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How do you know if you’re achieving cultural change?
On 15th November 2017, the University of Cambridge held its first research data management (RDM) conference, Engaging Researchers in Good Data Management. The Office of Scholarly Communication collaborated with SPARC Europe and Jisc, hosted the one-day event at St. Catherine’s College. In attendance were researchers, administrators, and librarians all sharing their experiences with promoting good RDM. Having a mixture of people from various disciplines and backgrounds allowed many different points of view on engaging researchers to be discussed. In the afternoon, the attendees split off into focus groups to concentrate on a number of nagging questions. Our group’s topic of discussion: How do we effectively measure cultural change in attitudes…
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From data curators to intellectual entrepreneurs: observations from IFLA
In this blog post, Clair Castle, Librarian, University of Cambridge, Department of Chemistry reflects on her experience at the IFLA Satellite Meeting 2017 in Warsaw, Poland. Earlier this year I was invited by the Office of Scholarly Communication (OSC) at the University of Cambridge to present a paper on Data Curator’s Roles and Responsibilities: International and Interdisciplinary Perspectives. This was my first time writing a paper for a conference and presenting it; it was slightly daunting but exciting too! IFLA is the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions, the international body that represents the interests of library and information services and their users. It celebrates its 90th birthday in 2017. This conference was a…
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Engaging Researchers with Good Data Management: Perspectives from Engaged Individuals
We need to recognise good practice, engage researchers early in their career with research data management and use peers to talk to those who are not ‘onboard’. These were the messages five attendees at the Engaging Researchers in Good Data Management conference held on the 15th of November. The Data Champions and Research Support Ambassadors programmes are designed to increase confidence in providing support to researchers in issues around data management and all of scholarly communications respectively. Thanks to the generous support of the Arcadia Foundation, five places were made available to attend this event. In this blog post the three Data Champions and two Research Support Ambassadors who were awarded…
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Plans for scholarly communication professional development
Well now there is a plan. The second meeting of the Scholarly Communication Professional Development Group was held on 9 October in the Jisc offices in London. This followed on from the first meeting in June about which there is a blog. The attendance list is again at the end of this blog. The group has agreed we need to look at four main areas: Addressing the need for inclusion of scholarly communication in academic library degree courses Mapping scholarly communication competencies against training provision options Creating a self assessment tool to help individuals decide if scholarly communication is for them Costing out ‘on the job training’ as an option…
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It’s hard getting a date (of publication)
As part of Open Access Week 2017, the Office of Scholarly Communication is publishing a series of blog posts on open access and open research. In this post Maria Angelaki describes how challenging it can be to interpret publication dates featured on some publishers’ websites. More than three weeks a year. That’s how much time we spend doing nothing but determining the publication date of the articles we process in the Open Access team. To be clear about what we are talking about here: All we need to know for HEFCE compliance is when the final Version of Record was made available on the publisher’s website. Also, if there is a printed version…
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Flipping journals or filling pockets? Publisher manipulation of OA policies
As part of Open Access Week 2017, the Office of Scholarly Communication is publishing a series of blog posts on open access and open research. In this post Drs André Sartori and Danny Kingsley look at examples of where publishers have structured pricing to take full advantage of funds available through UK open access policies. We are spending a lot on open access in the UK. The 2017-2018 RCUK block grant allocations alone to support the RCUK Policy on Open Access add up to more than £8 million. So, what happens when a country makes a decision to introduce a significant extra boost to the publication budget? As was predicted…
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Choosing from a cornucopia: a thesis digitisation project
As part of Open Access Week 2016, the Office of Scholarly Communication is publishing a series of blog posts on open access and open research. In this post Drs Danny Kingsley and Matthias Ammon describe the process of choosing theses to digitise. For decades microfilm was the way documents were photographed and stored. The British Library holds a collection of 14,000 Cambridge PhD theses on microfilm. These date back to the 1960s and go through to 2008 when digitisation took over from microfilm. In 2016 the Office of Scholarly Communication (OSC) was contacted by the British Library with an offer of low cost digitisation of these theses. Clearly being able to…
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Benchmarking RDM Training
This blog reports on the progress of the international project to benchmark Research Data Management training across institutions. It is a collaboration of Cambridge Research Data Facility staff with international colleagues – a full list is at the bottom of the post. This is a reblog, the original appeared on 6 October 2017. How effective is your RDM training? When developing new training programmes, one often asks oneself a question about the quality of training. Is it good? How good is it? Trainers often develop feedback questionnaires and ask participants to evaluate their training. However, feedback gathered from participants attending courses does not answer the question how good was this…
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Milestone -1000 datasets in Cambridge’s repository
Last week, Cambridge celebrated a huge milestone – the deposit of the 1000th dataset to our repository Apollo since the launch of the Research Data Facility in early 2015. This is the culmination of a huge amount of work by the team in the Office of Scholarly Communication, in terms of developing systems, workflows, policies and through an extensive advocacy campaign. The Research Data team have run 118 events over the past couple of years and published 39 blogs. In the past 12 months alone there have been 26000 downloads of the data in Apollo. In some cases the dataset has been downloaded many times – 170 – and the data…
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Biting the hand that feeds – the obfuscation of publishers
Let’s not pull any punches here. We are unimpressed. Late last week HEFCE published a blog: Are UK universities on track to meet open access requirements? In the blog HEFCE identified the key issues in meeting OA requirements as: The complexity of the OA environment Resource constraints Cultural resistance to OA Inadequate technical infrastructure. Right. So the deliberate obstruction to Open Access by the academic publishing industry doesn’t factor at all? Policy confusion We also note that the fact that the funders have different compliance requirements in terms of the means by which we make work available, the timing in the publication process and the financial support of their policies is not articulated…
