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Preparing for the end of COAF
The Open Access team are getting ready for the end of Charity Open Access Fund (COAF), which is due to dissolve on 30th September 2020. From 1st October 2020 onward, there are going to be changes to the block grants that we receive, and as a result, there will be a change in our policies on whether or not we can cover researchers’ article processing charges (APCs). We have outlined how researchers should go about securing funding for the APC’s below: Funder name Are article processing charges covered by a block grant? How do I pay for my article processing charge? UKRI Yes No change: researchers should continue to upload their paper to us for a funding decision. Wellcome Trust Yes No…
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Data sharing and reuse case study: the Mammographic Image Society database
The Mammographic Image Society (MIAS) database is a set of mammograms put together in 1992 by a consortium of UK academic institutions and archived on 8mm DAT tape, copies of which were made openly available and posted to applicants for a small administration fee. The mammograms themselves were curated from the UK National Breast Screening Programme, a major screening program that was established in the late 80s offering routine screening every three years to women aged between 50-64. The motivations for creating the database were to make a practical contribution to computer vision research – which sought to improve the ability of computers to interpret images – and to encourage…
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The Role of Open Data in Science Communication
Itamar Shatz has written a guest blog post for the Office of Scholarly Communication about how public trust in the scientific community increases when researchers make their data openly available to all. He also emphasizes that science communicators (e.g. press offices, journalists, publishers) have a responsibility to point attention directly at the primary source of the data. Itamar is a PhD candidate in the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics at the University of Cambridge. He is also a member of the Cambridge Data Champion programme, having joined at the start of this year. He writes about science and philosophy that have practical applications at Effectiviology.com. It’s no secret that…
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Clearing the final hurdle – automating embargo setting
One of the biggest issues facing the Open Access Team has been keeping up with the constant stream of accepted manuscripts that need to be processed. In many cases we receive notification of an accepted manuscript well before formal publication. This has presented a significant challenge over the last five years because although we know there is a publication forthcoming (or at least we trust that there this), we have no idea as to when an article may actually be published. This means that we have many thousands of publication records in Apollo which have ‘placeholder’ embargoes because we simply did not know the publication date at the point of…
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2019 That Was The Year That Was
This is our traditional yearly blog about what we have been doing at the OSC in Cambridge. We are publishing it a little later than intended, but this is an indication of how busy the beginning of 2020 has been here in the Office of Scholarly Communication. 2019 saw us more in a ‘business as usual’ phase as we knuckled down and got on with supporting researchers in Cambridge. That aside, we still had some major developments in Open Research and this work will continue into 2020 and beyond. Policy changes 2019 saw a number of happenings in the policy space at Cambridge. Most excitingly, the University’s Position Statement on Open Research was announced in February, making…
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Embarking on a career in open access
Lorraine and Olivia started working as Scholarly Communication Support in the Open Access team at the Office of Scholarly Communication (OSC) in the University Library this summer. In this interview, they share their experience of starting a new role in the field of open access, from the perspective of their respective backgrounds in academia and publishing. What does working in Scholarly Communication Support entail and what are your responsibilities in this role? For the first few months joining the Open Access team we both started looking at “Fast Track deposits”, the simplest route of depositing author’s manuscripts into Apollo, the University of Cambridge institutional repository. This system allows the team…
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Image Copyright and Open Access in the Arts and Humanities
Copyright is a crucial topic in the Humanities because researchers in several disciplines (especially history of art, my field of study) rely on images for their work and because publishers usually require authors to pay copyright holders for permission to reproduce those images – failure to do so would make the author and the publisher liable for copyright infringement. At the OSC Symposium last 2nd October 2019 (Open Access Monographs: From Policy to Reality), Dr Nicola Kozicharow’s presentation on ‘Open Research Publishing in the Humanities’ made quite an impact on the discussions of the day. This early career historian of art, specialised in 19th– and 20th-century European and Russian art, talked about the challenge of publishing when third-party image copyright is involved. She detailed the difficult and sometimes grotesque situations that she…
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Chasing cash cows in a swamp? Perspectives on Plan S from Australia and the USA
Plan S was born in Europe, yet from the very start it aspired to accelerate conversations around open access on a global scale. After all, if free access to research outputs is good in one place, it will be good everywhere, right? Well, it turns out that things may not be that simple. In this Open Access Week, we look East and West to find out how Plan S is being received across the globe. Dr Danny Kingsley explores how reliance on foreign students has trapped Australian universities in a ‘Faustian bargain’ with publishers and reduced the scope for change. Micah Vandegrift reports on the type of conversations that Plan…
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Open Access monographs: Reflections from our recent symposium
Open access book formats have been under discussion for several years and have attracted interest – and concern – from researchers in Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences as well as amongst institutions, publishers, and funders. Earlier this month the Office of Scholarly Communication organised a one-day symposium on ‘Open Access monographs: from policy to reality’ which took place at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge. It aimed to enable discussion about the open access monographs agenda and its future challenges with the Cambridge community and beyond, to bring together researchers with publishers, funders, experts and innovators in the field of open monograph publishing, and to share experiences about the opportunities and realities…
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Open Research at the University of Cambridge: What have we done so far?
At the start of 2019 the University of Cambridge announced its Position Statement on Open Research. This blog looks at what has been happening since then and the current plans for making research at Cambridge more open. Our Position In February 2019, the University of Cambridge set out its position on open research to support and encourage open practices throughout the research lifecycle for all research outputs. The Position Statement made clear that both the University and researchers have responsibility in this space and that there would be no one size fits all approach to how to be open. As part of forming a position on open research, the University…
