-
Open access: fringe or mainstream?
When I was just settling in to the world of open access and scholarly communication, I wrote about the need for open access to stop being a fringe activity and enter the mainstream of researcher behaviour: “Open access needs to stop being a ‘fringe’ activity and become part of the mainstream. It shouldn’t be an afterthought to the publication process. Whether the solution to academic inaction is better systems or, as I believe, greater engagement and reward, I feel that the scholarly communications and repository community can look forward to many interesting developments over the coming months and years.” While much has changed in the five years since I (somewhat…
-
Open Access monographs: Reflections from our recent symposium
Open access book formats have been under discussion for several years and have attracted interest – and concern – from researchers in Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences as well as amongst institutions, publishers, and funders. Earlier this month the Office of Scholarly Communication organised a one-day symposium on ‘Open Access monographs: from policy to reality’ which took place at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge. It aimed to enable discussion about the open access monographs agenda and its future challenges with the Cambridge community and beyond, to bring together researchers with publishers, funders, experts and innovators in the field of open monograph publishing, and to share experiences about the opportunities and realities…
-
How open is Cambridge?
As part of Open Access Week 2016, the Office of Scholarly Communication is publishing a series of blog posts on open access and open research. In this final OAWeek post Dr Arthur Smith analyses how much Cambridge research is openly available. For us in the Office of Scholarly Communication it’s important that, as much possible, the University’s research is made Open Access. While we can guarantee that research deposited in the University repository Apollo will be made available in one way or another, it’s not clear how other sources of Open Access contribute to this goal. This blog is an attempt to quantify the amount of Cambridge research that is openly available.…
-
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…
-
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…
