Monthly Archives: October 2015

Top ORO Downloads for September – Engaging and Open Research

Just made it before the end of the month! (It’s been busy). Top ORO downloads for September are below.

SeptemberTop15

 

PDF of the Top 15: SeptemberTop15

The  significant new item is the final report from the RCUK funded Public Engagement with Research Catalyst, An Open Research University.

In the report Richard Holliman writes that:

Engaged research … will only be prioritised on a sustainable basis if researchers:

  1. Generate funds to cover the costs for them, their stakeholders, and associated expenses for activities.
  2. Produce quality outputs, ideally ones that can be submitted to future sector-wide assessments of research.

I might be stretching it a bit, but there are echoes to me of how Open Access Publishing will only be sustainable if:

  1. We are creative in unlocking funds tied up in the existing subscription model (see Open Library of Humanities and UCL Press).
  2. Researchers publish quality Open Access research outputs with quality Open Access publishers (see The Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association).

 

 

Springer Compact on Open Access

Springer (in association with Jisc) have recently announced a new Compact for UK Universities and their researchers.

springer

Researchers from eligible UK Universities (including the OU) are now eligible to get their articles published Gold Open Access.  No charges need to be paid by the researcher at point of acceptance as they are covered by the general institutional subscription managed in the library.

To be eligible you need to be:

  • Publishing in a Springer Open Choice journal i.e. a Springer hybrid journal AND
  • The corresponding author AND
  • Affiliated to the OU AND
  • Publishing either an Original Paper, Review Paper, Brief Communication or Continuing Education (Springer terminology)

The process is that the author will provide evidence of their institutional affiliation (e.g. institutional email address) at point of acceptance.  Springer will then contact the OU (Library Services) to check the researcher is actually affiliated to the OU.  Once the OU (Library Services) verifies affiliation the article will be published Open Access.

The system is in effect from now and should run until December 2018 subject to annual opt outs.

Full details (including lists of eligible journals) from Springer can be found here Springer Open Access Compact

Open Access Week – Open Research Online

Thursday saw the last of our events for Open Access Week. The subject was using the Institutional Repository ORO.

oa-week_865x180

Shailey Minocha (MCT), Richard Blundel (FBL), Agnes Kukulska-Hulme (IET) and Simon Kelley (Science) each spoke on their usage of ORO raising good questions along the way.

I captured some key points from the talks:

  • Downloads – The Good: usage statistics allow users to identify which research is getting the most notice. (Separately I’ve been told how ORO downloads appear to be translating to increased google scholar citations – i need to investigate this).
  • Downloads – The Challenge: can we find out who is downloading Open Access items and where are they based?  Is our reach geographically skewed and/or anglo-centric?  How might we reach a new audience and how might we track/measure this usage? The usage pages are not easy to use or navigate.
  • Translations – The Challenge: having translations as an extra file rather than their own item proper may prevent dissemination as they are not discoverable.
  • Ex-OU staff – The Challenge: shouldn’t staff that have left the OU be flagged as not current in the repository?
  • Linking and keywords – The Good: adding links and keywords to ORO records enriches the records and aids discoverability.
  • Linking and keywords – The Challenge: the ORO service should create a podcast on tips for creating a good ORO record.
  • Coverage – The Good: use ORO as a platform for a range of research outputs, non-journal items and non-textual items.  Put all the research outputs out there and see where the interest lies!
  • Stability – The Good: ORO is central and persistent – a great place to archive your back catalogue.
  • Full text – The Challenge: why wouldn’t people put full text on ORO? Are there valid concerns about the appropriateness of making Accepted Manuscripts openly downloadable.  Will copyright allow me to put full text on ORO and/or Academic Social Networking Sites?
  • Discipline specific issues – The Challenge: disciplines do scholarly communication differently, ORO doesn’t fit well where there is already a repository (i.e. arXiv) with extremely fast speed of dissemination.
  • Monitoring – The Good: using ORO to monitor faculty outputs.
  • Awards/Prizes – The Challenge: should we incentivise usage & how?

… and my favourite theme was  The Confused Academic” – what profile do you curate? – ResearchGate, Academia.edu, LinkedIn, ORCID, ORO.  Why can’t they interoperate? Why is one version of an article on one platform whilst another is on ORO (which may or may not be embargoed). The Challenge (i think): provide clear guidance & support on the best way to curate academic profiles.

We’ll be looking through these questions as we develop the service.  Thanks to all the presenters and the audience who provided some great questions (and answers!)

Richard’s slides: RB – ORO presentation 22 Oct 2015

Chris’s slides: ORO Gateway to green

Agnes’s slides: AKH_Global reach

Shailey’s slides: Shailey-ORO-Presentation-for-22October2015-Submitted-FINAL

Open Access Week – Running an Open Access Journal

Our third event in Open Access Week was a session on Open Access Journals, subtitled challenges and opportunities – I came away with a sharper sense of the challenges than the opportunities.  Nevertheless lets start with the opportunities.

OpenAccessWeekAll the presenters, Martin Weller, Clem Herman and Francesca Benatti were enthusiastic, wanting to foster research communities in their subject areas and reach an audience beyond a paywall. The editors wanted to innovate, improve discoverability and provide quality to their authors without charging either their authors or readers.

However, they all suffered from one key thing – lack of resource.

Money to underpin the infrastructure and time to curate and promote the journal content.  So listening to them was immensely frustrating.

All 3 journals are using different platforms Journal of Interactive Media in Education uses Ubiquity, International Journal of Gender, Science and Technology uses Open Journal Systems and Open Arts Journal uses WordPress – there is no shared platform at the OU.

In the audience were at least 2 groups of people considering starting their own journal – they were looking for advice on infrastructure and advisory support in establishing the journals – there is no community of practice in Open Access at the OU.

Potential authors for the journals were being discouraged from publishing in these journals because these journals didn’t have impact factors or weren’t indexed by particular databases.

Central support in the form of a shared infrastructure (1 FTE developer or monies to pay for an off the shelf external infrastructure) and editorial support (1 FTE) would support the 8-10 (my guess) internally produced Open Access Journals allowing the editors to innovate and grow these journals to be a credible alternative to commercial publishers that routinely take millions of pounds out of higher education in the form of subscriptions for content provided to them for free.

 

Open Access Week – Academic Social Networking Sites

On Monday Katy Jordan from IET gave a talk on Academic Social Networking Sites (SNS) as part of Open Access Week.  Katy is currently a postgraduate student and her provisional thesis title is Reshaping the Higher Education network? Analysis of academic social networking sites, so she was a natural choice to ask!

As the ORO manager I’m often asked how sites like ResearchGate and Academia.edu interact with the institutional repository, so I was a little anxious as to the implications for ORO from Katy’s research.  But Katy’s talk was actually a resounding re-affirmation of the case for the Institutional Repository.

Katy presented a diagram in her presentation where ORO sits alongside and complements both Twitter and Academic SNS.jordantriangle

  • ORO was the host of self archived research publications
  • Twitter was for discussions and building new networks
  • Academic SNS were ‘a portable business card’

Katy’s talk was both wide ranging and engaging, other themes I found particularly pertinent were:

  • Interventions by Academic SNS into publishing services such as peer review and minting DOIs appear to be a challenge to existing models of scholarly communication.
  • Academic SNS seem to replicate existing networks rather than creating new ones.
  • Academic profiles are already out there so you shouldn’t ignore them but actively curate them.
  • There is a disciplinary divide where ResearchGate is more sciences based and academia.edu more Arts and Humanities.
  • Academic SNS are commercial enterprises – but revenue generation will not occur until the network is strong enough.

Katy’s presentation is available here: http://www.slideshare.net/katyjordan148/academic-social-networking-sites.

Thanks again to Katy for a fascinating talk.

 

 

 

 

Open Access Week: 19th – 23rd October


oa-week_865x180
Next week is Open Access Week, and to celebrate, together with RSQ Unit we’ve arranged a series of lunchtime events.

Lunch will be provided; register by following the links below to guarantee your place.

Monday 19th October, 12pm – Library Seminar Room 1

Academic Social Networking Sites

Katy Jordan (Institute of Educational Technology) will discuss the emergence of academic networking sites such as ResearchGate and Academia.edu, and their impact on openness of research in the academic community.

Eventbrite - Open Access Week: Academic Social Networking Sites

Tuesday 20th October, 12pm – Library Seminar Room 1

Open Data

The Pelagios project seeks to use linked open data to create connections between places in the ancient world and the present. Dr Elton Barker from the Classics Department will introduce attendees to the way in which open data is being applied to create a new sense of the world in this project.

Eventbrite - Open Acces Week: Open Data

Wednesday 21st October, 12.30pm – Library Presentation Room

Running an Open Access Journal

A panel featuring the editors of the OU’s Open Access journals:  Francesca Benatti (Arts), Clem Herman (Maths, Computing and Technology) and Martin Weller (Institute of Educational Technology) will discuss the role of university-based open access journals in meeting the challenges of academic publishing in the 21st century.

Eventbrite - Open Access Week: Running an Open Access Journal

Thursday 22nd October, 12pm – Library 2nd Floor Meeting Room

Open Research Online (ORO): The Gateway to Green Open Access Publishing

A panel of OU researchers: Richard Blundel (Faculty of Business and Law), Simon Kelley (Science) Agnes Kukulska-Hulme (Institute of Educational Technology) and Shailey Minocha (Maths, Computing and Technology) will discuss how using ORO has opened up new horizons for their research, introducing their publications to new audiences, and bringing them in contact with researchers and professionals from around the world.

Eventbrite - Open Access Week: ORO, the Gateway to Green Open Access Publishing

We look forward to seeing you there!

Think. Check. Submit.

A new tool was released earlier this month to help researchers better understand who they can trust with publishing their work.

thinkchecksubmit

The “Think. Check. Submit.” checklist is a response to concerns surrounding the practices of “predatory” publishers. “Predatory” publishers are characterized by spamming researchers and non existent quality control.

These publishers “seem to be in the scholarly publishing business only in order to collect APCs and provide rapid publishing without proper peer review for authors who need publications in their CVs“.(1)

The checklist will particularly aid early career researchers submitting their research to publishers for the first time.  By working through questions like “Can you easily identify and contact the publisher?” and “Is the journal clear about the type of peer review it uses?” researchers will be able determine whether a publisher can be trusted with their research publication.

(1) Cenyu Shen and Bo-Christer Björk, (2015) ‘Predatory’ open access: a longitudinal study of article volumes and market characteristics, BMC Medicine, 13:230 doi:10.1186/s12916-015-0469-2)

 

Open Access Week 2015: 19th-23rd October

open access week

 Are you interested in making your research more open?

The 8th annual International Open Access week runs from 19th -23rd October and to celebrate, Library Services in conjunction with Research Scholarship and Quality (RSQ) Unit have organised a series of lunchtime events.

This year we are highlighting a number of the OU’s Open Access success stories, including:

  •  how using social networking sites has created new opportunities for research collaboration
  • some of the innovative ways researchers are using open data
  • experiences of OU academics who are running open access journals
  • how using ORO has opened up new horizons for open research

Sessions are open to all, and lunch will be provided.

For more information and to sign up, visit the Open Access Week event page.

 

Credit where credit’s due: How and why to cite data

If your research papers are based on data, you should make sure you cite those data as you would any other research output.force 11 data citation principles

According to the UK Data Service, data are a vital part of the scientific research process and proper citation should be a significant feature of research publications. Data citation:

  • acknowledges the author’s sources
  • makes identifying data easier
  • promotes the reproduction of research results
  • makes it easier to find data
  • allows the impact of data to be tracked
  • provides a structure which recognises and can reward data creators

In 2014, FORCE11 drew up a set of Data Citation Principles (see box, right), these high level recommendations for the research community emphasise the importance of data citation.

The use of DOIs for research data was identified as one of the recommendations in the Metric Tide report (summarised by Nicola in an earlier blog post):

“The use of digital object identifiers (DOIs) should be extended to cover all research outputs… DOIs already predominate in the journal publishing sphere – they should be extended to cover other outputs where no identifier system exists, such as book chapters and datasets” (HEFCE, 2015)

Ideally, all publicly available research data should be assigned a persistent identifier (like a DOI) to ensure long-term discoverability and availability. If you deposit your data in a well-established, trusted data repository or archive your data should be assigned with a DOI (or other identifier). It is important to include these identifiers as part of your citations whenever available, to encourage future data re-use and enable the tracking of citations.

Despite the clear drivers for citing data, in her post for the e-science community blog: Tracking the impacts of data, Stacy Konkiel notes that

“as few as 25% of journal articles tend to formally cite data.”

So, it’s time to give credit where credit’s due and cite the data you’re using in your research publications.

In order to raise the profile of research data citation, the UK Data Service has introduced a #CiteTheData campaign, find them on Twitter @UKDSImpact.

Find out more

The following resources may help you to understand more about why and how to cite research data: