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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…
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Where did they come from? Educational background of people in scholarly communication
Scholarly communication roles are becoming more commonplace in academic libraries around the world but who is actually filling these roles? The Office of Scholarly Communication in Cambridge recently conducted a survey to find out a bit more about who makes up the scholarly communication workforce and this blog post is the first in a series sharing the results. The survey was advertised in October 2016 via several mailing lists targeting an audience of library staff who worked in scholarly communication. For the purposes of the survey we defined this as: The process by which academics, scholars and researchers share and publish their research findings with the wider academic community and…
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Open Research Project, first thoughts
Dr Laurent Gatto is one of the participants in the Office of Scholarly Communication’s Open Research Pilot. He has recently blogged about his first impressions of the pilot. With his permission we have re-blogged it here. I am proud to be one of the participants in the Wellcome Trust Open Research Project (and here). The call was initially opened in December 2016 and was pitched like this: Are you in favour of more transparency in research? Are you concerned about research reproducibility? Would you like to get better recognition and credit for all outputs of your research process? Would you like to open up your research and make it more…
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‘Be nice to each other’ – the second Researcher to Reader conference
Aaaaaaaaaaargh! was Mark Carden’s summary of the second annual Researcher to Reader conference, along with a plea that the different players show respect to one another. My take home messages were slightly different: Publishers should embrace values of researchers & librarians and become more open, collaborative, experimental and disinterested. Academic leaders and institutions should do their bit in combating the metrics focus. Big Deals don’t save libraries money, what helps them is the ability to cancel journals. The green OA = subscription cancellations is only viable in a utopian, almost fully green world. There are serious issues in the supply chain of getting books to readers. And copyright arrangements in academia do…
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We are going OPEN – the Open Research experiment has begun!
There has been much discussion recently about the reproducibility crisis and about the growing distrust among the public in the quality of research. As illustrated in our ‘Case for Open Research’ series of blog posts, one of the main reasons for this is that researchers are currently rewarded for the number of papers they publish in high impact factor journals, and not necessarily for the quality of work that they are doing. Indeed, Cambridge researchers clearly indicated that the lack of incentives to do anything other than publishing in these types of journals is one of the main blockers discouraging them from adopting a more open research practice. Joining forces with…
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The art of software maintenance
When it comes to software management there are probably more questions than answers to problems – that was the conclusion of a recent workshop hosted by the Office of Scholarly Communication (OSC) as part of a national series on software sustainability, sharing and management, funded by Jisc. The presentations and notes from the day are available, as is a Storify from the tweets. The goal of these workshops was to flesh out the current problems in software management and sharing and try to identify possible solutions. The researcher-led nature of this event provided researchers, software engineers and support staff with a great opportunity to discuss the issues around creating and…
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‘Paperless research’ solutions – Electronic Lab Notebooks
The Office of Scholarly Communication started 2017 with a discussion about ‘going digital’ – on 13 January 2017 we organised an event at Cambridge University’s Department of Engineering to flesh out the problems preventing researchers from implementing Electronic Lab Notebook solutions. Chris Brown from Jisc wrote an excellent blog post with his reflections of the event* and agreed for us to re-blog it here. For researchers working in laboratories the importance of recording experiments, results, workflows, etc in a notebook is engrained into you as a student. However, these paper-based solutions are not ideal when it comes to sharing and preservation. They pile on desks and shelves, vary in quality…
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2016 – that was the year that was
In January last year we published a blog post ‘2015 that was the year that was‘ which not only helped us take stock about what we have achieved, but also was very well received. So we have decided to do it again. For those who are more visually oriented, the slides ‘The OSC a lightning Tour‘ might be useful. Now starting its third year of operation, the Office of Scholarly Communication (OSC) has expanded to a team of 15, managing a wide variety of projects. The OSC has developed a set of strategic goals to support its mission: “The OSC works in a transparent and rigorous manner to provide recognised leadership…
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Further developing the library profession in 2016
In this blog post, Claire Sewell, the OSC’s Research Support Skills Coordinator reflects on a busy year for the professional development of Cambridge library staff. Librarians are always learning and 2016 was a bumper year for training in the Office of Scholarly Communication (OSC). The OSC has taken an active role in professional development since its foundation but things have stepped up since the dedicated training role of Research Support Skills Coordinator was established at the end of 2015. The OSC runs two parallel professional development schemes for library staff: the Supporting Researchers in the 21st Century programme (a continuous programme of training aimed at all staff) and the Research Support Ambassador…
