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Enriching the institutional scholarly record: Octopus outputs in repositories via Publications Router
Written by Dr Alexandra Freeman, Tim Fellows, Dr Agustina Martínez-García Researchers at universities across the country are constantly being reminded that when they publish work in journals (or elsewhere) they have to deposit the accepted version of their article in their university’s repository as well. It ensures that this version of the article can be made freely available to the world (so-called ‘Green Open Access’) but also allows the university to keep track of their researchers’ outputs, including reporting to the all-important REF (Research Excellence Framework) exercise that takes place every few years and helps determine future government funding to each institution. It’s important that researchers deposit their works, but…
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The Data Picture
I was recently named one of “the next generation of [library] leaders” as part of the CILIP 125, having been recognised as an individual who contributes energy and knowledge to improving and impacting their organisation. My area of expertise, and thus recognition, lies with the use of data within libraries. As a data analyst for the Office of Scholarly Communications at Cambridge University Library, my role focuses on empowering decisions with data driven understanding – such as supporting the Springer Nature negotiations. To develop my understanding of data, and its role within a wider organisation, further, I engage with data beyond the library – such as the Big Data London…
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Rights retention: publisher responses to the University’s pilot
The University’s one-year rights retention pilot has been running for six months now, during which time many papers containing the rights retention declaration have been submitted by Cambridge authors. As expected, the Office of Scholarly Communication is receiving more queries about rights retention from Cambridge academics, many of which relate to how publishers are responding to submissions containing the rights retention declaration. This post covers some of these queries to offer a picture of how rights retention is being received. It is worth reminding ourselves what the rights retention pilot entails. All researchers at Cambridge can sign up to participate in the pilot here. In doing so, the researcher enters…
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Thoughts on the new White House OSTP open access memo
Dr. Samuel A. Moore, Scholarly Communication Specialist, Cambridge University Libraries In the USA last Thursday, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy announced its decision to mandate public access to all federally funded research articles and data. From 2026, the permitted embargo period of one year for funded publications will be removed and all publications arising from federal funding will have to be immediately accessible through a repository. Although more details are to be announced, my colleague Niamh Tumelty, the OSC’s Head of Open Research Services, shared a helpful summary of the policy and some initial reaction here. I want to offer my own personal assessment of what…
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Rights Retention Pilot
This interview is reposted with agreement from the sOApbox blog. It is one of a series of blog posts outlining how different institutions are introducing rights retention policies to support their researchers in sharing their research as widely as possible. 14/04/2022In 2008 Harvard’s Faculty of Arts & Sciences voted unanimously to adopt a ground-breaking open access policy. Since then, over 70 other institutions, including other Harvard faculties, Stanford and MIT, have adopted similar policies based on the Harvard model. In Europe such institutional policies have, so far, been slow to get off the ground. We are beginning to see that situation change. The University of Cambridge has recently established a…
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Open Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences: Two Working Groups
This piece by Dr. Meg Westbury (Librarian, Haddon Library) and Dr. Matthias Ammon (Research Support Librarian, Germanic Languages & Film) introduces the work of the open research workings groups in the humanities and qualitative social sciences. During 2021, two working groups of the Open Research Steering Committee formed to explore disciplinary perspectives on open research. One working group focuses on concerns and interests in open research from the perspective of researchers in the School of Arts and Humanities, and the other focuses on perspectives of researchers engaged in qualitative inquiry mainly from the School of the Humanities and Social Sciences. In this newsletter article, we describe the goals, activities and…
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Open access success stories: interview with Dr. Jacqui Stanford
For this post, Katherine Burchell talks to Dr Jacqui Stanford about the success of her open access doctoral thesis: Identities in Transition: theorising race and multicultural success in school contexts in Britain. The thesis is available to download from Apollo here: https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.58378 Thanks for agreeing to talk about your research. Could you please describe what your PhD thesis is about? I am interested in how we build a harmonious society given the challenges of our past of chattel slavery and colonialism. As a Black educator of Caribbean heritage, I also have a particular professional interest in schools that are successful for Black children. However, I’ve never been interested in a…
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Informing the Elsevier negotiations: Dominic Dixon on the work of the Data Analysis Working Group
As part of our series of posts on the Elsevier negotiations, Dominic Dixon, Research Librarian at Cambridge University Libraries, explains the work of the library’s Data Analysis Working Group to access, understand and analyse the data relating to how researchers at Cambridge use Elsevier publications. These findings are also presented as a series of data visualisations on the recently launched Elsevier Data Dashboard [Cambridge University Raven account required]. Having a strong underpinning of data is critical to strengthening the University and sector position in negotiations with Elsevier. This post outlines our approach in the data analysis working group to gathering and presenting the data underpinning the negotiations, looks at some…
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How might we reduce our dependency on legacy publishers such as Elsevier?
To coincide with our first townhall event on the Elsevier negotiations, Professor Stephen Eglen offers his perspective on the University’s future relationship with the publishing industry. Prof. Eglen is Professor of Computational Neuroscience in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge. I’m often asked why I single out Elsevier when discussing spurious publishing practices*. The simple reason is that they are the single largest publisher that most institutions deal with. Other legacy publishers adopt similar practices, outlined below, that I disagree with. However, given that Elsevier tends to take about 40% of our journal subscription costs, it is worth focusing on. Even finding out…
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Staff introduction: Dr. Samuel Moore, Scholarly Communication Specialist
I am delighted to have joined the Office for Scholarly Communication here at Cambridge and wanted to post a brief introduction about my previous work in scholarly communication and the vision I have for my role as Scholarly Communication Specialist. I have been involved in open research and scholarly communication for the past fifteen years, having both worked for a number of open access publishers and completed a PhD on the transition to open access in humanities disciplines. I am an information studies researcher by training and a strong advocate for openness in scholarly research. I therefore hope to help Cambridge continue to steer towards an open future for scholarly…
