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Searching Open Access: steps towards improving discovery of OA in a less than 100% OA world
At the heart of the University of Cambridge’s Open Access Policy is the commitment “to disseminating its research and scholarship as widely as possible to contribute to society”. Behind this aim is the benefit to researchers worldwide, as the OA2020 vision has it, to “gain immediate, free and unrestricted access to all of the latest, peer-reviewed research”. It’s some irony indeed that the growth of the availability of research as open access does not automatically result, without further community investment, in a corresponding improvement in discoverability. Key stakeholders met at the British Library to discuss the issue at the end of 2018 and produced an Open Access Discovery Roadmap ,…
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Multiplicity, the unofficial theme of Researcher to Reader 2019
For the past four years at the end of February, publishers, librarians, agents, researchers, technologists and consultants have gathered in London for two days of discussions around the concept of ‘Researcher to Reader’. This blog is my take on what I found the most inspiring, challenging and interesting at the 2019 event. There wasn’t a theme this year per se, but something that did repeatedly arise from where I was standing was the diversity of our perspectives. This is a word that has taken a specific meaning recently, so I am using ‘multiplicity’ instead : The principles of Plan S are calling for multiple business models for open access publishing, according…
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Text and data mining services: an update
Text and Data Mining (TDM) is the process of digitally querying large collections of machine-readable material, extracting specific information and, by analysis, discovering new information about a topic. In February 2017, a group University of Cambridge staff met to discuss “Text and Data Mining Services: What can Cambridge libraries offer?” It was agreed that a future library Text and Data Mining (TDM) support service could include: Access to data from our own collections Advice on legal issues, what publishers allow, what data sets and tools are available Registers on data provided for mining and TDM projects Fostering agreements with publishers. This blog reports on some of the activities, events and…
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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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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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‘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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Consider yourself disrupted – notes from RLUK2016
The 2016 Research Libraries UK conference was held at the British Library from 9-11 March on the theme of disruptive innovation. This blog pulls out some of the highlights personally gained from the conference: If librarians are to be considered important – we as a community need to be strong in our grasp of understanding scholarly communication issues We need to know the facts about our subscriptions to, usage of and contributions to scholarly publishing We need high level support in institutions to back libraries in advocacy and negotiation with publishers Scientists are rarely rewarded for being right, so the scientific record is being distorted by the scientific ecosystem Society needs…
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‘It is all a bit of a mess’ – observations from Researcher to Reader conference
“It is all a bit of a mess. It used to be simple. Now it is complicated.” This was the conclusion of Mark Carden, the coordinator of the Researcher to Reader conference after two days of discussion, debate and workshops about scholarly publication.. The conference bills itself as: ‘The premier forum for discussion of the international scholarly content supply chain – bringing knowledge from the Researcher to the Reader.’ It was unusual because it mixed ‘tribes’ who usually go to separate conferences. Publishers made up 47% of the group, Libraries were next with 17%, Technology 14%, Distributors were 9% and there were a small number of academics and others. In addition to talks and panel discussions…
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Libraries of the future – insights from a talk by Lorcan Dempsey
There is no argument even from traditionalists that the library role is changing. But there is a great deal of confusion and sometimes fear about what that means, and what the future might look like. On 3 June, Lorcan Demsey* came to speak to staff at Cambridge University Library about how the role and purpose of libraries are changing. The slides from his talk are available on Slideshare. The one sentence headline from the talk was that research libraries are moving from licensing published content to managing workflow and research outputs – which means the print collection needs to be managed down to free up resources for the new roles.…
