Category Archives: Funder requirements

UKRI Open Access Policy: new requirements

If you are publishing research articles and are funded by UKRI you need to be aware that there are changes to the Open Access policy from 1 April 2022.

The new policy requires immediate open access for research articles and conference proceedings that acknowledge UKRI funding from AHRC, BBSRC, EPSRC, ESRC, MRC, NERC, STFC, Innovate UK or Research England submitted for publication on or after 1 April 2022. This can be achieved by 2 routes:

    • Route one: publish the article open access in a journal or publishing platform. The version of record (final published version) must be immediately open access via its website with a Creative Commons attribution (CC BY) licence. Funds for Gold Open Access may be available from the University’s UKRI Open Access Block Grant. The Library has been taking out Journal Transitional Agreements with Jisc that include gold open access publishing in them.
    • Route two: publish the article in a subscription journal and deposit the Author’s Accepted Manuscript (AAM) (or Version of Record, where the publisher permits) at the time of publication in an institutional or subject repository with a CC BY license. A publisher embargo period is not permitted.

The policy also requires a Data Access Statement on research articles, even where there are no data associated with the article or the data are inaccessible

It is important that any UKRI funded researchers check before article submission that the journal they are submitting to is compliant with the UKRI Open Access Policy.

The policy has also been widened to include monographs, book chapters and edited collections published on or after 1 January 2024 and requires:

  • the final version of a publication or the author’s accepted manuscript (AAM) being made open access via an online publication platform, publishers’ website, or institutional or subject repository within a maximum of 12 months of publication.
  • CC BY licence is preferred to maximise opportunities for sharing and reuse. The open access version should include, where possible, any images, illustrations, tables and other supporting content.

UKRI will be providing dedicated funding to support open access monographs, book chapters and edited collections. Funding will be via a centralised fund held by UKRI that must be applied for by authors. Publication costs for monographs, book chapters and edited collections can also continue to be included in research grant applications. UKRI will provide updated guidance by the end of 2022.

Further details can be found on the Library Research Support website and the full policy can be found here along with a list of frequently asked questions.

The Library Research Support Team will be running two briefing sessions in Microsoft Teams (please note these will not be recorded):

10-11am Tuesday 5th April 2022. Book here.

3:30-4:30pm Thursday 7th April 2022. Book here.

For help and advice, please contact library-research-support@open.ac.uk.

 

Training offer: Making your research data open

There are spaces available on our training session ‘Making your research data open‘ on Tuesday (27th November 2018), 10:00 to 11:30.

Photo by Finn Hackshaw on Unsplash

In this session we will look at why, how, what and when to share data:

  • Why should you share your data? We’ll discuss the benefits and the reasons why data sharing is such a hot topic at the moment.
  • How can you do it? We’ll take a look at the OU’s data repository, ORDO, and provide guidance on preparing data for sharing, including sensitive data
  • What should you share? Do you need to share everything? What do funders and publishers want you to share?
  • When should you share? We’ll the look at the stages of the research process when sharing data is most useful to you and others.

Sign up via My Learning Centre – any if you have any questions, get in touch at library-research-support@open.ac.uk.

ORDO online drop-ins – ask us about the OU’s research data repository

Heard of ORDO already but not sure what it does?

Never heard of it before but interested in options for storing and sharing data to support your research?

I’ll be holding an online drop-in session for ORDO, the OU’s research data repository, on the first Tuesday of every month at 10:30 to answer any questions you have about data preservation, data sharing, showcasing your work, collaborative projects… and anything else.

 

The first session is on Tuesday 5th June, and then at the same time on the first Tuesday of every month after that. Drop-in at any time and stay as long as you want.

To join, go to our Adobe Connect “Research Support” page and click on “join room” (and if you find the link takes you to the “DISS Home” page instead, click on “Resources” at the top and scroll down to “Research Support”).

If you want to get started right away, see the ORDO information on our website or get in touch at library-research-support@open.ac.uk

Training Offer: Making your research data open

There are still spaces available on our training session ‘Making your research data open‘ on Monday 21st May 2018, 14:00 to 15:30.

Image by Jorgen Stamp (CC-BY) at https://digitalbevaring.dk/

In this session we will look at the hows, whats and whys of data sharing:

  • How can you share your data? We’ll take a look at the OU’s data repository, ORDO and provide guidance on preparing data for sharing, including sensitive data
  • What data should you share? Do you need to share everything? What do funders and publishers want you to share?
  • Why should you share your data? We’ll discuss the benefits and the reasons why data sharing is such a hot topic at the moment.

Sign up via My Learning Centre – any if you have any questions, get in touch at library-research-support@open.ac.uk.

Applying for AHRC funding? Get to know your DMP

The Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) has changed how it wants funding applicants to tell them how they will manage and share their research data. Previously, a Technical Plan was required, which would then be reviewed by members of the Technical College, but AHRC now requires a Data Management Plan (DMP) to be submitted instead, which will be assessed by members of the Academic College as part of the whole proposal.

A DMP will be mandatory for all Research Grants, Follow on Funding and Leadership Fellows proposals, and harmonises AHRC with other Research Councils, most of which require a DMP.

Plans should give information about:

  • Types of data
  • Proposed methodologies
  • Short and long term storage
  • Data sharing
  • Ethical and legal considerations

AHRC has updated its Research Funding Guide to include guidance about what information to include for these sections, the format to use (no more than 2 pages of A4 at font size 11!), and how to name your plan.

The funding guide also describes that when submitting, applicants confirm that their institution has considered and will meet a number of points which support and facilitate good data management. These services and information about them are all available at the OU, so if you have any questions please get in touch.

DMP Online has also been updated and now has an AHRC DMP template with relevant guidance, making it easy to structure and format your plan.

As usual, we are very happy to review DMPs before they are submitted (you can email them to library-research-suppotr@open.ac.uk), and, as we do for other funders, we will add examples of completed plans to our website as soon as we have them. If you’re happy to share yours, please let us know!

Ps. You might want to check out the recording and slides from our recent online training session on Writing Successful Data Management Plans

Online training – Data sharing: legal and ethical issues

Yesterday I ran an online training session on sharing research data. This session covered:

  • Rights and data sharing
  • Ethics and data sharing
  • Re-using data

The slides from the session are below. OU staff and students can access a recording of the session on Adobe Connect and anyone can access it on You Tube.

This concludes the current batch of online training sessions but we aim to run more in future.

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

Planning for Research Data Management: workshop slides

Yesterday I ran a session on Planning for Research Data Management as part of the Core Skills series.

We talked about the current RDM landscape and looked in detail at Data Management Plans using a DMP template, and ended with a game of DMP Bingo.

The slides are available here:

Thanks to everyone who took part!

A reminder too that we’ll be delivering an online session on the legal and ethical issues around data sharing next week.

This 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

Research Data Resolutions

At the end of January we held our Research Data Resolutions event, where we invited researchers and anyone who supports research at the OU to join us for an open discussion of the issues around research data management (RDM).

What was the aim of the session?

We offer RDM support to the whole University through our website, training, repository and enquiries, but contact with researchers and those supporting them is largely limited to those who get in touch or attend our sessions, and often that it is to meet a particular need (which is great and we’re very happy to do), but we found ourselves wondering how could widen our knowledge of RDM at the OU?

It seems natural for us to focus on the mandated and defined goals of data management planning and meeting funder requirements – they are of course important – but are they the things that are most important to researchers? Are there other issues that we, as a support team, could know more about?

So, we decided to have an informal and open forum for an hour to hear what the important issues are at the University, and to encourage a sharing of experiences and ideas. If we learned anything that would help us understand better how OU research colleagues work, and how we can best support them, then all the better.

What did we talk about?

Without an agenda or structure, we set about seeing where the conversation took us, which touched on, and often returned to, several themes:

Data sharing

  • Why share? – publisher and funder requirements – what are the motivators?
  • What to share – selecting and preparing data to be shared – What’s relevant to support a particular publication? What will be useful to others? How much work is it to get it ready?
  • Sharing responsibly – How to effectively anonymise – The risks of data sharing when the potential of future technologies to aggregate data is unknown.

Informing participants and gaining consent

  • How to be clear and granular when communicating with participants how data will be gathered, stored and shared – The difficulty in balancing giving enough detail and being too complicated to understand and abide by.
  • Managing participants’ rights without compromising the research process.

Data management planning

  • Even if you know what you are doing you need to explain it well for others to understand.
  • The need for clear guidance and to know what’s expected.
  • How long should we retain data?

Storage and tools

  • Balancing convenience with security – Where is the data stored and backed-up? Is it compliant with data protection, and what about GDPR?
  • Can one system fit all? Can the university support everyone’s needs?
  • Using open source software to build our own tools – can we adapt existing software to give the functionality and security we want?

These are the main topics but even during the short time we had, we touched on many more too.

What did we learn?

As expected, there were certainly more questions than definitive answers, but the conversations illustrated a couple of things I think we already knew:

  • That research at the OU is varied and different disciplines, methods, and groups have different needs and require different solutions and approaches.
  • That everything is connected. The topics we talked about overlapped and connected in many ways.

It also indicated, from a relatively modestly sized group of ten, that there is an appetite to discuss RDM amongst OU colleagues.

It was certainly very helpful for us to hear how researchers work, and we hope those taking part enjoyed sharing their experiences too.

Next steps

As it was the first of this kind of event we’ll reflect on how it went and think whether we should do it again, and in what form? If you have any feedback, are interested in joining another session, or would like to suggest a particular research data issue for discussion, please get in touch – and watch this space!

And many thanks to everyone who took part and contributed to the discussion, either at the event or by sending their ideas in advance.

Written by Dan Crane, Research Support Librarian

Online training – Data sharing: How, what and why?

Yesterday I ran an online training session on sharing research data. This session covered:

  • Data sharing policies
  • Benefits of data sharing
  • Data repositories
  • Preparing data for sharing
  • Re-using data

The slides from the session are below. OU staff and students can access a recording of the session on Adobe Connect and anyone can access it on You Tube.

Here are the other sessions we’ll be delivering over the next month:

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.