A challenge – what are the three best articles about open access ?

What are the three best articles on open access? 

Not the ones that I might like but the key ones that I should/could/might get my academics to read. 

Not necessarily ones that will have them convinced or arch-evangalising left right and centre, but ones that really give a rich overview of the topic.  Ones that even bring some academic rigour to the discipline, some facts and figures as much as hearts and minds.  Ones, like the THE, that take a look at all the stakeholders and try to offer a dispassionate overview (or as dispassionate as it is possible to get!).

They don’t have to be peer reviewed, they can be reports, they can be briefings, they can be conference papers – they just have to be accessible and credible.

And here’s the trick – they have to be available, in full-text in an open access repository!  Suggestions welcomed and indeed warmly invited – but no more than three per commenter!!!

The 10 commandments of researcher development

I’ve been mulling over some of the main recurring points from the Vitae Researcher Development Conference 09 and their impact on my own practice as someone who engages with researchers. Here is a brief list of qualities that participants in Vitae 09 thought development activities should seek to encourage:

1. Ability to operate in a web 2.0 environment (for dissemination, collaboration, networking…)
2. Recognition of the value of both blue-skies creative thinking and applied research
3. Interdisciplinarity
4. Dialogue across disciplinary boundaries (This involves presentation and communication skills: researchers being able to present their ideas in accessible and jargon-free language.)
5. Participation and support from academic role models (Students are more likely to use their training if they see tangible evidence of its usefulness around them.)
6. Provision of physical and virtual spaces encouraging creativity, community and dialogue.
7. Getting students to be reflective and to analyse their own needs (E-portfolios were suggested as one method of encouraging this.)
8. Training that prepares future academics for new academic behaviours (VLRs, new devices and platforms.)
9. Recognition that preparedness  to cope with change and challenge is more important than any particular set of learned skills (Training needs to be flexible rather than prescriptive.)
10. Important role of emotional/motivational support in postgraduate research students (This can be done through events and networking opportunities, a focus on the writing process in workshops, providing alternatives to the formal supervision system etc.)

Can anyone add to these?

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 blog as an induction tool

It has occurred to me over the last few days while I’ve been finding my feet in a new job that the blog is incredibly useful as an induction tool. I’ve enjoyed reading through previous posts and getting a sense of the history behind various projects. It has also given me an idea of who is interested in what, and especially who might be interested in some of the areas my post as Research Forum Facilitator will work to develop.

Here is a very brief overview of what I’ll be doing up in the Graduate School Reading Room. I’ll be working to facilitate a physical and virtual research forum that will support postgraduate researchers in general, and PhD students in particular. I’ll have a stand up in the reading room, from which I can act as a point of contact for referral to any services they might need, as well as maintaining an online presence. Over the next couple of months I’ll be involved in the exciting new project of setting up a Graduate Media Zoo. I’m also very interested in doing anything I can to smooth the way for doctoral researchers over what can be a difficult few years. This will include using web 2.0 technologies to encourage social and academic networking as well as general problem sharing!

I’m looking forward to talking about web 2.0 with you all… and of course reading more of this valuable resource which is a great help to newcomers!

Welcome to a new member of the blog!

Just a short post to welcome our newest member of the UoL Library Blogging family Emma Kimberley.  Emma started recently at the library as our new Research Forum Facilitator, something about which I’ll let her post about in far more detail (and accuracy) than I can cover! 

I’m sure we all look forward to her posts with great interest.  Emma’s also on Twitter, and I’ll be adding her ID to the blog front page shortly.

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!

Tweeting in a pedagogical kinda of way

I see that Leicester’s Beyond Distance Research Alliance (BDRA) is thinking about exploring twitter for pedagogical and learning activities.  Excellent, this is really good news.  Let’s hope that those of us twitter veterans here already can support them and help welcome them into the community.  As we’ve explored and discussed on this blog (and elsewhere) more than a few times, twitter has been a great tool for us.

Open Science

Just wanted to recommend this article to any science librarians out there:

Doing science in the open

by Michael Nielsen

A excellent distillation of the barriers facing open science. Issues such as a lack of trust infrastructure and incentives and a lack of appropriate collaborative/science network tools. Plus the fact that the current grant and journal system, which was initially set-up to ensure scientific discoveries were shared, is now stopping people from sharing their research in the more efficient ways offered by the web.

Policy-making for Research Data in Repositories: A Guide

This rather interesting policy guide has just been brought out by JISC and DISC-UK DataShare project.  For once rather than being a lengthy report, it is actually a very useful tool kit for setting up the policies, workflows and the like for a research data repository.  It’s been something that the LRAPG has touched on in discussions, and I know the University in the future will be keen to develop.  Thus having a document like this, where a lot of the questions we need to ask and decisions that have to be taken are laid out in a very thorough manner.

Re-engaging the repository with the Arts research community

Just had a very interesting conversation with our arts librarian here.  Seems her departments are getting down hearted by the local repository being full of STM materials and are feeling, understandably, left out.

Unfortunately they don’t regard conference papers, reports or discussion papers they produce as “research worthy” enough to go in; and the bulk of their true research output is in the form of books.  Which in our experience, we’re unlikely to get permission to include (bar the odd one or two).

So my question is this – how do we re-engage with these people and enable them to deposit materials of genuine interest?  Are there any tricks we’re missing or is it that repositories actually are only suitable for the sciences?

Who’s doing what with their repository in the UK?

Some very interesting results have come out from UEA and their survey of UK repositories activities.

UK Repository Survey Results

One or two things peeked my interest in particular – of those surveyed (70+ HEIs)

• 28% will still archive if they do not get a reply from a publisher
• 4% Don’t check publisher rights
• 46% have less than 1FTE working on IPR clearance to deposit (3% have 5 or more staff!!!)
• 89% of repositories are funded by their library
• The modal level of deposit is 201-500 items a year

It’s not a long report, and there’s some very interesting data that can be gleaned from it – it certainly gives a very good picture of the current operating practices of the UK repositories; and unlike some more densely written reports it’s very easy to pick useful data out of it as a repository manager.  Highly recommended to read.

Finding an author’s h-index – a step by step guide

The h-index (Hirsch Number) is a metric that is increasingly becoming of interest to researchers, especially in the light of the REF.  An h-index is “a number that quantifies both the actual scientific productivity and the apparent scientific impact of a scientist“.  You can work it out manually, but to be honest you’d need to be mad or a bibliometrics fiend to want to.

I’ve been asked by a few people how to find it, and each time I totally forget how!  So in the light of this, here’s my step by step guide to discovering an author’s h-index automatically using that wonderful Web of Knowledge tool!

1. Go to Web of Knowledge  and click on the big green button
2. Click the Web of Science tab at the top of the screen
3. Rnter the author’s name in the format surname initial* (e.g. raven e*)
4. Change the search option from the drop down menu to Author
5. Click Search
6. At the top right of the results is the option to Create Citation Report. Click this.
7. The analysis appears, along with the person’s relative h-index.

It seems simple, but I was scratching my head using WoK until I discovered that I need to just use Web of Science, not the whole WoK in order to get the value.  And so, now you know!  It is worth noting you do have to be fairly exact in your author naming conventions, as the citation report will not run for more than 10, 000 result records.

I did wonder if between steps 6 and 7 about selecting individual papers from the list of results, but it appears that this has no effect on the citation analysis; for example selecting 5 papers from a list of 120, 000 doesn’t enable me to run the citation reports – it appears to run in an all or nothing manner.  Or maybe there’s a trick here I’m missing?