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Milestone – 10,000th article processed by OA Service
The Open Access Service at Cambridge has received its 10,000th Open Access submission – highlighting its commitment to making research freely available to anybody who wants to access it, without publisher paywalls or expensive journal subscriptions. Through open access our research can reach a worldwide audience. Nita Forouhi The 10,000th submission, reporting on the impact of eating a Mediterranean diet on the risk of developing cardiovascular disease in a UK population, was deposited by Signe Wulund at the MRC Epidemiology Unit, on behalf of Dr Nita Forouhi, Programme Leader in Nutritional Epidemiology at the MRC Epidemiology Unit, and several co-authors. The Open Access movement has been growing in strength in academia…
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Cambridge University spend on Open Access 2009-2016
Today is the deadline for those universities in receipt of an RCUK grant to submit their reports on the spend. We have just submitted the Cambridge University 2015-2016 report to the RCUK and have also made it available as a dataset in our repository. Compliance Cambridge had an estimated overall compliance rate of 76% with 46% of all RCUK funded papers available through the gold route and 30% of all RCUK funded papers available through the green route. The RCUK Open Access Policy indicates that at the end of the fifth transition year of the policy (March 2018) they expect 75% of Open Access papers from the research they fund will be delivered…
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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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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…
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The purpose, practicalities, pitfalls and policies of managing and sharing data in the UK
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. Tuesday is a piece by Dr Danny Kingsley reflecting the talk she gave this morning to the Royal Society of Chemistry, Chemical Information and Computer Applications Group conference – Measurement, Information and Innovation: Digital Disruption in the Chemical Sciences. The data policy landscape The policy position on data management in the UK is driven on many levels. Many institutions now have policies – an example is the Cambridge University Research Data Management Policy Framework. Increasingly publishers such as PLOS are requiring that research published in their journals is…
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A Day in the Life of an Open Access Research Adviser
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. Monday is a piece by Dr Philip Boyes reflecting on the variety of challenges of working in the Open Access team. As anyone working in it knows all too well, Open Access can be a complicated field, with multiple policies from funders, institutions and publishers which can be complex, sometimes obscure and sometimes mutually contradictory. While we’re keen to raise awareness of and engagement with Open Access issues, the University of Cambridge’s view is that expecting academics to get to grips with all this themselves would represent…
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Dutch boycott of Elsevier – a game changer?
A long running dispute between Dutch universities and Elsevier has taken an interesting turn. Yesterday Koen Becking, chairman of the Executive Board of Tilburg University who has been negotiating with scientific publishers about an open access policy on behalf of Dutch universities with his colleague Gerard Meijer, announced a plan to start boycotting Elsevier. As a first step in boycotting the publisher, the Association of Universities in the Netherlands (VSNU) has asked all scientists that are editor in chief of a journal published by Elsevier to give up their post. If this way of putting pressure on the publishers does not work, the next step would be to ask reviewers to stop working for Elsevier. After that, scientists could be asked to stop publishing in…
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In conversation with Ben Ryan from EPSRC
Cambridge University hosted Ben Ryan and Amanda Chmura from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) on Friday 15 May for a discussion about how the University is meeting the EPSRC expectations for sharing research data. We started the conversation with a demonstration of the services we offer our researchers including our Research Data Management website, and talked about the open data sessions and other training events we have been holding. So far we have managed to speak to 764 researchers about data sharing requirements (the numbers continue to grow). Managing expectations In 2011 EPSRC published nine key expectations on research data management. The expectations are directed principally at…
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Good news stories about data sharing?
We have been speaking to researchers around the University recently to discuss the expectations of their funders in relation to data management. This has raised the issue of how best to convince people this is a process that benefits society rather than a waste of time or just yet another thing they are being ‘forced to do’ – which is the perspective of some that we have spoken with. Policy requirements In general most funders require a Research Data Management Plan to be developed at the beginning of the project – and then adhered to. But the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) have upped the ante by introducing a policy requiring that…
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A review of the RCUK review of implementation of its OA policy
The RCUK released its ‘Review of the implementation of the RCUK Policy on Open Access’ today and it makes interesting reading. First I should state that I think this is a good report, it seems well researched and balanced in tone and it is well written and laid out. Jisc also welcomes the report. Overall findings It seems that a ‘common factor’ amongst all of the people and groups interviewed was ‘a general acceptance and welcome given to the concept of open access’. However, the administrative effort to implement the policy and distribute the funds is significant. This is not helped by a level of confusion about different funding policies, particularly relating…
