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An open letter to Blood
The Office of Scholarly Communication routinely advises Cambridge authors about their publishing options, and in the vast majority of cases we can help authors comply with funder mandates. However, there are a few notable journals that offer no compliant open access options for Research Council UK (RCUK) and Charity Open Access Fund (COAF) authors. One of those journals is Blood. We’ve previously called them out on their misleading advice: The author form for the journal Blood is grossly misleading about RCUK/WT compliance. pic.twitter.com/NWSnbHSIEQ — Cambridge OpenAccess (@CamOpenAccess) 25 July 2016 Today we are urging Blood to offer their authors either self-archiving rights without cost and a maximum 6 month embargo…
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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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In conversation with Wellcome Trust and CRUK
On Friday 22 January Cambridge University invited our two main charity funders to discuss their views on data management and sharing with Cambridge researchers. David Carr from the Wellcome Trust and Jamie Enoch from Cancer Research UK came to the University to talk to our researchers. The related blog ‘Charities’ perspective on research data management and sharing‘ summarises the presentations Jamie and David gave. After this event, a group of researchers from the School of Biological Sciences and from the School of Clinical Medicine at the University of Cambridge were invited to ask questions about the Wellcome Trust data management and sharing policy and CRUK data sharing and preservation policy directly…
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Charities’ perspective on research data management and sharing
In 2015 the Cambridge Research Data Team organised several discussions between funders and researchers. In May 2015 we hosted Ben Ryan from EPSRC, which was followed by a discussion with Michael Ball from BBSRC in August. Now we have invited our two main charity funders to discuss their views on data management and sharing with Cambridge researchers. David Carr from the Wellcome Trust and Jamie Enoch from Cancer Research UK (CRUK) met with our academics on Friday 22 January at the Gurdon Institute. The Gurdon Institute was founded jointly by the Wellcome Trust and CRUK to promote research in the areas of developmental biology and cancer biology, and to foster…
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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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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…
