LRA Top Accessed Items: January 2012

1. Social inclusion, the museum and the dynamics of sectoral change (Sandell, Richard) (2381/52)

• Financial Development, Economic Growth and Stock Market Volatility: Evidence from Nigeria and South Africa (Ndako, Umar Bida) (2381/8924)
• The propagation of VHF and UHF radio waves over sea paths (Sim, Chow Yen Desmond) (2381/7444)
• A Randomised Controlled trial of the effectiveness of pelvic floor therapies for Urodynamic Stress and mixed Incontinence (USI) (Williams, K.S. et al) (2381/2381)
• The challenges of insider research in educational institutions: wielding a double-edged sword and resolving delicate dilemmas (Mercer, Justine) (2381/4677)
• Fault Tolerant Sliding Mode Control Schemes With Aerospace Applications (Alwi, Halim) (2381/3957)
• “Careering out of Control”: Decision-Making in Contested Cases under the Licensing Act 2003 (Cammiss, Steven et al) (2381/10013)
• Educational Leadership: an Islamic perspective (Shah, Saeeda J.A.) (2381/1004)
• Writing up and presenting qualitative research in family planning and reproductive health care (Pitchforth, Emma et al) (2381/309)
• The List of Threatening Experiences: a subset of 12 life event categories with considerable long-term contextual threat (Brugha, Traolach S. et al) (2381/261)

Top LRA Items for November 2011

Here are the most accessed items on the LRA in November 2011

1. Financial Development, Economic Growth and Stock Market Volatility: Evidence from Nigeria and South Africa Ndako, Umar Bida
2. High Performance Work Practices: Work Intensification or ‘Win-win’? Sparham, Eimer et al
3. The propagation of VHF and UHF radio waves over sea paths Sim, Chow Yen Desmond
4. Social inclusion, the museum and the dynamics of sectoral change Sandell, Richard
5. Facebook, social integration and informal learning at university: ‘It is more for socialising and talking to friends about work than for actually doing work’ Madge, Clare et al
6. Ethics and Plagiarism – helping undergraduates write right Willmott, Christopher J.R. et al
7. Introducing undergraduate students to scientific reports Willmott, Christopher J.R. et al
8. The List of Threatening Experiences: a subset of 12 life event categories with considerable long-term contextual threat Brugha, Traolach S. et al
9. Measuring the efficiency of European airlines: an application of DEA and Tobit Analysis Fethi, Meryem Duygun et al
10. Optimal Number of Response Categories in Rating Scales: Reliability, Validity, Discriminating Power, and Respondent Preferences Preston, Carolyn C. et al

An interesting split with the top half of the table being mainstays from recent months, but with the lower half all being new materials. Notably the articles by Chris Willmott (et al) had been actively marketed by the academic this month, with links back to the LRA as the primary access route. Notably, fewer theses than in recent months are also seen in the table.

Don’t forget you can follow all the new additions to the LRA on twitter – UoLLRA.

6000th Record added to the LRA

Sound the fanfares!  I’m delighted to announce that we’ve added the 6,000th record to the Leicester Research Archive this week. 

• Working Together to Reduce Plagiarism and Promote Academic Integrity: A Collaborative Initiative at Leicester (Book chapter) by Jo Badge (Biology) et al. (2010)

Since the LRA is currently growing at around 1,600 items a year thanks to the hard work of Rob, Margaret and Valérie I’d expect we’ll easily see the 7,000 record this year (and with the implementation of the IRIS project perhaps even the 20,000th record!)

USTLG Winter Meeting 2

This follow on with my report of the USTLG Winter Meeting.

Finding the known unknowns and the unknown knowns, Yvonne Nobis, University of Cambridge.

• Talked about their development of the http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/scienceportal/website aimed specifically at researchers (which I know some of our researchers rather like the look of!)
• Researchers often don’t known what they’re looking for: unknown unknowns, as research skills might need updating, looking for something outside their field or don’t know where to begin.
• Scientists don’t tend to use the Cambridge libraries (over 100 of them so confusing system) and they want everything electronically so looking for a way to meet their needs.
• Found most visitors to the science library are those looking for historical (print) information, or students wanting a place to study.
• ~95% journal are online and ~95% of monographs are still print only.
• In response to this they will now scan on demand from their own collections for Cambridge researchers (currently a free service as charging would have copyright law implications).
• As the staff would often need to retrieve these items from storage the scanning has not added too much extra effort.
• Science librarians at Cambridge do a lot of training of early career researchers.
• Science@Cambridge contextualises information within a subject area to help researchers start their searching.
• Includes a federated search option where relevant databases have been chosen (to steer researchers away from just using Google Scholar as they don’t realise what scholar doesn’t index: unknown unknowns).
• Trying to make resource discovery as easy as possible.
• Have problems with making eBooks easy to access, especially individual titles on catalogue records.
• Trialled using chat with subject  librarians but not really worked so looking at centralising enquiries more.
• Training branded through College or Computing Services gets a better turn out than library branded training.

We use a similar idea to Science@Cambridge in our subject rooms, but could learn more from them when redeveloping our Rooms as part of our digital library overhaul? Hopefully using Summon in future will make resource discovery easier at Leicester

Lunch!

Obviously the most important part of any conference is the lunch provided. This time it was a good spread sponsored by Wiley Publishers, and in a very unexpected place…

Lunch in the Divinity School

Citations Count! Experience of providing researcher training on bibliometrics, citations and Open Access publishing. Kate Bradbury,  Cardiff University.

• Training in citation data in response to REF raising interest in bibliometrics, funders requesting bibliometric data, help deciding where to publish and to promote work. 
• Training covers: WoS/Scopus/Google Scholar, looking for data in other sources (e.g. book citations, full text resources which include references), what each database provides e.g. impact factors, increasing citations, using open access publishing and repositories.
• Format of training: 30 min talk and 1 hr hands-on using workbooks - activities such as finding impact factors, setting up citation alerts, looking at OA resource and using ResearcherID.
• Also do shorter, tailored talks for Departmental meetings etc.
• Sessions dones for subject librarians, staff development programme, specific schools/depts (e.g. Comp Sci, Engin, Psychology) and within seminar series.
• Lessons learnt: avoid too much detail, stay up to date with new database features and REF, emphasis benefits to researchers, takes time to build interest in training, targeted sessions best, be flexible & adapt sessions to suit audience, be prepared for discussions about the validity and use of bibliometrics!
• Stance taken: explain how to find information but leave it up to the researchers to decide if it is useful to them, including discussion of pros/cons of bibliometrics.
• Types of questions asked:
• How to pay for OA publishing?
• Shouldn’t we just write controversial articles to up our citations?
• What about highly cited, poor research?
• My journals not indexed in WoS, how do I get citation info?
• How to find book citation info?
• What about self-citations? Will they be excluded from REF?
• BMJ article said no observable citation advantage from OA publishing…
• Can I import articles on in WoS into ResearcherID? (can do, but tricky)
• What is a good H-Index to have?
• Doesn’t H-Index just reflect length of career?
• Where’s the best place to put an OA article?
• I use a subject repository so why also use institutional repository?
• I don’t want an early version of my work available…
• What next in terms of training? – Continue with sessions, support subject librarians to run their own sessions, introduce Bristol Online Survey to collect feedback from attendees, respond to individual follow-up questions and do a separate presentation on OA publishing.

Wiley Publishers: WIREs, Alexa Dugan.
Next up was our sponsor for the day Wiley talking about their new product:

• WIREs = Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews.
• Reference work meets journal review article -  a new concept in publishing.
• Have been finding it difficult to find authors/researchers with enough time to devote to writing traditional reference works, especially as those works do not gain professional recognition .i.e. they are not indexed or cited.
• WIREs is Wiley’s answer to this: invited content with high quality editorship, drawing on their research journal community ties (so like a reference work), but also managed to get them indexed in major databases and WoS so the authors can get recognition.
• Each Review has a carefully thought out structure, which is kept up to date with a range of article types e.g. focus (news) articles, opinion pieces, basic reviews, advanced reviews etc.
• Content is added every two months (so serial like a journal) & articles retain their title and DOIs for citation purposes.
• One of their flagship titles: Climate Change Review has won several awards already.
• FREE for first two years: wires.wiley.com


Getting Interactive

Researcher@Library – becoming part of the research cycle, Katy Sidwell, University of Leeds.

• Leeds, like many of us, have managed to get a certain amount of library training embedded or offered to PhD students, but what about Academics and other Researchers?
• Started to think about how to support researchers so thought about the life cycle of a research project:
• Ides (pre-funding) – Planning (finding application) – Action (research/life of grant) – Dissemination - Application (of research knowledge/transfer) – back to beginning of cycle.
• They got us to think about how we all support these stages of the cycle & feedback (using post it notes – a good bit of interactivity to wake us all up!).
• What they (and from the feedback, others might do) are:
• Ideas = library collections, current awareness & literature search training.
• Planning =  Identify funding sources ^ support research bids (though in Leeds this only happens in particular areas as it’s labour intensive and unscaleable).
• Action = PhD workshops, bibliographic management, lit search support, data management advice, user behaviour research, friendly space for researchers.
• Dissemination = RAE/REF support, etheses online, institutional repository, publications database.
• Application = intellectual property advice (Business officer), market research for knowledge transfer e.g. patents.
• Hard for researchers to know about training – where/how to promote?
• Created a website for researchers to bring together the various things available to them (need user needs analysis to find out what to put there).
• Researchers wanted a website that was not solely library resources/focused, not tutorial but advice that could be dipped into at appropriate time, simple navigation, no login but not really basic advice – appropriate to their level.
• library.leeds.ac.uk/researcher
• Work in progress – need to clarify purpose, look at navigation issues, obtain feedback and roll out across other faculties.
• Where now? – created Library Researcher Support Group to continue the work and look at how it fits in with the new Vitae researcher development framework.

A good day all round. The presentations from the day can now be viewed at the USTLG site.

All about OTTERS – a day on open educational resources

Today I went down to the BDRA to attend a day on the OTTER project and OERs (open educational resources/repositories).  Educational object repositories are a little to the left of my working experience, so this was a great opportunity to find out a little more.  The aim of the day was to give an overview of OTTER and OERs in a broader sense.

We began by seeking to define what an OER was – something that could be reused, re-purposed, freely available, and discrete (not embedded within an environment).  The primary concerns over using them are currency, sustainability and quality control.  IPR/licensing to use/reuse is also an issue – especially third party rights of contents embedded within items.  Interestingly there is a lot of use of these objects by Leicester students for their revision, not simply those produced at Leicester.  Noted that MIT with their Open Courseware have been leading in this field for at least 12 years.

(Incidentally my favourite learning object is on  Kongregate – a game that teaches cellular physiology.)

OTTER is mounted on PLONE, and of course JORUM Open is more well known – as this links to OERs in all kinds of teaching environments. OTTER over-delivered on their target credits material – almost 500 credits worth of material.  Also the CORRE framework for creating and evaluating OERs.

CORRE

We started looking at Content gathering, and IPR/ownership questions were noted – the Uni generally owns copyright in OERs created here, but it was noted there are some cases where this might actually not be as cut and dried.  So OTTER worked with people where this wasn’t going to be a problem.  Even after the gathering there were questions over IPR and that some depts seemed to misunderstand what had been agreed to be supplied.  To get around this the BDRA devised a memorandum of understanding that was an agreement as to what partner depts would supply.  Noted that knowledge of copyright, let alone creative commons was poorly understood by the academic community and that education in this respect is needed.

Next is the Content screening – need to do some assessment of the content before you can decide that it is suitable for conversion into a OER.  OTTER used indicative questions to perform this analysis.  Interesting points about transnational issues over language and spelling were raised.  The amount of local references within OERs was an issue too – OTTER thought it was better to remove them and make them more generic, although other institutions didn’t always agree with this viewpoint – saying users could see past the local references to the reusable model underneath.

Then there is Openness – and the difference between creative commons and copyright.  In South America for example if it’s on the Web the normal assumption, even in the academic sphere, is that it is public domain and rights free.  The question of significant change to create a new object (and how much work is needed to demonstrate this) was raised.  Noted, like the LRA, that OTTER was very rigorous with copyright unlike some of the other projects – and had a series of indicative questions to be asked before an object could be progressed (developed with the consultation of Tania, our Copyright Administrator)

Next transformation – which is about enhancing the existing teaching materials as it becomes a OER, effectively making it an object independent of other resources that can be used on its own.  It may require restructuring – en.g. a lecture may be designed to work in a certain context, but as an OER its structure will need to be re-examined.

Then we looked at formatting and standardisation, making sure that final file formats are appropriate and openable by as wide a range of end users as possible.  It is also about making sure that metadata, and embedded metadata within the OER is  appropriate.  This was a manual process.  There was quite a discussion around the use of iTunesU and YouTube as alternative locations for mounting some OERs, the advantage being the discoverability would be enhanced by their search tools and greater visibility to a broader audience.  however, in contrast downloading of some objects can be restricted on these services, unlike from your own OER where you can control this more.

Now in Sahm’s words we move into a fashion parade – or Reuse and Repurpose – thinking about the end users and how they will be using it.  So these are questions to ask the various groups, although you can use your own in-house team to go through the tool kit questions.  Noted how they validated the materials by running it past real user groups e.g. EMALinc event with librarians.

Finally there is Evidence – this is about the impact and what is the value to teachers and learners around the wold, how do we measure it?  Senior management is more interested in evidence of impact, but as a teacher you will be more interested in the anecdotal evidence from learners on how these resources have helped in their learning experience.  like the LRA they use Google Analytics to track the quantitative data.  However, after all this effort and only 9 people use a resource the question of “worth” arises.  Hard to demonstrate what people get out of it – or what they would have not got, had the resource not existed.  Talked about MIT taking 10 years to demonstrate worth of their Open Courseware site. Akin to libraries making many materials available that few people use – but if they weren’t there, it would have diminished someone’s learning experience.

Applying CORRE

At this point we closed for lunch. After lunch we looked at some demos of objects in the Leicester OER, including a video with some upside down bits.  Following this we applied the CORRE framework to our own teaching examples – in my group’s case Marta from SDSS’ session on evaluating evidence.  We touched on the need to redesign teaching session objects from the ground up, if they were to fit through the CORRE framework – as they stand there is too little context to make them work alone, or too much referencing to other materials.

Finally the day reflected on how OERs and designing for openness has impacted on the work of the BDRA.  In particular thinking about stuff they are designing with this in mind from the start; alongside designing for the student.  They ask themselves “Can we make it open and can we enhance visibility for ourselves and our work through making it into an open resource?”

——–

Overall this was an enjoyable and engaging day, and the chance to think about CORRE I think could have filled an entire day if we’d worked through it methodically.  Even though I don’t do that much teaching these days I found plenty to think about, and look forward to future engagements with the BDRA.

Slides will be available on the OTTER sige, along with the podcast from the day (with the odd audible comment from me on it).

Google Books & Libraries

In the last couple of weeks Google Books has been something that’s been on the lips of myself and some of my colleagues. A confession, until last week I’d read a fair number of articles about it, but hadn’t actually pointed my browser towards it at all. No particular reason for not doing that, save for the face that I’d had no particular reason for doing that either. However, at first glance it is a very interesting site for the public and students alike that raise’s a few questions over how we, in the library, could/should be using it. And so like all good managers, I deputised one of my staff to find out more about it – and so my thanks to my Copyright Officer Tania Rowlett for the following notes.

US, UK & Downunder
It appears that Google books reached an agreement with the Association of American Publishers and the Authors Guild concerning the digitisation of their books, which essentially said the following in relation to books published in the US, UK, Canada and Australia:

• In-copyright books could be previewed and purchased (unless the author/publisher ‘turned off’ the title) within the realms of fair use (a limited amount similar to our 5%/ chapter)
• Out of copyright books will continue to be readable, downloadable and printable (which may be why it is more useful for Museum Studies/Archaeology/History documents)

HOWEVER, they also state that “Because this agreement resolves a United States lawsuit, it directly affects only those users who access Book Search in the U.S.; anywhere else, the Book Search experience won’t change. Going forward, we hope to work with international industry groups and individual rights holders to expand the benefits of this agreement to users around the world.”.

So, people accessing Google books from the US may be able to access more content than we [in the UK] can, but this should still only be within the above fair limits, which is supported by their statement: “whenever you can see more than a few snippets of an in-copyright book in Google Books, it’s because the author or publisher has joined our Partner Program and granted us permission to show you the Sample Pages View, which helps you learn enough about a book to know whether you want to buy it. This is something we do with a publisher’s explicit permission.”

Overseas
In addition, Google books have not reached a settlement/agreement with other countries, and certainly France and Germany appear to be unhappy about the project, so books from other countries ‘may’ be available but may not remain so. Having said that, if an item is accessible, then it is likely to be so for the foreseeable future (I’ll keep everyone posted on developments), and might be a useful addition to the search process.

Information Librarian Support
What has been notable is when we look at some of the books on reading lists here at Leicester, certainly not all the books are available.  In addition even for those that are on Google Books there are sections and chapters that are missing.  Some of the books are even ones that we may well have access to in print or electronically by other sources too.  What it means for my team is something we will need to discuss in-house - should we for example start to check Google Books more as a resource for satisfying our DL and DS requests, or not?  There are a number of advantages certainly to the students (speed of resolution of requests for one) but how stable are the resources on there?  How frequently do they change?  And what steps are other higher education libraries taking towards embracing this swelling collection of accessible texts?

I might also add that there is also an information literacy component here, in that the students may need user and awareness training if they are to take to using Google Books as one of their regular resources.  Which again raises the question over the reliability of access.  It doesn’t look like it’s going away anytime soon, and so once again we may need to adapt to this new information frontier.

JISC Conference: April 13th 2010

This Tuesday I travelled down to the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre in a very sunny Westminster to attend the annual JISC Conference.  This event draws a lot of senior people from across the educational sector; and it’s possible to run into more than a few VCs over coffee.  It’s also a rich opportunity to hear from the broadest cross section of educational computing projects.  What follows are my notes

 The day was introduced by Malcolm Reed and Chair of JISC then JISC Chair Sir Timothy O’Shea. Spoke about current value as well as what the impact the UK election and reduced funding means we as a sector will be dealing with.  The next 10 years will be difficult as the environmental impact as well as funding will impact on HE computing.  He highlighted an article in the Guardian (14/Apr/2010) on HE, commenting that it complemented the lively pre-conference debate 150 people yesterday led by JISC Vice-Chair.  Suggested to go back and have one key thing to implement.

Martin Bean, VC OU: The Learning Journey: From Informal to Formal

An anarchist at heart who sought to spark discussions and possibly put a few backs up; with imitable Australian bravado.  Distance education is on fire – because you cannot build enough brick and mortar institutions to keep pace with growth in HE; and thus need to look at alternative delivery modes.  Distance learning is growth area, as cannot build enough brick and mortar HEIs.  But 1/3 HE students are in private institutions – going to see a growth in private organisations providing this kind of educational role.

 Challenges for the custodians – need to educate citizens for new kinds of work.  STEM is key for a competitive workforce for the next 10-50-100 years for innovation.  Need to think about transformation of information into meaningful knowledge.  John Naisbitt book Megatrends was mentioned.  Learning in the workplace needs to become essential, and supported by HEIs more.

 Modern students need constant stimulation and hate complexity (among other aspects of their  desires) but does this mean we need to dumb down our degrees, or shouldn’t we adapt to the modern student expectations?  Is there nothing to be said for a proper old fashioned solid and complex education, I wondered  – where does that take us in terms of teaching critical thinking?

 What can be done to break down the barriers?  Multichannel.  YouTube and iTunes university – 342,000 downloads a week for the OU – in the top 10 in U channel; and most of that traffic comes from outside the UK, pay off is that many of their new students first encounter the OU in this way and are drawn in by the brand.  Informal learning, more cooperative environment and need for flexibility for educational institutions.  LLL need the ability to move in and out of HE formally and informally.  Comments that the D.E. Act is going to seriously interfere with this ability to evolve and use new patterns of education, research and training.

Living with IPR – the web, the law and academic practise

Charles Oppenheim opened with a passionate and scholarly dismantling of the appallingly poorly debated and rushed through Digital Economy Bill (now Act).  Then Jason Miles-Campbell (his sporran is a wifi hot spot allegedly) from JISC Legal spoke.  In the next five years there is unlikely to be changes to copyright protected items, you need to find an exemption. Gave an overview of the small changes in the law and clarifications under law for reuse of items.  Digital Economy act – what’s going to happen to institutions – some time to go to see if we are subscribers or ISPs as there will need to be case law.  Note that D.E. Act calls for a graduated response to infringement.  Talked about the Newsbin vs big media companies case.  Newsbin was indexing infringing material – in court case they were found to be infringing.  Court noted what we need to do to have an exemption for such a thing; Newsbin was effectively authorising infringement – encouraged copyright infringement by employing editors.  11 words effective of being substantial.  No good making a large amount of material available to staff, if they’re unsure if they can legally use it.  Patchwork licenses are a problem – different aspects of resources covered by different legislation.  May mean we need to ditch some resources that we won’t be able to use.  Need to make life easy, but we also need to be able to take risk decisions – e.g. like driving – there are times when 32mph in a 30 zone can be okay, but you have to make the judgement call.

Naomi Korn and Emma Beer, Copyright Consultants spoke next about orphan works- those where author is unknown or untraceable – they are significant barrier to public access, due to length of implicit copyright.  The internet is a major source of orphan works.  Items hundreds of years old can still be in © until end of 2039!  In a project 302 staff hours were spent to give only 8 permissions received for use in the British Library sound archive – massive staff effort to little effective impact.  EU Mile Project -registry of Image Orphan Works.  EU ARROW Project – accessible registries of rights information and orphan works.  One thing is clear dealing with orphan works even for major bodies and projects requires a lot of work and staff time, something that those of working in open access can be aware of.  In D.E. Bill Clause 43 tried to offer an exemption.  The D.E. Act means that for now you should only use orphan works within a risk management framework, as not clear quite what the impact of this will be.

Project OOER – best name of the day? #jisc10 Organising Open Educational Resources.  Barriers for sharing different levels of IPR awareness, licensing awareness etc.

 Open Access Session, Neil Jacobs (Chair)

Talked about the report authored by Charles Oppenheim et al late last year.  Moves to electronic only can help reduce costs in the scholarly communications sector.  Alma Swann gave an overview of the work looking at three models of repos gold, green, and role of repos as locations of quality assurance and publication – described by Alma as more futuristic.  Libraries do things differently, and this affected the model that they created.   Though unis increase in size the benefits don’t necessarily.  The Salford VC and Librarian of Imperial College spoke about how they’ve gone about making a strong case for open access, fiscally, at their institutions.

Community Collections and the power of the crowd, Catherine Grout

In a fascinating session looking at crowdsourcing and citizen science we heard from Kate Lindsay (Oxford, WWI Poetry Digital Archive) Arfon Smith (Oxford, Galaxy Zoo), William Perrin (Web innovator and Community Activist) and Katherine Campbell (BBC, History of the World) about 4 very different areas of community engagement.  From sourcing and augmenting first world war artefacts from across the country (including a roadshow – turn up and digitise!), though the power of Galaxy Zoo’s galactic classification project – which I’m proud to say I’m one of the thousands involved in.  What was clear from these two talks is the scale of what is achievable is amplified many, many times beyond what can be achieved through using more conventional team based approaches, and that the successes far outweigh the concerns over quality (indeed the “normalisation” of so many repeated analyses ala Wikipedia was touched on).

 William took a different approach building up a resource from the ground up, and using it as a focus for drawing a community together physically as well as virtually.  He showed some excellent examples of what you can do when a community develops a local Web resource rather than just one activist (I am reminded of the local Sileby village Website for an example of how NOT to approach this – locked down and run by a small clique).

For the twitter over view see here, here and here

The Ongoing Open Access Debate in the THE

Good article in the Times Higher today on the open access debate.  Required reading I suspect for anyone with an interest in scholalry communication.  Especially impressed that Salford’s VC appears to be championing open access there, if there’s one thing repository managers still need today it’s vocal senior administrative member speaking out in support. 

I was writing my workshop for academics on open access that I’ll be running next month (2nd December) via our Staff Development Office, so this kind of overview is smashing.  It’s something I’ll certainly be using to support the session and pointing my participants towards reading.  Actually it might well form part of the hands on portion of the session, as I’m planning to really get the people there thinking about their own publishing habits and those of their peers in relation to OA.

It also gives the publisher’s side, which while dissmissive in part of some of the research on OA (I wonder if they’re so sneery about research they publish that doens’t impact on their business model?) remains of considerable interest.  It even draws in the funders as well.  As a clear and plain english overview it’s not bad at all.

Open Access Week!

This week is Open Access week as declared by SPARC.  While we’re not having any formal celebrations this week at UoL, if you are a Leicester student or academic (or indeed any member of the institution) why not celebrate the importance of freely available research makes in all our lives by:

• Sending some final author versions of published papers (or any kind of research publication output) to the LRA team.
• Use OpenDOAR Search to track down freely available research
• Find out just how open to Open Access your favourite publisher or journal is – and if you don’t like what you find out, why not drop their editor a polite note.
• Find out just what your research funding body requires of your publications to satisfy their grant requirements – and remember that the LRA team are ever ready to help you out with this!
• Find out more about what the LRA is doing for research publications and PhD thesis
• Find out more about the global efforts towards open access
• Discover more about open access publishing and journals in your field
• Or just invite one of the LRA team over for a chat over coffee and #cake

I’ll be making daily posts on aspects of the LRA and open access throughout this week – and as always we warmly welcome comments from everyone.

Open access for new academics workshop

I was approached last month by our Staff Development team to consider running a workshop for new academics on all the various aspects of open access.  Obviously I said yes, and followed up with the very helpful Derek Cox and Meera Warrier.  I gave them an overview of the sort of thing that we could include, and they went away to think about it.

Well they’ve come back now to give me the go ahead for December for a three hour workshop.  I’m rather delighted to be given this much time, but now I’m sitting down and thinking “How can I usefully fill this and shape it into a format that is both beneficial but objective at the same time”.  I’m immediately giving some thought to bringing in one of my colleagues as well, so it’s not just me droning on for the whole time (they do get a tea break).

I think I’m going to have to give this some very serious thought.  I’d like to include some hands on elements, but there seems little point in getting academics to search (say) RoMEO when we at the LRA do all the work on copyright for them.  But then exploring things like DOAJ, OpenDOAR, BASE, OAIster etc are likely to be of more direct interest to them.

I’m also going to have to tackle aspects of the REF and Funders requirements too.  I’m lucky in that we have a day event run by our Research Office in late October where a lot of these issues are going to be raised, discussed and presented by external speakers from the various bodies.  I’ll hopefully be able to crib elements from there.

At this stage in my planning I’m open to constructive suggestions though.

Messages from the plenary lecture at the Vitae Researcher Development Conference 2009.

The plenary speakers were each concerned with reminding researcher developers of their formative role in equipping future researchers with the skills needed to enter a changing research environment in the digital age. Interdisciplinarity, web 2.0 and blue-skies research were high on the agenda.

 Prof. Ian Diamond (chair of RCUK) emphasised that the UK requires a research force who think across disciplines, as well as achieving excellence in their own fields, in order to face the new challenges ahead. These researchers need to be “responsive to new knowledge, new technologies and new strategic economic and social needs”.  

 Prof. Brigid Heywood (Pro VC for Research and Enterprise at the OU) shared her vision of a future researcher capable of reacting to a fast-changing digital academic environment, embedded in an active research community, interacting with other academics and the public on both local and global platforms. This researcher engages in a range of new academic behaviours in a web 2.0 environment. Examples of projects included:

• http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/
• http://www.apple.com/education/mobile-learning/
• www.evolutionmegalab.org

 Prof. Alexandre Quintanilha (Director of the Institute for Biomedical Engineering, Porto) urged the academic community to place less emphasis on the traditional methods of evaluating the quality of graduate training (publication output, funding, etc.) and to focus on training researchers to address some of the major challenges of the 21^st century. These challenges often require a mixture of blue-skies thinking and applied thinking, as well as an interdisciplinary approach, involving research methods that have been seen as risky, vague and a threat to disciplinary foundations. Prof. Quintanilha outlined the obstacles facing postgraduates who wish to enter these areas of research that are the most valuable in terms of long-term impact, but frequently also the most challenging in terms of immediate career progression (because of difficulties in publishing and getting funding because they cross evaluation boundaries; unclear departmental affiliation; accusations of lack of focus), and called for graduate training programmes that recognise their role in producing what the research community needs:

• Curious, imaginative people willing to move across disciplinary and geographical boundaries to follow their dreams
• People excited about tackling new challenges
• People prepared for the complex challenge of tackling major world problems of the 21^st century

 All three speakers agreed on the importance of developing communities of researchers across disciplinary boundaries, championing academic role models who visibly practise what they teach, and training future academics to be adaptable and responsive to the challenges of a new digital research environment.

The End of Institutional Repositories! (or not)

I’ve just been reading an article “Basefsky, Stuart. (2009). The end of institutional repositories and the begining of social academic research service: An enhanced role for libraries.“.  With such a shocking title you’d expect revlations of a major order, and to be honest the opening page or so does rather continue in that vein.  Indeed there’s a slightly superior author style that runs through the whole paper that rather grated on me as I read it.  That said Stuart does raise some interesting points on the first couple of pages about the driving forces and assumptions behind the creation of institutional repositories (IR).

The idea behind the paper is that librarians and academics should be working together more closely, using social media and other tools in support of the research process of a whole.  I can certainly support that, and hope through the local contacts I have via twitter here at UoL that in some small way I’m already offering that level of service.

He goes on to consider the generally understood paradigm underlying IRs (the shop window/increased exposure to academic research) to be only one opportunity – as he puts it “Is this all the value we can extract from an IR?”.  This is a theme I was hoping he’d explore in more detail later in the paper, but this rather seems to disappear as the second half of the paper dissolves into an effective list of “things I am doing”, rather than maintaining this earlier scholastic tone.

He does make some good points along the way nevertheless.  When talking about the partnership twixt libraries and institutional repositories he comments

“Libraries welcomed this attention since they were fearful of being marginalised…IR would help the library maintain an important role in academic life in this time of disruptive technological change”

However, he than makes some rather caustic comments about the lack of vision of library services, suggesting their involvement in repositories is merely an attempt to maintain visibility and apparent viability in the new media age; rather than an actualised devotion to enabling further scholastic endeavour.  I take issue with these statements somewhat.  Perhaps two or three years ago this was a more robust argument, but certainly in the major research universities like Leicester this is not so.  The repository is at the heart of the institutions preparations for REF and visibility of research.  As the repository manager increasingly my time is spent working with the Research Office, or discussing research visibility issues with our academics, helping them do more with what we have.  Not to mention making them aware of the developing scholastic publishing landscape.

The next third of the paper focuses more inwardly on the Catherwood Library, so is of less immediate interest or relevance to the casual reader.  However, with this framework the author then extends his views point to wider library scene; pausing only for a barbed comment about library leadership that I shall pass over.

He does have a salient point here that I agree with “too many libraries take the attitude that if they build it users will come”.  I think this is an unfortunate truism about the library sector.  We have many enthusiasts for new services and resources, and too often we offer them on an already overloaded information platter.  As a LIS researcher and project manager at heart, I always believe that we should be answering real needs with our services and making informed decisions based on an strong evidence base.  Indeed he spends the next page making his argument, which seems useful if overlong by the end.

As I mentioned earlier the rest of the paper is a guide to services that the author has employed in the deliverance and indeed furtherance of the research support agenda.  It seems strangely at odds with the earlier half of the paper, moving to pure practicality from scholastic theory and review.  In many regards I would have been interested to read this in some more detail as a paper in its own rights.

Finally he devotes the last page to suggested new directions and possibilities for supporting academic endeavour.  However, what he fails to do (IMHO) is explain the challenge of his title.  Throughout the work whilst he points out the arguable flaws in IRs and their implementation and exploitation by libraries and institutions, he does not clearly to my mind exposit exactly why IRs days are (in his view) numbered.

Thus this is a flawed but detailed and intriguing article to read that anyone working with research support, IRs or indeed academic libraries should take a few minutes to glance through.  You may have other insights that differ to mine, so let me know your thoughts!