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Researchers championing data – what works?
Here we follow up on our earlier piece “Creating a research data community”, where Rosie Higman and Hardy Schwamm discussed innovative ways of researcher engagement with research data management. This blog discusses the outcome from a dedicated Birds of a Feather session at the 9th Research Data Alliance Plenary meeting in Barcelona in April 2017. The session discussed three different programmes for engaging researchers with data management and sharing: University of Cambridge Data Champions programme, TU Delft’s Data Stewardship and SPARC Europe’s Open Data Champions. The purpose of this session was to exchange practice, discuss the difference between the programmes and talk about possible next steps. All presentations from the sessions are…
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Sustaining long-term access to open research resources – a university library perspective
In the third in a series of three blog posts, Dave Gerrard, a Technical Specialist Fellow from the Polonsky-Foundation-funded Digital Preservation at Oxford and Cambridge project, describes how he thinks university libraries might contribute to ensuring access to Open Research for the longer-term. The series began with Open Resources, who should pay, and continued with Sustaining open research resources – a funder perspective. Blog post in a nutshell This blog post works from the position that the user-bases for Open Research repositories in specific scientific domains are often very different to those of institutional repositories managed by university libraries. It discusses how in the digital era we could deal with…
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What I wish I’d known at the start – setting up an RDM service
In August, Dr Marta Teperek began her new role at Delft University in the Netherlands. In her usual style of doing things properly and thoroughly, she has contributed this blog reflecting on the lessons learned in the process of setting up Cambridge University’s highly successful Research Data Facility. On 27-28 June 2017 I attended the Jisc’s Research Data Network meeting at the University of York. I was one of several people invited to talk about experiences of setting up RDM services in a workshop organised by Stephen Grace from London South Bank University and Sarah Jones from the Digital Curation Centre. The purpose of the workshop was to share lessons…
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Strategies for engaging senior leadership with RDM – IDCC discussion
This blog post gathers key reflections and take-home messages from a Birds of a Feather discussion on the topic of senior management engagement with RDM, and while written by a small number of attendees, the content reflects the wider discussion in the room on the day. [Authors: Silke Bellanger, Rosie Higman, Heidi Imker, Bev Jones, Liz Lyon, Paul Stokes, Marta Teperek*, Dirk Verdicchio] On 20 February 2017, stakeholders interested in different aspects of data management and data curation met in Edinburgh to attend the 12th International Digital Curation Conference, organised by the Digital Curation Centre. Apart from discussing novel tools and services for data curation, the take-home message from many presentations…
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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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‘Paperless research’ solutions – Electronic Lab Notebooks
The Office of Scholarly Communication started 2017 with a discussion about ‘going digital’ – on 13 January 2017 we organised an event at Cambridge University’s Department of Engineering to flesh out the problems preventing researchers from implementing Electronic Lab Notebook solutions. Chris Brown from Jisc wrote an excellent blog post with his reflections of the event* and agreed for us to re-blog it here. For researchers working in laboratories the importance of recording experiments, results, workflows, etc in a notebook is engrained into you as a student. However, these paper-based solutions are not ideal when it comes to sharing and preservation. They pile on desks and shelves, vary in quality…
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2016 – that was the year that was
In January last year we published a blog post ‘2015 that was the year that was‘ which not only helped us take stock about what we have achieved, but also was very well received. So we have decided to do it again. For those who are more visually oriented, the slides ‘The OSC a lightning Tour‘ might be useful. Now starting its third year of operation, the Office of Scholarly Communication (OSC) has expanded to a team of 15, managing a wide variety of projects. The OSC has developed a set of strategic goals to support its mission: “The OSC works in a transparent and rigorous manner to provide recognised leadership…
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Creating a research data community
Are research institutions engaging their researchers with Research Data Management (RDM)? And if so, how are they doing it? In this post, Rosie Higman (@RosieHLib), Research Data Advisor, University of Cambridge, and Hardy Schwamm (@hardyschwamm), Research Data Manager, Lancaster University explore the work they are doing in their respective institutions. Whilst funder policies were the initial catalyst for many RDM services at UK universities there are many reasons to engage with RDM, from increased impact to moving towards Open Research as the new normal. And a growing number of researchers are keen to get involved! These reasons also highlight the need for a democratic, researcher-led approach if the behavioural change necessary…
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Changing roles and changing needs for academic librarians
The Office of Scholarly Communication (OSC) has joined the Centre for Evidence Based Library and Information Practice (C-EBLIP) Research Network, and as part of this commitment has prepared the following blog which is a literature review of papers published addressing the changing training needs for academic librarians. This work feeds into research currently being carried out by the OSC into the educational background of those working in scholarly communication. The piece concludes with a discussion of this research and potential next steps. Changing roles There is no doubt that libraries are experiencing another dramatic change as a result of developments in digital technologies. Twenty years ago in their paper addressing the education of…
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Are academic librarians getting the training they need?
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 post Claire Sewell looks at the training of library staff in areas relating to scholarly communication. The problem Few people would deny that the world of the academic library is changing. Users are becoming more and more sophisticated in their information gathering techniques and the role of the academic librarian needs to adapt accordingly or risk being left behind. Librarians are changing from the traditional gatekeeper role to one which helps their research community to disseminate the outputs of their work. This shift offers…
