Monthly Archives: January 2018

Online Training – Open Access Publishing

This week I ran the second of our online training sessions.  This session looked at Open Access publishing.  Slides are below:

 

 

Here are the other sessions we’ll be delivering over the next couple of months:

These sessions will be run using Adobe Connect; joining instructions can be found on the event pages on My Learning Centre, but if in doubt please email us at library-research-support@open.ac.uk

If there’s any other training you’d like us to deliver online, feel free to let us know by emailing or commenting below.

Online training: Writing successful data management plans

Last Friday I ran the first in our series of online training sessions. This morning’s session focused on Data Management Plans.

If you were unable to attend, here are the slides and a recording of the session is available on YouTube.

Here are the other sessions we’ll be delivering over the next couple of months:

These sessions will be run using Adobe Connect; joining instructions can be found on the event pages on My Learning Centre, but if in doubt please email us at library-research-support@open.ac.uk

If there’s any other training you’d like us to deliver online, feel free to let us know by emailing or commenting below.

“Social media for scholarly communications and networking” training session

Social media for scholarly communications and networking-title slide

Me and Chris recently ran a training session entitled “Social media for scholarly communications and networking”.

It provided an introduction to how different social media platforms can be used in relation to research and scholarship,  focussing on dissemination, keeping up to date and networking.

We provided some tips and advice on effective use of social media,  used real-life examples as illustrations and got participants to reflect on their use of digital tools as a whole using the Visitors and Residents mapping exercise.

You can access the slides on Slideshare.

What is an Electronic Lab Notebook, and why should I use one?

…so begins this recently published guide to Electronic Lab Notebooks (ELNs), from the Gurdon Institute at the University of Cambridge.

The short answer is that ELNS are “a software system for documenting your research work”, which can replicate a hard-copy notebook and add benefits of being searchable, shareable and having safeguards of security and backup.

kenyon_5.1.07_083 by ydylg https://flic.kr/p/2WbiUE

The guide was put together following a trial of various ELNs and provides a great source of information if you’ve either never heard of them before, are in the process of working out if they could work for you, or know you want to try one but don’t know which will best suit your work.

As with other technologies, there are many ELN products on the market, all of which do the same sort of thing but with a wealth of other features that vary between them.

To help make sense of all of this, the guide:

  • poses some key questions to ask yourself to decide which ELN would be the best fit for your work
  • lists the functions and features to consider when evaluating them
  • has a quick reference checklist of 25 current ELN products

There’s also a discussion forum where ELN users can share their experiences, and where prospective users can ask questions.

For further reading you can also find a blog about the ELN workshop held in Cambridge last year.

Dimensions – a new service for discovering and analysing academic literature

Researchers may be interested to try out the free version of Dimensions, a new research information platform from Digital Science (the company behind Figshare, Altmetric, Readcube etc.).

Screenshot of Dimensions search page

Its main functionality includes:

  • Discovery – search for journal articles, books and other research literature
    • It indexes over 89m publications
    • You can view PDFs where available, open access content is highlighted and links to publisher pages are provided for other content (so you can still potentially login and get the full text if your institution has access)
  • Analysis – gain insights into research via a wide sets of linked data covering citation counts, linked grants, patents and clinical trials
  • Insights into impact/popularity – via citation counts and Altmetric scores (mentions on social media, in the news, in policy documents, on social bookmarking services etc.)

It has been described as an alternative starting point to Google Scholar – see what you think and let us know!

Learn more about Dimensions at www.dimensions.ai

Screenshot of Dimensions item page

You asked, we delivered: online training

We are regularly asked if we can deliver our training sessions online to research staff and students who don’t work at Walton Hall and can’t make it onto campus. In order to satisfy this demand we have arranged a series of online training which will take place throughout January and February in the new year.

Here’s the programme of training, with links to full session details on My Learning Centre:

These sessions will be run using Adobe Connect; joining instructions can be found on the event pages on My Learning Centre, but if in doubt please email us at library-research-support@open.ac.uk

If there’s any other training you’d like us to deliver online, feel free to let us know by emailing or commenting below.

New icon images in Library Search

OU Library Services is constantly trying to improve the services it provides.

As part of this commitment, we have developed new icons for Library Search. These are brighter (in keeping with The OU’s up-to-date website templates), colour-contrast tested for accessibility and include many more format types than before. This has involved creating some icons (and underlying categorisations of material) that did not exist before and updating others.

Here are a few examples:

New Library Search icons

We have received great student and staff feedback on these changes already and we are seeing their benefit during usability testing. The new icons were designed following an analysis of similar work undertaken in Tennessee and Washington. This was a real team effort – colleagues from across Library Services worked together to make it happen.