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Charities’ perspective on research data management and sharing
In 2015 the Cambridge Research Data Team organised several discussions between funders and researchers. In May 2015 we hosted Ben Ryan from EPSRC, which was followed by a discussion with Michael Ball from BBSRC in August. Now we have invited our two main charity funders to discuss their views on data management and sharing with Cambridge researchers. David Carr from the Wellcome Trust and Jamie Enoch from Cancer Research UK (CRUK) met with our academics on Friday 22 January at the Gurdon Institute. The Gurdon Institute was founded jointly by the Wellcome Trust and CRUK to promote research in the areas of developmental biology and cancer biology, and to foster…
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What does a researcher do all day?
Recently, Paul Jervis-Heath* came to speak to Cambridge Libraries staff about work he had done as part of the Cambridge Libraries user centred design programme during the previous academic year. This project was trying to establish how Cambridge University administrative services would manage the RCUK block grant provided to the University to support the RCUK Open Access policy. The end goal of the project was to design products and services, so the team of six working on the programme needed to start by trying to understand what academics did and what services they needed. Information gathering process During the project the team worked with 56 academics including contextual interviews with 34 academics. Paul noted however…
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Could the HEFCE policy be a Trojan Horse for gold OA?
The HEFCE Policy for open access in the post-2014 Research Excellence Framework kicks in 9 weeks from now. The policy states that, to be eligible for submission to the post-2014 REF, authors’ final peer-reviewed manuscripts of journal articles and conference proceedings with an ISSN must have been deposited in an institutional or subject repository on acceptance for publication. Deposited material should be discoverable, and free to read and download, for anyone with an internet connection. The goal of the policy is to ensure that publicly funded (by HEFCE) research is publicly available. The means HEFCE have chosen to favour is the green route – by putting the AAM into a repository. This…
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2015 – that was the year that was
This time last year, the Office of Scholarly Communication at Cambridge University had been in existence for one week. As the inaugural Head of the Office, I had landed in the UK from Australia on 1 January, and was still battling jet lag. What a difference a year makes. This blog is a short run down of what has happened in 2015 and a brief peek into our plans for 2016. The OSC has three primary foci – managing compliance with funders, external engagement and working with the Cambridge community to ensure awareness of broader scholarly communication issues. In our spare time we have also taken on a few projects. Managing…
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Time to act together?
On 9-10 November 2015 Marta Teperek attended the fourteenth Research Data Management Forum (RDMF#14) in York organised by the Digital Curation Centre. Research Data Management Fora are organised twice yearly to bring together the community of people supporting research data management across different institutions in the UK. This was the second RDMF meeting Marta has attended and these meetings offer an excellent opportunity for the community to get together and think strategically about how to best support research data management needs of our researchers. Below are Marta’s impressions from the meeting. Battling inertia While the title of the meeting was ‘Research Data (and) Systems’, a more appropriate title could have been ‘Time to…
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Research Support Ambassadors – an insider’s view
In 2015 the Office of Scholarly Communication (OSC) started two related programmes. The Supporting Researchers in the 21st century programme is an ongoing series of talks, events and training sessions for the library staff in Cambridge. Some of these we have blogged to share the insights with the wider community – see: Openness, integrity & supporting researchers, Tips for preparing and presenting online learning, Evolution of Library Ethnography Studies – notes from talk, Libraries of the future – insights from a talk by Lorcan Dempsey, Software Licensing and Open Access, Open Data – moving science forward or a waste of money & time as a few examples. The second programme is the Research Support Ambassadors. This began as…
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Research Support Ambassadors – a progress update
On Thursday 19th November the participants of the Research Support Ambassadors programme presented their work to date. This blog from Yvonne Creba, a member of the Research Data Facility team in the Office of Scholarly Communication, summarises these presentations of their progress so far. A good start Attending the Research Support Ambassadors programme presentation I can only say how impressed I was with the amount of time and effort contributed by the participants of each group. This is even more notable considering that the following was achieved outside of their normal working hours. Each of the groups produced an informative and interesting session on each of the topics. What is…
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Disruptive innovation: notes from SCONUL winter conference
On Friday 27 November Danny Kingsley attended the SCONUL Winter Conference 2015 which addressed the theme of disruptive innovation and looked at the changes in policy and practice which will shape the scholarly communications environment for years to come. This blog is a summary of her notes from the event. The hastag was #sconul15 and there is a link in Twitter. Disruptions in scholarly publishing Dr Koen Becking, President of the Executive Board, Tilburg University, spoke first. He is the lead negotiator with the publishers in the Netherlands. Things are getting tight as we count down to the end of the year given the Dutch negotiations with Elsevier (read more in ‘Dutch boycott…
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Open Data – moving science forward or a waste of money & time?
On the 4 November the Research Data Facility at Cambridge University invited some inspirational leaders in the area of research data management and asked them to address the question: “is open data moving science forward or a waste of money & time?”. Below are Dr Marta Teperek’s impressions from the event. Great discussion Want to initiate a thought-provoking discussion on a controversial subject? The recipe is simple: invite inspirational leaders, bright people with curious minds and have an excellent chair. The outcome is guaranteed. We asked some truly inspirational leaders in data management and sharing to come to Cambridge to talk to the community about the pros and cons of data…
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Open Access around the world
As part of the Office of Scholarly Communication Open Access Week celebrations, we are uploading a blog a day written by members of the team. Friday contains some observations from Dr Lauren Cadwallader on the bigger picture. For researchers new to Open Access, it can often feel like policies are imposed on them by their institution. This is possibly because the wider context of Open Access has not been explained or revealed to them. In a recent workshop held by the Office of Scholarly Communication we were asked “whether Open Access was just a UK thing and that the rest of the world were benefiting from the research funded by the taxes that we…
