Monthly Archives: May 2016

Cultivating ORCIDs

Yesterday Jisc organised an event on Cultivating ORCIDs in Birmingham.

The OU is part of the Jisc ORCID consortia and we are busy integrating ORCIDs into the Institutional Repository, ORO, and plan to promote both ORCIDs and the ORCID/ORO integration in July.

The event was about sharing experiences of institutional ORCID roll out and information gathering on the part of Jisc.  Key take outs for me:

  • ORCIDs recognise peer review – if your peer review is verified by a service like Publons – then it can be added to your ORCID record.
  • RCUK have joined the ORCID consortia and have integrated ORCIDS in to Je-S. Integration is only limited as there will be a replacement for Je-S in the next 2 years. However, RCUK do intend to push Grant information to the researchers ORCID record in the future. Importantly, RCUK are not mandating ORCIDs in bid submissions.
  • DOIs minted by CrossRef or DataCite that have an associated ORCID ID can be pushed to that ORCID record.  This means that both research data and publications with DOIs can be automatically pushed to ORCID records – if you grant CrossRef and DataCite permissions to do so!

ORCID&DOIs

  • ORCID records are not a profile system. Rather they are hubs of data that allow the flow of bibliographic information from one place to another.  For us at the OU we have a clear use case where ORCIDs can help populate ORO – this will save the researcher time and provide the institution with a more complete set of research publications.

And finally, in the light of the Social Sciences Research Network being bough be Elsevier, the Executive Director of ORCID Laure Haak concluded with a robust statement that ORCID would not, and as a 501(c)3 organization legally could not, be purchased by a commercial entity.

Open Library of Humanities

It’s great news that The Open University has joined the Open Library of Humanities membership scheme.

OLH-logoBlue-large-1024x271

The Open Library of Humanities is an Open Access publisher that does not charge Article Processing Charges (APCs), rather is funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and a library consortium.  The portfolio includes The Comics Grid, Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry and ASIANetwork Exchange: A Journal for Asian Studies in the Liberal Arts.  It also includes Glossa, which was established when the editorial staff of Elsevier journal Lingua resigned over Elsevier’s Open Access pricing model.

Martin Eve, one of the founders of OLH, gives a warm welcome to the OU:

“The Open University has been a pioneering in ensuring that those who wish to access higher education may do so, regardless of their background. As such, we feel a particular affinity with the mission of the Open University and are delighted that the institution has joined our membership scheme”

For me these innovative community driven approaches to Open Access are crucial interventions in academic publishing and I’m thrilled the Open University Library has found the funds to support the initiative.

ORO Mediated deposit pilot – some conclusions

We recently conducted a short pilot of mediated deposit in ORO.  As outlined in a previous post we looked at adding ORO records to researcher user areas in ORO for them to check and deposit to the review queue.

For Night Deposits by C.J.TM https://www.flickr.com/photos/bigluzer/216318107 (CC BY-NC 2.0)

For Night Deposits by C.J.TM https://www.flickr.com/photos/bigluzer/216318107 (CC BY-NC 2.0)

In total we checked 264 items from various data sources including Web of Science, Scopus, Google Scholar, Taylor and Francis and Science Direct. 56 of these items were added to researcher user areas.  Why so few?

  • 34% weren’t OU staff i.e. affiliations recorded in the data source were incorrect.  This was mostly the case for Google Scholar which was a shame as this feed contained a wide scope of research publications and included records from arXiv.
  • 26% were duplicates – there was overlap in the data sources, this was expected.
  • 22% were not in scope e.g. they were book chapters.  We made the decision early on to only include journal articles and conference items with a Digital Object Identifier (DOI).
  • 10% had no DOI – a further 4% did have a DOI but it had not yet been registered with CrossRef which mean’t we’d have to manually key in the data.  Taylor and Francis in particular assign DOIs to articles before being registered at CrossRef.

Of these 56 items only 23 items were deposited to the review area by researchers.  This was disappointing, a success rate of less than 10%.  But it was a useful exercise.  We learnt that we could capture Author Accepted Manuscripts from Science Direct if we act quickly enough and we learnt that manually checking data sources is probably not the way forward.  Instead we will look for automating ingest of data to ORO via developments such as the Jisc Publications Router and integrating ORCIDs into the ORO infrastructure.

Workshop – “Finding and evaluating external scholarship literature”

Helen Clough and David Jenkins from the OU Library are presenting a workshop entitled “Finding and evaluating external scholarship literature” on Wednesday 25th May, 12:00 – 14:00 in the Michael Young Building, room 2 UPDATE – this workshop has been postponed due to planned strike action – details of the rearranged session will be published as soon as they are known.

They will guide you through finding and evaluating the external scholarship of teaching and learning literature. They will also talk about how you can find good journals to publish in and how you can save yourself time by using a reference management tool. There will be some laptops available for hands-on practice but if possible, please bring along your own internet-enabled device.

This session is aimed at OU academic staff.

Please contact the scholarship@open.ac.uk mailbox to register your place.

Open Research Online – Quarterly Update

Please find below quarterly update for ORO Q3 2015/16.  Key headlines for the last quarter are:

  • Increase in deposits on previous quarter and quarter 3 2014/15
  • Increase in Open Access items and items with Full text 

PRO-2015-6-q3-report

Deposits

702 deposits over the last quarter is a significant rise over the previous quarter (381) and on the same quarter of the previous year (545).  ORO deposits have historically fluctuated with increased faculty engagement, internal drivers (research audits), external requirements (REF) and the ebb and flow of new staff joining the OU. (Deposit counts can be influenced by the enthusiasm of one or two new members of staff especially if they are in a discipline that generates a lot of research outputs!)  However, the requirement to deposit in a timely fashion for the HEFCE Open Access Policy should see deposits remain at a consistent level… we’ll see.

% Open Access & % Full text

I’ve included both % Open Access and % Full text data for the first time.  % Open Access indicates the % of items with freely available documents, % full text indicates the % of items with any attachment – these attachments may, or may not, be freely downloadable and will include those papers that are under a publisher embargo.  There has been a steep increase in the % full text indicator over the last 2 quarters (72% and 69% of items include full text) and I associate that directly with an increase in embargoed full text being archived in ORO.  Again, I’m seeing this as an indicator of engagement with the HEFCE Open Access Policy.

PDF of the quarterly report is available: ORO Quarterly Report Q3 2015-16

Getting to grips with RDM

Yesterday I ran a workshop on research data management for research staff and students. The session generated lots of interesting discussion, especially around questions of ethics and the gaining of consent for data sharing; trying to anticipate what might be worth sharing with others; and whether documenting data processing activities is really worth the interruption to creative flow! As promised, the slides are uploaded here.

The sessions are run twice yearly, so if you missed this one, keep an eye out for future training emails from the Research Career Development team in the Autumn.