-
Milestone – 10,000th article processed by OA Service
The Open Access Service at Cambridge has received its 10,000th Open Access submission – highlighting its commitment to making research freely available to anybody who wants to access it, without publisher paywalls or expensive journal subscriptions. Through open access our research can reach a worldwide audience. Nita Forouhi The 10,000th submission, reporting on the impact of eating a Mediterranean diet on the risk of developing cardiovascular disease in a UK population, was deposited by Signe Wulund at the MRC Epidemiology Unit, on behalf of Dr Nita Forouhi, Programme Leader in Nutritional Epidemiology at the MRC Epidemiology Unit, and several co-authors. The Open Access movement has been growing in strength in academia…
-
Taking a Principled stance – the Scholarly Commons
It only rains about 10 days a year in San Diego. And Tuesday was one of them. In a rooftop room on campus in San Diego at UCSD, a group had gathered for the FORCE11 Scholarly Commons workshop. The workshop brought together members of the Scholarly Commons working group, who hail from around the world and come from the broad scholarly commons. The Scholarly Commons is an idea to help define the future of research communication. The goal is to promote the best research and scholarship possible through rapid and wide dissemination to all who need or want it. FORCE stands for the Future of Research Communications and eScholarship and is an organisation (or…
-
Cambridge University spend on Open Access 2009-2016
Today is the deadline for those universities in receipt of an RCUK grant to submit their reports on the spend. We have just submitted the Cambridge University 2015-2016 report to the RCUK and have also made it available as a dataset in our repository. Compliance Cambridge had an estimated overall compliance rate of 76% with 46% of all RCUK funded papers available through the gold route and 30% of all RCUK funded papers available through the green route. The RCUK Open Access Policy indicates that at the end of the fifth transition year of the policy (March 2018) they expect 75% of Open Access papers from the research they fund will be delivered…
-
Making the connection: research data network workshop
During International Data Week 2016, the Office of Scholarly Communication is celebrating with a series of blog posts about data. The first post was a summary of an event we held in July. This post looks at the challenges associated with financially supporting RDM training. Following the success of hosting the Data Dialogue: Barriers to Sharing event in July we were delighted to welcome the Research Data Management (RDM) community to Cambridge for the second Jisc research data network workshop. The event was held in Corpus Christi College with meals held in the historical dining room. (Image: Corpus Christi ) RDM services in the UK are maturing and efforts are increasingly focused on…
-
Championing RDM training
During International Data Week 2016, the Office of Scholarly Communication is celebrating with a series of blog posts about data. The first post was a summary of an event we held in July. This post looks at the challenges associated with financially supporting RDM training. The problem There is a desperate need for training in research data management. Our significant engagement with researchers at the University of Cambridge over the past 18 months has indicated to us that research data cannot be effectively shared if it has not been properly managed during the research lifecycle. Researchers cannot be expected to share their data at the end of their research project if they are unable…
-
Beyond compliance – dialogue on barriers to data sharing
Welcome to International Data Week. The Office of Scholarly Communication is celebrating with a series of blog posts about data, starting with a summary of an event we held in July. On 29 July 2016 the Cambridge Research Data Team joined forces with the Science and Engineering South Consortium to organise a one day conference at the Murray Edwards College to gather researchers and practitioners for a discussion about the existing barriers to data sharing. The whole aim of the event was to move beyond compliance with funders’ policies. We hoped that the community was ready to change the focus of data sharing discussions from whether it is worth sharing…
-
Could Open Research benefit Cambridge University researchers?
This blog is part of the recent series about Open Research and reports on a discussion with Cambridge researchers held on 8 June 2016 in the Department of Engineering. Extended notes from the meeting and slides are available at the Cambridge University Research Repository. This report is written by Lauren Cadwallader, Joanna Jasiewicz and Marta Teperek (listed alphabetically by surname). At the Office of Scholarly Communication we have been thinking for a while about Open Research ideas and about moving beyond mere compliance with funders’ policies on Open Access and research data sharing. We thought that the time has come to ask our researchers what they thought about opening up the research process and…
-
The case for Open Research: solutions?
This series arguing the case for Open Research has to date looked at some of the issues in scholarly communication today. Hyperauthorship, HARKing, the reproducibility crisis, a surge in retractions all stem from the requirement that researchers publish in high impact journals. The series has also looked at the invalidity of the impact factor and issues with peer review. This series is one of an increasing cacophony of calls to move away from this method of rewarding researchers. Richard Smith noted in a recent BMJ blog criticising the current publication in journal system: “The whole outdated enterprise is kept alive for one main reason: the fact that employers and funders…
-
The case for Open Research: does peer review work?
This is the fourth in a series of blog posts on the Case for Open Research, this time looking at issues with peer review. The previous three have looked at the mis-measurement problem, the authorship problem and the accuracy of the scientific record. This blog follows on from the last and asks – if peer review is working why are we facing issues like increased retractions and the inability to reproduce considerable proportion of the literature? (Spoiler alert – peer review only works sometimes.) Again, there is an entire corpus of research behind peer review, this blog post merely scrapes the surface. As a small indicator, there has been a Peer Review Congress…
-
Lifting the lid on peer review
This blog describes some of the insights that emerged from two sets of discussions with academics at Cambridge University organised by Cambridge University Press last year. The topic was peer review and the two sessions were a group of editors in the Humanities and Social Sciences, the other a group of editors in the Science, Technical, Medical and Engineering areas. The themes that emerged echoed many of the issues that were raised in the associated blog ‘The case for Open Research: does peer review work?‘. If anything, the discussion paints a darker picture of the peer review landscape. Themes included the challenges of finding and retaining reviewers, the reviewing demand on…
