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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…
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Sustaining open research resources – a funder perspective
This is the second in a series of three blog posts which set out the perspectives of researchers, funders and universities on support for open resources. The first was Open Resources, who should pay? In this post, David Carr from the Open Research team at the Wellcome Trust provides the view of a research funder on the challenges of developing and sustaining the key infrastructures needed to enable open research. As a global research foundation, Wellcome is dedicated to ensuring that the outputs of the research we fund – including articles, data, software and materials – can be accessed and used in ways that maximise the benefits to health and…
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Whose money is it anyway? Managing offset agreements
Sometimes an innocent question can blow up a huge discussion, and this is what happened recently at an RCUK OA Practitioner’s Group meeting when I asked what was appropriate for institutions to do when managing money they receive as refunds from publishers through offsetting arrangements. When an institution pays for an article processing charge (APC) in a hybrid journal, it is doing so in addition to the existing subscription. This is generally referred to as ‘double dipping’. I have written extensively about the issues with hybrid in the past, but here, I’d like to discuss the management of offset agreements. Offset agreements are a compensation by a publisher to an institution for the extra…
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Open Resources: Who Should Pay?
This blog is the first in a series of three which considers the perspectives of researchers, funders and universities in relation to the support for open resources, coordinated and written by Dr Lauren Cadwallader. This post asks the question: What is the responsibility of national funders to research resources that are internationally important? In January 2017 the Office of Scholarly Communication and Wellcome Trust started an Open Research Pilot Project to try to understand how we could help our researchers work more openly and what barriers they faced with making their work open. One of the issues that is a common theme with the groups that we are working with is the issue…
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Reflections on Open Research – a PI’s perspective
As part of the Open Research Pilot Project, Marta Teperek met with Dr David Savage and asked him several questions about his own views and motivations for Open Research. This led to a very inspiring conversation and great reflections on Open Research from the Principal Investigator’s perspective. The main points that came out of the discussion were: Lack of reproducibility raises questions about scientific rigour, integrity and relevance of work in general Being open is to work in a team and be collaborative Open Research will benefit science as a whole, and not the careers of individuals Peer review remains a critical aspect of the scientific process Nowadays, global collaboration…
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Cambridge RCUK Block Grant spend for 2016-2017
Much to our relief, last Friday we sent off our most recent report on our expenditure of the RCUK Block Grant fund. The report is available in our repository. Cambridge makes all of its information about spend on Open Access publicly available. This blog continues on from that describing our spend from 2009 – 2016, and from the blog on our open access spend in 2014. Compliance We are pleased to be able to report that we reached 80% compliance in this reporting period, up from 76% last year. The RCUK is expecting 75% compliance by the end of the transition period on 31 March 2018, so we are well over target. According…
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Open at scale: sharing images in the Open Research Pilot
Dr Ben Steventon is one of the participants in the Open Research Pilot. He is working with the Office of Scholarly Communication to make his research process more open and here reports on some of the major challenges he perceives at the beginning of the project. The Steventon Group is a new group established last year which looks at embryonic development, in particular focusing on the zebrafish. To investigate problems in this area the group uses time-lapse imaging and tracks cells in 3D visualisations which presents many challenges when it comes to data sharing, which they hope to address through the Wellcome Trust Open Research Project. Whilst the difficulties that…
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Strategies for engaging senior leadership with RDM – IDCC discussion
This blog post gathers key reflections and take-home messages from a Birds of a Feather discussion on the topic of senior management engagement with RDM, and while written by a small number of attendees, the content reflects the wider discussion in the room on the day. [Authors: Silke Bellanger, Rosie Higman, Heidi Imker, Bev Jones, Liz Lyon, Paul Stokes, Marta Teperek*, Dirk Verdicchio] On 20 February 2017, stakeholders interested in different aspects of data management and data curation met in Edinburgh to attend the 12th International Digital Curation Conference, organised by the Digital Curation Centre. Apart from discussing novel tools and services for data curation, the take-home message from many presentations…
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Libraries’ role in teaching the research community – LILAC2017
Recently Claire Sewell, the OSC Research Support Skills Coordinator attended her first LILAC conference in Swansea. These are her observations from the event. LILAC (Librarians’ Information Literacy Annual Conference) is one of the highlights of the information profession calendar which focuses on sharing knowledge and best practice in the field of information literacy. For those who don’t know information literacy is defined as: Knowing when and why you need information, where to find it and how to evaluate, use and communicate it in an ethical manner (CILIP definition) Showcasing OSC initiatives Since it was my first time attending it was a privilege to be able to present three sessions on different…
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Shifting sands: notes from UKSG2017 workshop on skills
Library education needs to teach skills over knowledge to remain relevant into the future, conferences are a useful place to learn about scholarly communication and libraries need to employ a wider range of staff were some of the outcomes from two workshops held at the recent UKSG conference called “Shifting sands: Changing academic library skill sets”. The slides – which include notes from the discussions on both days – are available in Slideshare. The hashtag for the conference is #uksg17 The workshop was held twice, on Monday 10th April and on Tuesday 11th April. The audience on both days consisted of just over 50 people and were primarily library staff…
