Open Access Week: Success Stories from Glasgow

I was pleased to see that the University of Glasgow is running stories about individuals who have experienced academic success on the back of making their work available on their Enlighten repository.  The first one concerns Dr Katherine Forsyth from the Department of Celtic and Gaelic who has had a phenomenal number of downloads of her out of print book (50,000). 

I wonder if there are any authors of out of print books here at Leicester who might like to consider exploring the possibility of making their texts available to all via the LRA?  Please get in touch if you are!

UKCoRR Summer 2009 meeting pt 2

Continuing on with the UKCoRR day at Kingston University

Integration of Repositories with other systems, Wendy White, Southampton

This session looked at how the repository interacts with all the other systems that an institution uses.  Not just technologies but people as well, the repository can help identify and nurture your star performer academics.  Recognising the role the repository plays as a knowledge management system.  But also as a location for marketing, to tell stories, myths and legends of your institution’s research is a role the repository can play.  Also the repository managers themselves are the star performers that institutions need to hold on to, by recognising them and ensuring their pay and benefits encourage them to stay.

Integration of Repositories with other systems, Morag Greig, Glasgow

This talk aimed to take a more practical overview of the same issue, which started with Morag giving an overview of Glasgow’s repository.  Like Leicester they aimed to join the repository and publications database together.  It was important to develop policies and procedures to enable departments to engage with the repository on an on-going basis.  Started by going out to talk to HoDs and research chair/champions in each department.  Gathered information on their current practices on how they gathered current procedures.  Self deposit for two depts, mediated for large faculties and proxy for most small to medium sized departments.  Issue with materials in PMC going unharvested.

Training sessions were run for administrators (from 30 depts) including the wider context of OA, something which I think is very important.  Even if you are just adding material to a repository as part of your job, it is important you understand why it is important to academics and the institution as a whole; not to mention the global dimension.  Glasgow are planning a large scale import of data going back to 2001, and adding staff number.

Embed, John Harrington, Cranfield

In this talk John explained how his repo emerging from the embedding phase and into the mature phase.  He looked at the problems they initially faced.  Then he moved to look at the various sweeteners they could use to sell the repository and the publication cycle.  Using a model like Leicester (alerts and request) to obtain materials got a low awareness in the academic community.  They concluded that this was an unsustainable model for scaling up, something I agree with.  RAE didn’t help, but elements of bibliometrics raised importance of the repository which they used as a basis for renewed advocacy push.

Adrian Mschiraju, Royal Holloway

Adrian told a cautionary tale about what happens if it people are seduced by bought in systems.  They have bought Equella an Australian developed system for all purposes teaching objects, research publications, data and theses.  14 months of developer time so far to customise for their purposes – however, had to drop their requirements down to a level that eprints could have done on day 1.  [Post-event I spoke to their developer Alison on twitter, who said actually the picture wasn’t quite as bleak as this – and indeed their repository actually offers a lot more functionality]

Susan Miles, Kingston

Susan talked about maintaining momentum with a repository team over time.  They have 7 people who have editorial rights over their eprints server, which is a considerable number for a smaller institution.  However, repository work has to be competed for with all the other competing demands – these are not dedicated members of staff.  As a team distributed over 4 campuses they have been using Sharepoint to draw the team’s activities drawing together.

Finally Mary Robinson, talked about the UKCoRR repository skills set document which has ended up being used around the world.  Dominic talked about the JISC recruitment tool kit for digital repository projects – which frankly was just the sort of basic things you get told at all kinds of recruitment training and didn’t appear to offer much of novel use – JISC reinventing the wheel again? 

Over all this was another very useful day and gathering of people in the rare position of being repository managers (there’s still less than 100 people in this country in this position – so it’s a very small but active community).  I learned a fair bit and let’s hope I was able to share my own experiences with a fair few people.  Let’s hope it’s not 18 months before the next event.  And maybe we can have it North of the M25 (or on the south coast – I’m not fussy!).

Twitter feed from the event.

UKCoRR Summer 2009 meeting pt 1

It seemed a long way to go, longer than going to Edinburgh for the Fringe the other week, but in the end thanks to my handy in-laws as an overnight venue, getting to Kingston UIniversity wasn’t such a difficult destination after all.  Aside from some early morning shopping, the event today was all about sharing practical experiences of repository managers.

Keynote: Bill Hubbard, UKCoRR Can!

Bill (SHERPA/Centre for Scholarly Communication, Nottingham) talked about the founding of UKCoRR and the purpose of a membership organisation as a safe haven for repository managers to meet and discuss issues, away from other stakeholders in open access.  He went on to talk about the vision and purpose behind UKCoRR – key among that being the professionalism and recognition within HEIs.  He highlighted the RIN Mind the Skills Gap report as one that illustrated a clear role and need for repositories and their staff, not just libraries, as key partners of all those involved in the research process.  The UK remains a significant global player in the world repositories, and potentially gives us the chance to lead the world.  Need remains to get the disciplinary repository people involved in UKCoRR as well.  NECOBELAC (Latin America, Caribbean and Europe Repo collaboration).

 Repositories should remember simple as a key feature – simple to access, simple metadata and simple content; although in particular the REF will seriously change the role of the repository.  As managers we may need to be able to fight our corner and our significance against competing demands, which we might feel isolates us.  How does the repository know when people are mandated to deposit by funders?  There is a need to be involved in the research process from the start, not as an after the fact activity.  And this is a position few if any HEI repositories are in.

Here is where UKCoRR can help by supporting peer networks, by identifying needs, supporting collaboration, seeking funding, sharing best practice and acting as a voice for we repository mangers.  There is a need for organisations like JISC to be lobbied by UKCoRR to support repository managers and processes from the top down.  If senior administrators and academics hear about this from a body like JISC, then they might just take more note of our concerns and expertise.

Following this talk Jenny Delasalle, Mary Robinson and Dominick Tate talked about their role as the inaugural UKCoRR Committee.

Theo Andrews, Central funds for open access publishing

This talk looked at the open access publishing side of open access, with Theo giving an overview of the current situation.  The Gold OAP Route avoids a lot of the problems.  There are a lot of new publishers jumping on board (e.g. PLOS) but also traditional publishers offering hybrid journals; with the option of the author paying a fee to retain rights or not.  How can this be funded, how can this be managed and how can this change be communicated? 

 Mechanisms for payment in this way are not totally new, with page charges for images in articles being around for years.  Often these have been paid from unallocated fund, and this is not really a sustainable nor easily managed way.  Wellcome Trust awarded additional funds to 30 HEIs, and other HEIs can apply to reclaim costs.  At Edinburgh using this as an opportunity to step in for advocacy, and provide support to managing the funding.  Noted that FEC can be included in calculation for researcher fees in grants. 

The feeds issue means that a lot of different departments and stakeholders within an institution are involved in the issue (finance, research, administrative staff, library, committees etc).  No matter what they do, institutions need to coordinate these funds centrally and along the lines of acceptable standard policies.  Edinburgh will be introducing a mandate in Jan 2010 and are spending the 6 months in the lead up to that talking with departments about how this will impact and how the repository can help them to meet the requirements of this.  Noted that once you have introduced the idea of a central fund to pay for publication, top sliced from research grants, you have to maintain it – even if income decreases.

 Glasgow, Nottingham, UCL, Brunel, Edinburgh, Warwick and Kingston are all already or about to start funding open access funding in a central.  Some Northampton academics very much against the idea of paying to publish though, as a matter of principle. Some publishers offer an OA option – but then increase their embargo to a length that means in order to comply with funders’ mandates, authors need to pay for OA option as IR will not be able to meet the requirements.  As Bill Hubbard put it – “They’re back into a double dipping approach to getting money.”

Event slides are here.

UK Institutional Repository Rankings – July 2009 Edition

The Webometrics site  half yearly update of their ranking of world repositories is available.  For information on how they calculate their metric see here.  For further interest here’s the ranking of the top UK based institutional repositories, I’ve put their global score in brackets at the end, and those with mandates (as listed on ROARMAP)  in italics.

1. University of Cambridge (22)
2. University of Oxford (42)
3. University College London (51)
4. University of Edinburgh (71)
5. University of Southampton (74)
6. University of Warwick (123)
7. University of Glasgow (131)
8. University of Manchester (160)
9. University of Leeds (White Rose) (167)
10. University of Birmingham (187)
11. University of Nottingham (212)
12. LSE (215)
13. Open University (222)
14. Imperial College (225)
15. University of Bristol (232)
16. University of York (White Rose) (239)
17. Newcastle University (253)
18. Lancaster University (261)
19. University of Sheffield (265)
20. Durham University (302)
21. King’s College London (255)
22. University of Bath (309)
23. University of Essex (328)
24. Herriot-Watt University (344)
25. University of Liverpool (366)
26. University of Aberdeen (373)
27. University of St Andrews (376)
28. University of Leicester (383)
29. University of Surrey (406)
30. University of Kent (424)
31. University of Strathclyde (438)
32. UEA (476)
33. Cardiff University (478)
34. University of Sussex (486)
35. University of Reading (494)
36. Loughborough University (499)
37. University of Exeter (501)
38. Queen Mary University of London (518)
39. Manchester Metropolitan University (527)
40. Queen’s University Belfast (537)
41. Aberystwyth (547)
42. University of Dundee (592)
43. University of Brighton (626)
44. Royal Holloway (628)
45. De Montfort University (640)
46. University of Stirling (644)
47. City University London (669)
48. University of Salford (671)
49. Brunel University (678)
50. University of Westminster (685)

You can see the whole list of UK Institutional Repositories’ ranks here.  Contrasted with last timethe LRA has dropped down the list somewhat – with detailed metrics for our repository giving us the following changes in the sub-rankings for Leicester.

	July 09	Jan 09
Size	877	222
Visibility	378	186
Rich Files	363	125
Scholarly	422	125

 The most drastic change seems to be in terms of size, where a lot of repositories have clearly begun to be filled at a considerably advanced rate.  How the recent mandate at Leicester will affect these figures in the next 6 months will bear watching.

Information literacy at Staffordshire University (SUILCoP event)

I went over to University of Staffordshire on Wednesday to take part in one of their information literacy scholarly community events SUILCoP. It was a really worthwhile session and I was deeply privileged to take part. After a spot of networking with the senior librarians at Stafford the day kicked off with an introduction by Alison Pope (Staffordshire University). This was then followed by myself speaking about the practicalities of making and using videos for information literacy, along with my now streamlined scriptwriting for beginners 101 course. It’s a development of my highly regarded workshops from last year’s CoFHE/UC&R Conference. It was quite a packed and enthusiastic room at the start of the event and thankfully still was at the end. Hopefully all the folks there will go onto televisual greatness and continue to develop their scripts to fruition.

After my workshop Chris Wakeman (Centre for Professional Development, University of Staffordshire) spoke about information and its implications for contemporary facilitation methods in HE. Chris asked us to think about our perspective of information literacy (something that immediately made my mind go blank), something that he was coming at from a practitioner’s point of view. He mentioned paper by Bruce Edwards & Larson on information literacy that defines the topic. Chris suggested that he was going to focus on information literacy as dialogue between two people – to consider modern facilitation methods in higher education and to ponder how information literacy skills may influence ultimate success of failure for students. He looked at dialectic (including Socratic dialogue) and teaching by asking/discussion (assuming students bring with them a knowledge base) teaching. There is also enquiry based learning that covers a whole range of other techniques including cognitive problem solving and Webquests (a technique now used in modern schools). People discussed what they thought information literacy was – a variety of concepts were aired and I was very impressed by the deep level of scholastic thought demonstrated by those present.

Chris described himself as a social constructivist in terms of IL, which wasn’t a term I was overly familiar with; which didn’t help with my following of his talk. Glancing at the faces in the rest of the room I sensed I wasn’t alone in this. Chris’ talk was at a very high level, considerably more academic than I’ve come to expect for a workshop session. Whilst it is good to be pushed sometimes, unfortunately there was just far too much to take in, and delivered at a pace and professional lexicon that didn’t help the audience to pick up the threads.

I did later have the opportunity to read a paper on constructivist learning (or at least skim through it while he talked) and discovered that it is the concept that “humans can understand only what they have themselves constructed” – and involves the learner learning through developing their own problem solving techniques and solutions. This helped a little in following the session, but obviously whilst reading it Chris had bounded onwards to talk about more exotic concepts and definitions of IL.

He provided various definitions of information literacy, including the Australia & New Zealand Literacy Framework ANZILF one which defines IL in terms of people whom are information literate and skills and aptitudes they display. The idea that an IL citizen “used information and knowledge for participative citizenship and social responsibility”; was at least an interesting concept. Even more important was the idea that IL is embedded within teaching and skills delivery rather than being taught as a separate skill. There was a nice juicy algebraic problem on Chris’ slides, which I ended up solving in a minute or two for personal satisfaction, though as he explained this would have been previously taught by showing the solutions, which means only about 20-40% of people would have learned it. For enquiry based learning the learner would experiment with solving it themselves, which should ensure their memory of the learning experience would be much stronger.

Next he talked more about Webquests and explained how students enjoy this sort of activity, though it is very much one that cannot be run in a single session; rather it is one that takes place over a period of time. They sound a very attractive approach, but I can see some significant practical difficulties with the way teaching sessions at UoL I’m involved in applying them. I think as he talked about how they could be used over a course stretching over a term, this rather illustrated just how little Chris understood about the environment and opportunists that librarians have to teach in. To have the luxury of more than a single hour on a module is rare and hard won treat, and much as I would welcome the opportunity myself to make use of this kind of training strategy, none of my current departments are set up to embrace it. There is clearly a long way to go for academics themselves in understanding the importance of information literacy and the vital importance of ensuring sessions from librarians are not seen simply as box ticking skills sessions.

Indeed the audience politely made the point that Chris’ POV of the traditional librarian was somewhat blinkered, and didn’t encompass the wealth of what modern librarians teach. Personally I think the truth lies somewhere between the two points of view.

Chris followed the session up with a somewhat bewildering workshop exercise matching training styles to statements. Frankly since he’d pitched the whole session at the wrong level for the audience the room was filled with baffled faces, I think if he’d cut his lecture down to about half the length, and tried not to go for information overload (as I’d warned against earlier in the day) and given us a good half an hour on the exercise, that the participants wouldn’t have been able to work through it using their own learning and problem solving styles. As it was in the time allotted there was little our group could establish in coherent form, or take from the work. This was a pity as correctly pitched Chris had a lot to say that was of interest.

So whilst this might have been a slightly odd counterpoint to my advocacy and communication session, it did give me plenty to mull over and consider on the long drive back home. If you get the chance to attend one of the future SUILCoP sessions, I can highly recommend them as they are pitched at a higher level than most EMALink sessions I’ve attended.