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Data Diversity Podcast #3 – Dr Nick H. Wise (4/4)
Thank you for staying with us throughout this four-part series with Dr Nick Wise, scientist and an engineer, who has made his name as a scientific sleuth. By now, it is hoped that he needs no introduction (though if you would like one, please look back at the previous posts). In this final post, we get Nick’s take on what he thinks the repercussions should be for engaging in fraud, and we get a parting tip from Nick on what researchers should do when performing a literature search on papers in their field. Below are some excerpts from the conversation, which can be listened to in full here. Most people…
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Data Diversity Podcast #3 – Dr Nick H. Wise (3/4)
Welcome back to the penultimate post featuring Dr Nick H. Wise, Research Associate in Architectural Fluid Mechanics at the Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge. If you have been with us for the previous two posts, you would know that besides being a scientist and an engineer, Nick has made his name as a scientific sleuth who, based on an article on the blog Retraction Watch which was written in 2022, is responsible for more than 850 retractions, leading Times Higher Education to dub him as a research fraudbuster. Since then, through his X account @Nickwizzo, he has continued his investigations, tracking cases of fraud and in some cases, naming…
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Data Diversity Podcast #3 – Dr Nick H. Wise (2/4)
We are back again with our second blog post featuring Dr Nick H. Wise, Research Associate in Architectural Fluid Mechanics at the Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge. As is the theme of the Data Diversity podcast, we spoke to Nick about his experience as a researcher, but this is a special edition of the podcast. Besides being a scientist and an engineer, Nick has made his name as a scientific sleuth who, based on an article on the blog Retraction Watch which was written in 2022, is responsible for more than 850 retractions, leading Times Higher Education to dub him as a research fraudbuster. Since then, through his X…
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Diamond Open Access Journals platform launch at Cambridge
Dr Agustina Martínez-García, Head of Open Research Systems, Digital Initiatives We are pleased to announce that our Diamond Open Access Journals at Cambridge platform has launched in May and can be accessed at https://diamond-oa.lib.cam.ac.uk/home. This service will be available initially as part of a one-year pilot project undertaken by the Open Research Systems (ORS) and Office of Scholarly Communication (OSC) teams within Cambridge University Library (CUL). Project overview The main aim of the Diamond project is to support Cambridge’s research community in the context of a changing open research and scholarly publishing environment. To meet increasing demand to share research findings we are scoping, assessing, and implementing future services…
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Open Research in Cambridge: 2022 in review
2022 has been another fantastic year for Open Research in Cambridge and I’m so proud of what we have achieved together as a community of researchers, library staff, technicians, administrators, publishers and more. I’d like to highlight some of the key themes in our work this year and thank all who have contributed to this work in any way throughout the year (though I have limited myself to naming chairs of workstrands below). The following video by our Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Research), Prof Anne Ferguson-Smith, gives an indication of the importance that the university places on this work. Understanding disciplinary differences I know that I’m not alone in hearing that researchers in…
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Open access: where next? – event round-up
Dr. Samuel Moore, Scholarly Communication Specialist, Cambridge University Libraries On Friday 18th November, participants from across Cambridge and beyond gathered for a hybrid meeting on the future of open access publishing. Hosted by Homerton College, ‘Open Access: Where Next?’ explored issues relating to article-processing charges, research assessment and innovation in scientific publishing. 65 in-person attendees and 78 online attendees participated in the day-long event consisting of four panels and a keynote from Professor Gina Neff of the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy. Prof. Neff kicked off the event with a timely and insightful talk titled ‘Further than the academy: the stakes for open research’. Covering themes such as misinformation,…
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Springer negotiations: what’s our plan B?
The negotiations The UK universities sector is negotiating a read & publish deal with publisher Springer Nature. Reaching a transitional agreement is particularly important to make it easier for our authors to publish their work open access, as well as continuing to read all of Springer Nature’s content. The deal needs to be affordable for our sector, which is already under financial strain. The Jisc negotiating team and the University of Cambridge are committed to finding a deal that works well for us, that is our plan A. But we are aware that some previous negotiations between universities and publishers could not find enough mutual ground (for example UCLA and…
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Rights retention: publisher responses to the University’s pilot
The University’s one-year rights retention pilot has been running for six months now, during which time many papers containing the rights retention declaration have been submitted by Cambridge authors. As expected, the Office of Scholarly Communication is receiving more queries about rights retention from Cambridge academics, many of which relate to how publishers are responding to submissions containing the rights retention declaration. This post covers some of these queries to offer a picture of how rights retention is being received. It is worth reminding ourselves what the rights retention pilot entails. All researchers at Cambridge can sign up to participate in the pilot here. In doing so, the researcher enters…
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Is a Rights Retention Clause needed for OA books?
Dr. Rupert Gatti is a Fellow and Director of Studies in Economics at Trinity College, Cambridge, and co-founder of the non-profit Open Book Publishers. In recent discussion about funder-imposed Rights Retention Strategies (RRS) I realised that there is an important consideration for funders of Open Access (OA) books and book chapters that differs significantly to the standard arguments for RRS with journal articles, and that I haven’t seen articulated elsewhere. The standard motivation for applying RRS to article submissions is that it ensures that the Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM) can be shared and reused under a CC BY licence even if there are greater restrictions over reuse of the final…
- Open Research at Cambridge Conference, Publishing, Supporting Researchers in the 21st Century, Supporting Researchers in the C21st
A new institutional open access fund for the University of Cambridge
Open Access is a powerful tool that enables researchers to share their research and maximise the impact of their work. However, the reality is that gold open access is a business model that is based on paying to publish, and it’s a business model that is primarily supported by research funders. What that means in practice is that gold open access often comes with a price tag that effectively excludes unfunded researchers. The University of Cambridge has established a new institutional open access fund to provide financial support for unfunded researchers across the collegiate University. Researchers who do not have access to grant funds with which to pay the open…
