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Open Resources: Who Should Pay?
This blog is the first in a series of three which considers the perspectives of researchers, funders and universities in relation to the support for open resources, coordinated and written by Dr Lauren Cadwallader. This post asks the question: What is the responsibility of national funders to research resources that are internationally important? In January 2017 the Office of Scholarly Communication and Wellcome Trust started an Open Research Pilot Project to try to understand how we could help our researchers work more openly and what barriers they faced with making their work open. One of the issues that is a common theme with the groups that we are working with is the issue…
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Reflections on Open Research – a PI’s perspective
As part of the Open Research Pilot Project, Marta Teperek met with Dr David Savage and asked him several questions about his own views and motivations for Open Research. This led to a very inspiring conversation and great reflections on Open Research from the Principal Investigator’s perspective. The main points that came out of the discussion were: Lack of reproducibility raises questions about scientific rigour, integrity and relevance of work in general Being open is to work in a team and be collaborative Open Research will benefit science as a whole, and not the careers of individuals Peer review remains a critical aspect of the scientific process Nowadays, global collaboration…
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Cambridge RCUK Block Grant spend for 2016-2017
Much to our relief, last Friday we sent off our most recent report on our expenditure of the RCUK Block Grant fund. The report is available in our repository. Cambridge makes all of its information about spend on Open Access publicly available. This blog continues on from that describing our spend from 2009 – 2016, and from the blog on our open access spend in 2014. Compliance We are pleased to be able to report that we reached 80% compliance in this reporting period, up from 76% last year. The RCUK is expecting 75% compliance by the end of the transition period on 31 March 2018, so we are well over target. According…
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Open at scale: sharing images in the Open Research Pilot
Dr Ben Steventon is one of the participants in the Open Research Pilot. He is working with the Office of Scholarly Communication to make his research process more open and here reports on some of the major challenges he perceives at the beginning of the project. The Steventon Group is a new group established last year which looks at embryonic development, in particular focusing on the zebrafish. To investigate problems in this area the group uses time-lapse imaging and tracks cells in 3D visualisations which presents many challenges when it comes to data sharing, which they hope to address through the Wellcome Trust Open Research Project. Whilst the difficulties that…
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Strategies for engaging senior leadership with RDM – IDCC discussion
This blog post gathers key reflections and take-home messages from a Birds of a Feather discussion on the topic of senior management engagement with RDM, and while written by a small number of attendees, the content reflects the wider discussion in the room on the day. [Authors: Silke Bellanger, Rosie Higman, Heidi Imker, Bev Jones, Liz Lyon, Paul Stokes, Marta Teperek*, Dirk Verdicchio] On 20 February 2017, stakeholders interested in different aspects of data management and data curation met in Edinburgh to attend the 12th International Digital Curation Conference, organised by the Digital Curation Centre. Apart from discussing novel tools and services for data curation, the take-home message from many presentations…
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Libraries’ role in teaching the research community – LILAC2017
Recently Claire Sewell, the OSC Research Support Skills Coordinator attended her first LILAC conference in Swansea. These are her observations from the event. LILAC (Librarians’ Information Literacy Annual Conference) is one of the highlights of the information profession calendar which focuses on sharing knowledge and best practice in the field of information literacy. For those who don’t know information literacy is defined as: Knowing when and why you need information, where to find it and how to evaluate, use and communicate it in an ethical manner (CILIP definition) Showcasing OSC initiatives Since it was my first time attending it was a privilege to be able to present three sessions on different…
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Shifting sands: notes from UKSG2017 workshop on skills
Library education needs to teach skills over knowledge to remain relevant into the future, conferences are a useful place to learn about scholarly communication and libraries need to employ a wider range of staff were some of the outcomes from two workshops held at the recent UKSG conference called “Shifting sands: Changing academic library skill sets”. The slides – which include notes from the discussions on both days – are available in Slideshare. The hashtag for the conference is #uksg17 The workshop was held twice, on Monday 10th April and on Tuesday 11th April. The audience on both days consisted of just over 50 people and were primarily library staff…
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How to get the most out of modern peer-review
On 30th March the Office of Scholarly Communication hosted an event How to get the most out of modern peer-review, bringing together researchers, publishers and library staff to discuss how peer review is changing. Dr Laurent Gatto was both a presenter and a participant, and with permission we have re-posted his blog about the event here. Publisher presentations There were presentations from eLife (Dr Wei Mun Chan) and F1000Research (Dr Sabina Alam, @Sab_Ra) in the Innovations in peer-review session. PeerJ was mentioned several times, for publishing their peer reviews, for example. I general, I think the presenters did a good job in demonstrating modern peer review on how it can benefit authors…
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“Become part of the research process” – observations from RLUK2017
When is a librarian not a librarian? Rather than a bad joke, this was one of the underlying interesting discussions arising from the 2017 RLUK conference held earlier in March. The conference Twitter hashtag was #rluk17 and the videos are now available. The answer, it appears is when we start talking about partnerships with, rather than support of, our research community. As always with my write-ups of conferences, these are simply the parts that have resonated with me, and the impression I walked away with. This write up will be very different from anyone else’s from the conference, such as this blog from Lesley Pitman, and the RLUK conference report. I have…
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Service Level Agreements for TDM
Librarians expect publishers to support our researchers’ rights to Text and Data Mining and not cut access off for a library if they see ‘suspicious’ activity before they establish whether it is legitimate or not. These were the conclusions of a group who met at a workshop to discuss provision of Text and Data Mining services in March. The final conclusions were: Expectations libraries have of publishers over TDM The workshop concluded with very different expectations to what was originally proposed. The messages to publishers that were agreed were: Don’t cut us off over TDM activity! Have a conversation with us first if you notice abnormal behaviour* If you do cut…
