UKSG are offering a free webinar on The Law of Text and Data Mining in Europe.
“The aim of the webinar is to introduce the audience, in particular non-lawyers, to the legal framework of text and data mining, focusing on the main aspects of the law at the European level.” Speakers are Guilia Dore and Nancy Pontika.
The webinar is on Tuesday 21st March and registration also provides access to the recording of the session.
This week Alan Stiles (ORO Developer) and I ran a workshop on ORCID with particular attention to linking individual ORO (the OU’s Institutional Repository) accounts to existing or new ORCID accounts. 
The development work has gone on for some time and isn’t complete due to other emerging priorities – but we are currently able to link accounts so that all publications listed in ORO can be pushed to ORCID when individual researchers grant ORO permissions to do this. I was a bit tentative about doing this and we had a few issues! However, this was countered by a few “wows” in the room when all the publications people had keyed into ORO suddenly appeared in their ORCID account! But there were a few things for us to take away:
The development is still best considered in beta and only those people who signed up for the session had the ability to link ORO to ORCID. It’s not available to all ORO users by default. However, if you want to be able to do (if you do please email the Library Research Support team). At this stage it’s probably best to do this on a one to one basis or in small groups.
And one last thing… we did a very short flip chart warm up where I asked people “Where, or how, did you find out about ORCID” which was instructive.
Most people who had encountered ORCID had been prompted to add an ORCID by publisher or funder submission systems. So people had created ORCIDs in order to complete the submission of an article or a bid… and probably hadn’t done anything with their ORCID account afterwards. So what’s the wider impact of this – researchers signing up for ORCIDs to comply with funder publisher requirements but not really knowing what it’s for, or what to do with it? Zombie accounts we called them… and that’s a problem.
David, Dan and I recently ran a training session on Social media for scholarly communications and networking for first year PhD students.
Our aim was to give an introduction to the kinds of social media tools and techniques available, look at what can be achieved with them, and how you can tailor your approach to get the most out of them while avoiding potential pitfalls. We also wanted to give attendees a chance to reflect on their current use of social media, and to think about how they might use it in future, using a couple of UX activities.
The session was informed by Mark Carrigan’s Social Media for Academics and talked about how factors such as how much time you have, whether you want to collaborate or work individually, and whether a task is intrinsically or extrinsically motivated, will contribute to how you use social media.
We then went on to talk about several sites and tools as examples of what’s out there, some key features of them, and how others are using them. Promoting your own work and actively encouraging interaction and networking can require different ways of presentation and engagement. If one of the aims of using social media is to grow your network, or audience, then it’s good to find out more about people you want to be part of that network – this may take some fine-tuning. It’s also important to consider how a new audience might want, or be able, to understand you and your work – are there barriers of understanding and access that you can mitigate by providing different versions or summaries of your work? Can you make sure your work is understandable and accessible to those without the background knowledge and or subscriptions to academic publications? Open Access and social media seem natural bedfellows.
Pulling all of this together we saw some examples from ORO where promotion and interaction with social media, using methods like featuring links and images, can lead to increased impact and reach of work.
Lastly, we talked about the risks of using social media, and the potential down-sides in terms of reputation, potential for plagiarism, and sometimes just making sure you are not misunderstood in a medium where nuanced expression and debate can be hard to achieve!
Our first UX activity kicked off the session and served as a really good ice-breaker. David started by introducing the concept of Visitors and Residents, as described by David S. White and Alison Le Cornu. It asks us to think about how we use and engage with aspects of the online world in different ways, depending on what we want to achieve, and whether – and how much – we wish to interact with others and/or leave a digital trace. The idea is to place our activities on a scale of engagement for each tool or task, so there is no absolute status as a Visitor or Resident (or right or wrong way to engage). We asked attendees to draw their own their own activity maps on the Visitors/Residents scale, and also on a scale of personal or institutional use.
Here’s mine (Chris)
My map was influenced by some online activities I had done over the previous couple of days – so felt it was a bit skewed – but I took some delight in relegating Facebook to the furthest corner! Moreover, there were aspects (e.g. banking & shopping) that I completely overlooked – so I think some bits of online life are so ingrained I’m not consciously aware of them being online!
And here’s Dan’s
“Having recently joined the OU from another university I found myself thinking about tools that were relevant in one environment but perhaps not in another, or that I might use differently in a new context. I guess this goes to show that behaviour can change and we can adapt usage to new situations. On reflection, I also think I miss-mapped a few things, which all suggests I should probably do it again in a couple of months and compare the two maps” – Dan.
After the session we collated the results of the visitors/residents exercise in a wordle to find the most popular services.
Unsurprisingly, Google looms large, as does email, Facebook and Twitter. But there were a couple of things that stood out. One is identifying tools that we can develop training and support for, such as Linked-in, which many of the group were using. Another is that YouTube is also very popular, for both institutional and personal use, so we might do more to provide support material in video format on that platform?
The relative popularity of general social media (Twitter, Facebook, etc) over more academic-focused systems (ResearchGate, Academia.edu and ORCiD) wasn’t surprising, given that the attendees are relatively new to their research careers, but it was interesting to see that in our group ResearchGate was noticeably more popular than Academia.edu.
It was also evident that people tended towards the visitor side of the spectrum rather than the resident side. Maybe that’s accurate or maybe the attendees were a bit modest.
We concluded the session with a second UX exercise, a card sort. Groups discussed and ordered a set of cards featuring types of information we might be comfortable sharing on social media, from our thoughts on the current political situation to fully-formed academic outputs.
The card sorting exercise led to interesting discussions about what is appropriate to share, on which platform to which audience? There are things we would happily share for example on Facebook with our friends and family that we wouldn’t share with our peers, which added an extra dimension. Are you interested in the music someone you follow is listening to or are you only interested in new papers in your field? Perhaps people respond more to a three dimensional profile on social media?
We hope everyone had a good introduction to the topic and saw that traditional methods of scholarly communication and networking can be augmented, complemented and in some cases substituted by social media. The questions and contributions to discussions throughout were very welcome, so thanks to everyone who came and took part. If you are interested in us running the session for you and your colleagues get in touch!
Slides: Social media for scholarly communications and networking-January 2017
The download data of Open Access content in ORO can tell some fascinating stories, the counts from December and January are no exception… it really is amazing what you can discover with a bit of digging!
The first one that jumped out at me from the December list is a journal item published back in 2002 by Dr Sara Haslam in FASS:
Haslam, Sara (2002). Written in blood: Family, sex and violence in Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre. The English Review, 13(1) pp. 8–11.
A “steady performer” that averages between 20 to 30 downloads a month. But December and January saw a spike in downloads with 100 in December and 124 in January which saw it reach the top 50 list (see below). Looking at the referrals I noticed a large amount coming from open.edu, or OpenLearn to you and me. A quick search found this page, which had a link to the ORO page for the article.
Sara was the academic consultant on the OU/BBC co-production “To Walk Invisible” and this was one of the OpenLearn pages supporting the programme – which is great connecting ORO and OpenLearn – how joined up!
Looking at Google analytics to see how many hits the ORO page got from OpenLearn tells us the ORO page was visited 251 times in the week immediately following broadcast (29th December to January 4th). The actual PDF of the article was downloaded 115 times. So, roughly, half the visitors coming to ORO from OpenLearn, were interested enough to download the paper!
Mapping the site visits and downloads of the paper gives us this graph. 
The graph shows that the greatest spike came immediately after broadcast of the programme. But there is a tail of site visits and downloads that coincide with the availability of the programme on iPlayer. It’s a great example of connecting Open Learning and Open Research.
The second story comes from the January downloads and relates to a paper co-authored by Dr Mathijs Lucassen in WELS:
Fleming, Theresa M.; Bavin, Lynda; Stasiak, Karolina; Hermansson-Webb, Eve; Merry, Sally N.; Cheek, Colleen; Lucassen, Mathijs; Lau, Ho Ming; Pollmuller, Britta and Hetrick, Sarah (2017). Serious Games and Gamification for Mental Health: Current Status and Promising Directions. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 7, article no. 215.
This one went through the roof, with 604 downloads in January making it the second most downloaded item in January (full top 50 below). It was added to ORO on the 10th January and almost immediately picked up in twitter by @andi_staub.
Important #Insurtech#Gamification for Mental #Health – Promising Directions#VR #AR #BehavioralEconomics #fintechhttps://t.co/gsiQRszO3N pic.twitter.com/Jo4TtzTx0U
— Andreas Staub (@andi_staub) January 14, 2017
The download pattern show a remarkable a correlation between that tweet and the number of ORO downloads for that article.
Initially I was suspicious that a single tweet could have that impact, even though it did get plenty of likes and retweets. But Andreas Staub is apparently a Top 20 influencer in the world of FinTech. FinTech (Wikipedia told me) “is an industry composed of companies that use new technology and innovation with available resources in order to compete in the marketplace of traditional financial institutions and intermediaries in the delivery of financial services” and got $19.1 bn funding in 2015.
So why might a FinTech influencer be interested in this research? Mathijs gave me some lowdown:
People do seem very interested in serious gaming in mental health…I wonder if it is because people are aware of the addictive potential of commercial games, so they wonder how can a game be therapy? There are some really interesting ones out there (in addition to SPARX – I was a co-developer – Professor Sally Merry has led this work), like “Journey to the Wild Divine” a ‘freeze-framer’ game based on bio-feedback in a fantasy setting. The program is a mind and body training program, and uses biofeedback hardware (e.g. a user’s heart rate) along with highly specialised gaming software to assist in mindfulness and meditation training (e.g. a user has to learn to control their body in certain ways in order to progress through the game)…Plus programs like “Virtual Iraq” (to assist service men and women with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder with their recovery).
There was one other thing about the downloads for this paper. It was published in an Open Access journal so I’d have expected most downloads to come from the journal site. But the majority of downloads (at least in January following this tweet) were from ORO.
Which indicates to me that Institutional Repositories can be as good as any other platform, whether they are publisher platforms or commercial academic social networking sites, to disseminate your research. Full Top 5o lists for downloads are below: 
This months Top 50 includes one of the oldest records in ORO at number 40. The eprint number is 38 (we are now on eprint number 48065 and counting), which indicates it was one of the first to be added to the ORO eprints software.
The paper Ekins, Paul; Simon, Sandrine; Deutsch, Lisa; Folke, Carl and De Groot, Rudolf (2003). A Framework for the practical application of the concepts of critical natural capital and strong sustainability. Ecological Economics, 44(2-3) pp. 165–185 was deposited over 10 years ago in ORO and according to the eprints software has had 3,762 downloads and 422 views. Over half of those downloads have come direct from Google (or Google Scholar).
The full text of the paper is also in ResearchGate which records 137 reads – although I’m not entirely sure when it was added to ResearchGate or exactly what a “Read” is! It is also in Repec which is a subject repository for Economics – but there is no full text archived there. The full text is also in CORE and it looks like it was a pretty early addition to CORE if the url https://core.ac.uk/display/8 is anything to go by.
Downloads of the item in ORO have grown over the years in a not dissimilar pattern to how a paper accrues citations:
Citation data in Scopus indicate that this is a very highly cited paper, accruing over 240 citations, with a Field-Weighted Citation Impact of 4.34. In terms of citations it appears to be in the top 2% of papers, based on its subject area, date and type of publication. Citation pattern from Scopus is below:
I’m not attempting to make any correlation between downloads from ORO and citations from this single instance… I have made some exploratory analysis before. It’s just rewarding that something archived in the infancy of the University repository is a highly cited paper, was originally made Open Access via ORO and remains a popular paper in terms of downloads today.
Top November downloads from ORO are below:
Author Profile Systems (like Academia.edu, ResearchGate, ResearcherID and Google Scholar profiles) have grown in number over the last few years. The prevalence of them begs the question as to which one(s) to use, or, should you use any at all! So in this post I’ll try and outline some of the benefits of the systems, their different characteristics, and some particular things you should consider when creating and curating author profile systems.
Simply put, the benefits of Author Profile Systems are:
Different functions have created different Author Profile Systems – that might sound awkward and I intend it to be. What I mean is that the primary function of a system (e.g. author disambiguation, open access, reference management or search engines) has created different types of profile systems. So the characteristics of a Google Scholar profile will in part be defined by the original function of Google Scholar, that being a search engine. However, the common feature of all profile systems is the attempt to increase the visibility of the researcher and their work.
A further point to consider is that different Author Profile Systems have different modus operandi which will affect your interaction with them. Some are institutional, others are personal; some commercial, others not for profit; some are open, others are closed (or should I say are a walled garden). The tension between these aspects may determine how you interact (or choose not to interact) with any particular profile. I have written before on the considerations anyone should make when using commercial profile systems like ResearchGate and Academia.edu.
Importantly, some profiles already exist, without you having to create them yourself. These include ScopusID (the Elsevier persistent identifier for researchers) and OU People Profile pages. For ScopusID this is important as Scopus attempts to match publications to an existing author profile or create a new author profile – this doesn’t always work, it’s an algorithm. So in Scopus you can get multiple author profiles for the same person and you can get papers associated to a particular author’s profile that weren’t written by them at all. So this profile needs to be curated.
For the OU Profile pages the problem is different, but the solution remains curation. The profile pages are automatically created so if you don’t add any information to them then they are basically empty – a zombie profile, so to speak. And, unfortunately if you own a zombie profile and do a google search on your name and “Open University” that zombie page is going to appear pretty close to the top of a search results page. Which I don’t think is desirable.
So here is a bit of checklist of author profile systems and what they ostensibly can and cannot do. There are a couple of caveats to this checklist. Firstly, functionality changes very quickly on some of these systems so what it can’t do one week it may be able to do the next. Secondly, not all Yes’s are equal, for instance whilst ResearchGate and ORO can provide metrics, it is a qualitatively different type of metrics to that offered by ResearcherID or ScopusID.
Well firstly you should look after the OU People Profile and the ORO publications that populate the publications page. There are external drivers (i.e. REF) to maintain a publication record in ORO and there are significant benefits in making publications Open Access in ORO wherever possible. Add some biography to the People Profile and keep it current.
Secondly, look after any other profile that is readymade. This at the moment might only be a light touch review of your Scopus account – this shouldn’t be onerous, but it is important as it may be affecting author level metrics created in Scopus.
Thirdly, get an ORCID. I’ve written about the benefits of ORCID before. ORCIDs are quickly becoming the de facto standard in scholarly communications because they are open and non-proprietary. They are increasingly expected (if not necessarily required) by publishers and funders.
And, then, I’d suggest, take your pick based on any key criteria you have. If you are an Early Career Researcher attempting to make connections for collaboration and funding then using a commercial platform to help you seems a sensible option. Choose a platform you are comfortable with and where your peers have a presence. However, if you already have those connections you may not need to take the trouble.
David and I ran the session on metrics on Wednesday and had a good attendance – so thanks to all who came out.
The session was an overview of metrics, researcher profiles, the application of metrics and the problematic behaviours these applications have created.
The slides are available: metrics-what they are and how to use them-December-2016- Blog and so are our notes: Metrics-what-they-are-and-how-to-use-them-script-December-2016.
Checking monthly download statistics gives a great insight into individual cases of how events in social media can impact the dissemination of Open Access research outputs. In October the article An investigation into written comments on assignments: do students find them usable? by Mirabelle Walker in Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 34(1) received an exceptional 531 downloads. But unfortunately I couldn’t track down the event(s) that caused this spike. All I could see was a large set of referrals from a Facebook post (which I couldn’t get any more specific about…. gggrrrr!!!) and also a large set of referrals from Greece!
Top downloads for both September and October are below.
So I stepped back and decided to think about the bigger picture – how do items get downloaded from ORO i.e. what platforms are being used to download items from ORO and exactly where in the world do they come from.
Firstly, I compared the number of external referrals to referrals from ORO itself (e.g. someone clicking the download file from an external website rather than downloading an item from within ORO itself).
Internal referrals equalled 604,344 (44%), whereas external referrals equalled 783,232 (56%)… most users of ORO never actually visit the site!
So from here I looked at the most popular external referrers (no prizes are on offer…)
Yes, ORO loves Google (82.69%, 642,185 downloads). Unpicking it a bit I was surprised how little traffic gets referred from Twitter (0.19%, 1,438 downloads) and that more referrals actually come from Facebook (0.66%, 5,126). I was also pleasantly surprised to see a significant minority of traffic coming from Library Search (1.89%, 14,671). But, really, ORO loves Google.
So where in the world do these external downloads come from… 
Again, no surprises, the UK the biggest country of referrals (41.6%, 185,834), followed by the US (10.81%, 48,282) and India in third (3.42%, 15,278).
So, whilst the individual stories can be fascinating, the overall picture is that downloads come direct from Google and are most likely to originate from the UK. The take away is we need to ensure ORO remains visible to search engines, it doesn’t actually matter whether people “use” the website, as long as they can access the content.
We’ve produced some Faculty Reports for the University Year 2015-16 based on the new Faculty structure. We’ve been able to report at School level which shows some interesting detail in both the downloads and deposits in the last University year and going back to 2009-10.
There are some challenges mapping old departments to new schools, especially where new Schools could not be previously mapped (e.g. The Law School). This has resulted in varying degrees of Unaffiliated deposits and downloads, especially in FBL, nevertheless I think it’s a useful exercise. Any feedback welcome!
FASS 2015-16 ORO Update (PDF)
STEM 2015-16 ORO Update (PDF)
WELS 2015-16 ORO Update (PDF)
FBL 2015-16 ORO Update (PDF)
IET 2015-16 ORO Update (PDF)
Earlier this week HEFCE updated their Open Access policy. It had been expected that the time frame for deposit to a repository would shift from 3 months of first online publication to 3 months of acceptance from 1st April 2017 – this has been postponed. The policy has been updated to state:
“To take account of the need for systems to be developed to support deposit-on-acceptance, during the first two years of the policy (1 April 2016 – 1 April 2018), outputs can be deposited up to three months after the date of publication. This flexibility will be subject to a review of the readiness of systems within the sector in autumn 2017.”
Updated HEFCE Open Access Policy.
This uncertainty about the time frames of deposit to a repository is worth reflection. Firstly, it causes continuing problems in administering a policy that has shifted from its initial 3 months from acceptance, to 3 months from publication until April 2017, to, now, 3 months from publication until April 2018, subject to review...
Secondly, this delay highlights another problem with the policy – and it’s not just about having the appropriate systems in place! Where no embargo has been stipulated by the publisher, “deposit at point of acceptance” will often mean making the paper available in a repository before it is made available via the publisher platform. Now this may well be the intention of the policy, but it’s a cause for concern for both authors and publishers who don’t operate in a Preprint culture.
Given the increasing number of papers in the UK being deposited in institutional repositories I’m unsure how publishers who don’t currently require an embargo will react. One course of action for publishers would be to simply establish new embargo periods where previously there weren’t any. But Green Open Access with long embargo periods isn’t really Open Access! The risk is “deposit at point of acceptance” may provoke a response that undermines the Green Open Access route the policy attempts to exploit.
