our (relatively) quiet call to alumni to also share their PhDs openly online has been met with enthusiasm and we continue to receive regular queries from our alumni community.

Experiments/research

We are now half way through our Open Research Pilot Project which has identified primary issues in this area as a lack of sustainable support for infrastructure and a lack of reward and incentive to work openly. The participants agree that having the dialogue is helping the participating researchers exchange ideas and the Wellcome Trust develop new services and policies.

We started investigating Text and Data Mining in 2017, with a meeting of interested library staff in February. This was followed up with a workshop at the RLUK conference which identified the fact that we do not have any Service Level Agreements with our publishers. Within Cambridge, our colleague James Cauldwell prepared a TDM libguide for our research community. In July we hosted an extremely well attended Text and Data Mining symposium which showcased many experiments and methods. The presentation slide decks and some of the recordings of the presentations are available on our website.

The Data Champions programme has been the subject of considerable interest worldwide and the website has been updated to be more useful to visitors. Regular meetings and training fora were held in 2017.

Training of the library community

Part of the work of the OSC is to develop the skills and knowledge of the large Cambridge library community in scholarly communication issues. Our Research Skills Support Coordinator Claire Sewell had an impressive 403 attendees at 23 events with a 70% rating of ‘excellent’. Claire launched successful online webinars in 2017 in addition to her face to face programme delivery. An example is ‘How to spot a predatory publisher’.

Claire has also been involved with Danny Kingsley on a sector wide project that is looking at the broader issue of training provision in scholarly communication. This project arose from a workshop held at UKSG in April. In 2017 the group, which includes representatives from Jisc, SCONUL, ARMA, RLUK, UKCORR, Vitae and CILIP, had its first meeting in June and will continue work this year.

Outreach to the research community

In 2017 the OSC consolidated its training provision for PhD students and Early Career Researchers to create a termly programme each for HASS and STEM. We have worked with other libraries across Cambridge to share our training capabilities, an approach that has been very successful.

We ran several very popular events, and in keeping with our philosophy of opening up our work to the widest audience, filmed events which are publicly available on our website and livestreamed where possible. Events included “How to get the most out of modern peer review”, a Text and Data Mining symposium and several “Helping Researchers Publish” events. We ended the year with a large event at St Catherine’s College called ‘Engaging Researchers in Research Data Management’ in conjunction with Jisc and SPARC Europe.

As a follow on from that event we are encouraging those involved in data to pitch for some funds to develop an idea to further the engagement of researchers with data. Information about the project can be downloaded.

Some events fed into further research. A popular January event to discuss Electronic Lab Notebooks then morphed into a trial of ELNs amongst our research community at Cambridge. This trial completed towards the end of 2017 and the findings and advice are now online with a link to what is already becoming a useful online discussion resource.

Engagement

We continue to blog through Unlocking Research and the new Open Research- Adventures from the Frontline blog. Between the two we published 45 blogs in 2017, all of which received hundreds of visits. The most visited blog was Milestone -1000 datasets in Cambridge’s repository with 1300 visits. Looking at the most popular blogs it shows a wide range of topics that have grabbed the imagination of the readership which seem to alternate between interest in the processes and assessment of Cambridge’s scholarly communication services:

• Next steps for Text & Data Mining
• Planning scholarly communication training in the UK
• Who is requesting what through Cambridge’s Request a Copy service?
• Open Access policy, procedure & process at Cambridge

and discussions about the politics surrounding policy in this area:

• Biting the hand that feeds – the obfuscation of publishers
• Flipping journals or filling pockets? Publisher manipulation of OA policies

Interestingly, the second most visited blog in 2017 was one published in February 2016 – What does a researcher do all day?, demonstrating the usefulness of this as a communication resource.

We continue to send out our two newsletters. The KaleidOSCope newsletter now has over 1100 subscribers of which just over 50% go to a Cambridge email address. The readership of the Research Data Management newsletter, with over 2200 subscribers, is more Cambridge focused, with approximately 77% having a Cambridge email address.

We also launched our new logo in 2017 – with the dandelion motif – to symbolize dissemination. As one of our team mentioned, they are a weed, but they are also very effective at spreading themselves around. We are not sure what that says about us.

Review of the Office of Scholarly Communication

After two years of operation, the Office of Scholarly Communication was the subject of a Review by the University. The actual Review took place in mid July, after a lead in requiring considerable work to reflect and summarise the work that has been done in this initial stage of the Office.

The process did represent a significant amount of extra work for the team in document preparation, and there is no denying this was a very stressful period. But it was extremely edifying to have such a high level endorsement of the approach the OSC has taken, with the Panel commending the team “for a highly creative and professional approach to setting up the service, and for achieving rapid growth in awareness, engagement and compliance in open access throughout the University”.

The Panel noted they had received “very positive feedback from service users who had responded to the consultation, and from external stakeholders”.

The Panel also commented on a “pro-active stance towards external engagement and advocacy for scholarly communication, being recognised as an internationally renowned and pioneering leader in the field of scholarly communication”. The blogs here on Unlocking Research are an example of this work.

Generally the OSC staff have continued to contribute to professional activities within and outside the University to help develop robust policies and services in the area of scholarly communication.

The first recommendation of the Review of the OSC was that a Working Party should be convened to “clarify the University’s needs and expectations in relation to Open Research”. This will be an important piece of work for the OSC with the University throughout 2018.

Staff changes

In April 2017 the Cambridge Library community welcomed Dr Jess Gardner as the University Librarian. In October last year Professor Stephen Toope was admitted to the office of Vice Chancellor at Cambridge University. These are significant leadership changes for the Library and the University.

Locally, scholarly communications was further embedded in the fabric of core business for the Library with the creation of a new Directorate in Scholarly Communication and Research Services, which Dr Danny Kingsley is heading in her new role as one of the Deputy Directors of the Library. Drs Lauren Cadwallader and Arthur Smith moved into Acting Deputy Head roles for the OSC.

The OSC said farewell to two members of the Research Data Management Facility. In April Rosie Higman moved to a new role at Manchester University and in July, Dr Marta Teperek moved to a role at Delft University in the Netherlands. This has been a big loss for the OSC team, although we maintain a strong working relationship with them both and have now been able to extend our collaborations across institutional and country lines.

On the other side of the ledger, we welcomed several new people to the team. In January, Dr Andre Sartori joined the Open Access Team. In May, Dr Marta Busse started work as our Research Data Coordinator. Dr Melodie Garnier joined the team in a Scholarly Communication Support role. We have had Tony Malone working with us, undertaking a wide range of support across our activities. Most recently, Zoe Walker-Fagg has joined as our Project Manager and lead on the thesis work.

There were some internal changes from within the Cambridge library community as well. Dr Matthias Ammon moved to a new role in a departmental library. Katie Hughes and Lucy Welch joined the team on secondments from other areas of the library network to cover some of the internal movement resulting from those staff who had left. For a team of 17 people, this movement within one year (four out, seven in) has been substantial.

We continue to need to consolidate the contractual and funding arrangements for the staffing of the OSC, and while the situation is considerably more stable than it was at the beginning of 2017, there is still some significant work to be done.

Looking ahead

There are some large projects underway in 2018. We are consulting with our research community and continuing to refine the thesis requirement policy.  We are working with Cambridge Digital Humanities and Cambridge University Press on a Text and Data Mining “Test Kitchen” to explore techniques, corpus and copyright issues. We are also looking to understand better how our research community interacts with the published literature.

On the technical side, one of our biggest challenges this year will be to automate our Request a Copy service and start promoting this more actively. We have some interesting plans for engagement including a competition for researchers to have their work explained by a professional storyteller for the Cambridge Science Festival.

The outcome of the University’s work on a position statement on Open Research will affect the direction of the OSC into the future. Regardless, we will continue to support and innovate in the area of scholarly communication with our local community while contributing to the discussions and activities nationally and globally. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose sums it up nicely.

Published 22 January 2018
Written by Dr Danny Kingsley