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Biting the hand that feeds – the obfuscation of publishers
Let’s not pull any punches here. We are unimpressed. Late last week HEFCE published a blog: Are UK universities on track to meet open access requirements? In the blog HEFCE identified the key issues in meeting OA requirements as: The complexity of the OA environment Resource constraints Cultural resistance to OA Inadequate technical infrastructure. Right. So the deliberate obstruction to Open Access by the academic publishing industry doesn’t factor at all? Policy confusion We also note that the fact that the funders have different compliance requirements in terms of the means by which we make work available, the timing in the publication process and the financial support of their policies is not articulated…
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Open Access policy, procedure & process at Cambridge
The Open Access policies developed and applied by the UK’s major research funders (HEFCE, RCUK and COAF) all aim to achieve one thing: freedom of knowledge for all. However, the specific mechanisms these funders have taken to achieve this goal varies considerably and requires careful implementation from higher education institutions (HEIs). In this blog post, I’ll describe the different workflows required to meet each funder’s expectations and then look at how these policies intersect with each other to form a tangled web of policy nightmare. Some of the decisions and processes will be peculiar to the University of Cambridge, especially when it comes to decisions around funding for article processing…
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Researchers championing data – what works?
Here we follow up on our earlier piece “Creating a research data community”, where Rosie Higman and Hardy Schwamm discussed innovative ways of researcher engagement with research data management. This blog discusses the outcome from a dedicated Birds of a Feather session at the 9th Research Data Alliance Plenary meeting in Barcelona in April 2017. The session discussed three different programmes for engaging researchers with data management and sharing: University of Cambridge Data Champions programme, TU Delft’s Data Stewardship and SPARC Europe’s Open Data Champions. The purpose of this session was to exchange practice, discuss the difference between the programmes and talk about possible next steps. All presentations from the sessions are…
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Who is requesting what through Cambridge’s Request a Copy service?
In October last year we reported on the first four months of our Request a Copy service. Now, 15 months in, we have had over 3000 requests and this provides us with a rich source of information to mine about the users of our repository. The dataset underpinning the findings described here is available in the repository. What are people requesting? We have had 3240 requests through the system since its inception in June 2016. Of those the vast majority have been for articles 1878 (58%) and theses 1276 (39%). The remaining requests are for book chapters, conference objects, datasets, images and manuscripts. It should be noted that most datasets…
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Sustaining long-term access to open research resources – a university library perspective
In the third in a series of three blog posts, Dave Gerrard, a Technical Specialist Fellow from the Polonsky-Foundation-funded Digital Preservation at Oxford and Cambridge project, describes how he thinks university libraries might contribute to ensuring access to Open Research for the longer-term. The series began with Open Resources, who should pay, and continued with Sustaining open research resources – a funder perspective. Blog post in a nutshell This blog post works from the position that the user-bases for Open Research repositories in specific scientific domains are often very different to those of institutional repositories managed by university libraries. It discusses how in the digital era we could deal with…
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Continuing the conversation: a CRUK workshop on RDM
In May 2017 the Office of Scholarly Communication organised a workshop with Paola Quattroni from Cancer Research UK (CRUK) focusing on data sharing policy and practices. It was a great opportunity for the funder to outline its policies and current initiatives on data sharing and for the Cambridge researchers to discuss the issues, suggest further solutions and give feedback to the funder about the changes they would like to see implemented. This blog highlights the main points of the workshop. This session was continuing the conversation from February last year when the CRUK and Wellcome Trust came to Cambridge to speak to our research community. CRUK’s grand ambition In her presentation “Data…
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What I wish I’d known at the start – setting up an RDM service
In August, Dr Marta Teperek began her new role at Delft University in the Netherlands. In her usual style of doing things properly and thoroughly, she has contributed this blog reflecting on the lessons learned in the process of setting up Cambridge University’s highly successful Research Data Facility. On 27-28 June 2017 I attended the Jisc’s Research Data Network meeting at the University of York. I was one of several people invited to talk about experiences of setting up RDM services in a workshop organised by Stephen Grace from London South Bank University and Sarah Jones from the Digital Curation Centre. The purpose of the workshop was to share lessons…
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Summer camp – the scholarly communication way
Growing up, a diet of B-grade movies gave the impression of American summer camps as places where teenagers undertake a series of slapstick events in the wilderness. That may indeed be the case sometimes, but at the University of California San Diego campus recently, a group of decidedly older people bunked in together for a completely different type of summer camp. The inaugural FORCE11 Scholarly Communications Institute (FSCI) was held in the first week of August, bringing together librarians, researchers and administrators from around the world. The event was planned as a week long intensive summer school on improving research communication. The activities were spread all over the campus, although…
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Next steps for Text & Data Mining
Sometimes the best way to find a solution is to just get the different stakeholders talking to each other – and this what happened at a recent Text and Data Mining symposium held in the Engineering Department at Cambridge. The attendees were primarily postgraduate students and early career researchers, but senior researchers, administrative staff, librarians and publishers were also represented in the audience. Background This symposium grew out of a discussion held earlier this year at Cambridge to consider the issue of TDM and what a TDM library service might look like at Cambridge. The general outcome of that meeting of library staff was that people wanted to know more. Librarians at…
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Planning scholarly communication training in the UK
In June 2017 a group of people (see end for attendees) met in London to discuss the issues around scholarly communication training delivery in the UK. Representatives from RLUK, UKSG, SCONUL, UKCoRR, Vitae, Jisc and some universities had a workshop to nut through the problem. Possibly because of the nature of the attendees of the group, the discussion was very library-centric, but this does not preclude the need for training outside the library sector. This blog is a summary of the discussion from that day. Background The decision to hold a meeting like this came out of the a library skills workshop run at UKSG recently. In ensuing discussions, it was agreed…
