Promoting open access (OA) scientific publication practices to health sciences librarians

The Network of Collaboration Between Europe & Latin American-Caribbean (NECOBELAC)  countries  is a project that aims to promote open access publishing in Europe and Latin America. The project is sponsored by six institutions; Istituto Superiore di Sanità in Italy, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas (CSIC) in Spain, University of Nottingham in the UK, Biblioteca Virtual em Saúde (bvs) in Brasil, Universidad Nacional De Colombia  in Colombia, and Universidade do Minho in Portugal. In the past, these partners have developed a collaboration scheme and spurred enthusiasm and interest about the open access publishing options in the scientific community of both continents.

Due to the variety of the scientific writing practices in Europe and Latin America, the NECOBELAC project works in the two geographical areas and spreads the word about the publishing options enabled by the information and communication technologies (ICTs) in relation to open access. The project has established two different types of training activities; the first (T1) is a training course where the participants are expected to become trainers in their affiliated institutions and educate others on the available open access publication practices. The second (T2) includes workshops or meetings that aim to replicate activities and develop wide open access advocacy strategies. The success of the NECOBELAC project stems from the interrelation of the activities that take place in the two continents, and the bidirectional approach that is followed to spread best practices and strategies both in relation to the teaching styles and the implementation of advocacy plans for open access.

Japan and UK in agreement

In January, I wrote a post about my visit to the Digital Repository Federation in Japan. We wanted to formally mark the visit as the beginning of an ongoing relationship for our mutual benefit. So we agreed to sign a Memorandum of Understanding – we also invited UKCoRR (United Kingdom Council of Research Repositories) to be a partner.

The Memorandum includes a commitment to

• sharing experience and expertise
• inviting and possibly sponsoring representatives from partners to participate in RSP and DRF events
• joint efforts to seek funding and/or support

It is intended that forms the basis for future cooperation. The RSP and the DRF have submitted a joint poster proposal to Open Repositories 2012 about the visit and the memorandum.

Digging in and embedding your repository

Photograph by Einar Erici and made available by the Swedish National Heritage Board. Sourced from the Commons on Flickr. http://www.flickr.com/photos/swedish_heritage_board/5621896086/

How embedded and integrated is your repository? 

The JISC Repositories: take-up and embedding projects (JISCrte) are now complete and a free end of project event focusing on embedding and integration will take place at the Nottingham Conference Centre on the 10th February 2012.

The aim of the #jiscrte project was:

“..to improve the institutional services that rely on the repository by enabling take-up of the lessons and benefits from the most successful repository applications, tools and good practice.”

 The six projects involved currently use different repository software platforms and     each project team explored different tools and repository applications.

 Project teams explored and worked on a variety of tools and applications, for example, enriching a medical image repository, improving a digital repository interface and making improvements and enhancements to the Hydra code, scoping and launching a brand new repository, using the KULTUR extension to feature non-text research outputs, ‘Kulturising’ a DSpace repository, updating advocacy guidance, and embedding institutional research repositories into the culture of arts researchers by enhancing the MePrints profile tool.

We have a packed and exciting programme for the day, all project managers will be presenting their project outputs, William Nixon, Digital Library Development Manager, University of Glasgow will be presenting on the embedding and integrating theme, and we will be calculating your ‘E’ factor – what is your embedding score?

Online booking, further details on #jiscrte and the embedding guide,  and the full programme is available here.

RSP and International Open Access Week

Open Access Week will be celebrated this year from October 24th through the 30th.  Open Access Week is an important global event and this year the Repositories Support Project (RSP) have facilitated and sponsored visits between UK repository staff.

Ten members of the UK repository community submitted proposals around open access themes and issues and these visits took place during October. After each visit successful applicants wrote a reflective guest  RSP blog posting, covering what they learnt during the visit, its value to themselves and possibly the wider repository community, and how the visit may change their repository working practices.

During OA Week we will be publishing these guest blogs daily, covering five major themes. The themes are:

1. Archiving and presenting arts research outputs
2. Repositories and REF preparation
3. CRIS and Equella
4. Mandates and Policies
5. Repository best practice and management

Later in the year the RSP will be publishing video interviews with all those who took part in these visits.

A huge thanks to all those institutions who hosted these visits, and these include, University of Glasgow, Royal Holloway, University of London, University College Falmouth, University of Bath, University of Edinburgh, London School of Economics, and the University of Leeds.

So don’t forget to follow these blog postings next week and see how the 10 successful applicants got on and how they felt their visit went.

Useful links and resources

• JISC and Open Access
  
• Peter Suber’s introduction to Open Access
• Online Seminar – new directions in scholarly communication
• Open Access Week international events and Open Access Directory events listing
• INASP and Open Access
• The Right to Research Coalition OA Week activities
• Twitter hashtag #oaweek

A repository song

This was my first attendance at the Repository Fringe (#rfringe11) and as mentioned previously, I was there with the JISCrte portfolio of 6 projects, which featured in the programme on day 2 and delivered presentations on the progress and activities of their repositories take-up and embedding projects.

One of the JISCrte project partners, Robin Burgess from the Glasgow School of Art, delivered his presentation via the medium of…SONG. A link to Robin’s performance will shortly be available and I will make a link to it from this posting once it has been released! UPDATE 30/08/2011 – ‘Repository song’ is now available from here.

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Image courtesy of eurovision_nicola's photostream [http://www.flickr.com/photos/eurovision_nicola/6010558301/

I thought this event was excellent and some of the innovative and interesting projects and initiatives really do require further exploration. Personally I found the following really interesting, and it was a new initiative to me:

FigShare – a permanent research data storage and sharing platform founded by Mark Hahnel. For use by researchers worldwide, FigShare aims to improve science and avoid duplication by encouraging all data to be shared, including negative results.

The stated ethos of FigShare is:

“Unless we as scientists publish all of our data, we will never achieve access to the sum of all scientific knowledge.”

All the event videos and presentations will shortly be made available by the event organisers, and I think they will be linked to from here.

RSP event: repositories and CRIS – working smartly together

Conference Theme - the interaction of repositories and CRIS (Current Research Information Systems) and the dissemination of the findings of the JISC-funded RePOSIT project.

On Tuesday I attended the RSP conference and software exhibition ‘Repositories and CRIS – working smartly together’ which was held at the East Midlands Conference Centre, located on the University of Nottingham Campus. This event was well attended (more than 70 delegates) which is an indication of how important this topic is to our community.

 The keynote presenter was Simon Kerridge from the Association of Research Managers and Administrators (ARMA) and his presentation provided an interesting insight into the role of research managers and administrators, and more importantly the internal and external drivers for research managers and administrators and what they want and require from a CRIS.

In his presentation Dr Mark Cox talked about the development of CRIS systems and open access repositories, the integration of the CRISes and open access repositories, euroCRIS, the benefits of using CERIF, and the REF.

Valerie McCutcheon from the University of Glasgow provided an overview of how repository and research system staff work collaboratively with great success.

 

 

The RePosit project facilitated interactive break-out discussion sessions covering the following topics:

• Motivating and engaing academic staff
• CRIS and repository advocacy
• Branding
• Legacy data and repository issues
• Community and communications to support the CRIS model

The project team then shared some of their findings with a series of valuable presentations.

The event programme and all of the presentations for the event are all available here.

Umbrella 2011

University of Hertfordshire by phatcontroller

I will be presenting at Umbrella 2011 on “Research Repositories: the role of library staff in their management”. I’ll be referring to a survey which the RSP carried out last year on the role and skills of staff in UK repositories. I’ll also describe the role of the RSP, including its training events, and refer to UKCoRR. It will include some future gazing as to the role librarians might play to meet the ever growing demands of research data management.

Hope to see some of you there.

A new sense of confidence in the repository community

On Wednesday we held a workshop on Communication Skills for Effective Advocacy. We were very lucky to have Deborah Dalley, a freelance consultant who has been working in the field of training and development for the last 20 years, lead the activities for the day. Her background includes the food industry, the Criminal Justice System and Higher Education, for the last ten years she has been a freelance consultant working primarily in the public sector.

During the day we focused on how we can mobilize the sources of power we have to influence people. We also looked at the difference between influence and manipulation, we agreed we all wanted to stay on the side of influence as manipulation, whilst effective in the short term, rarely works in the long term.

We looked at different sources of power in relation to influence: power that comes from the position you hold; power that comes from outlining risks of not acting; power that comes from being expert in a particular area, power that comes from our connections to someone who can exert influence on our target audience (ie you need information from X for a report you are writing for the CEO who holds the power), power that comes from association (this is the type of power products mobilise when they get celebrity endorsements), power derived from tangible reward as a result of action, power that comes from personal relationships with our target audience and finally power that comes from having information and in particular having the right information and using is appropriately, not hoarding it to gain power. It was really valuable to articulate this, which most of us are aware of but tend not to consciously examine when setting out to influence others.

We found that we all use different sources of power in different situations, but that in most cases we use the source of power that would most influence us in a given situation.  It was really helpful to be reminded that when trying to influence someone’s behaviour –get them to deposit their materials in the IR – it’s important to focus on them and what will motivate them.

All the sessions throughout the day were extremely useful, but one that was especially so was our session on objection handling. I was struck by the fact that we instinctively react when faced with conflict, with either fight or flight, and that it takes most people 10 seconds to start to react rationally in these situations.  This really resonated for me, having worked in customer service in the past I have managed my fair share of conflict.  Having key phrases or strategies on hand to help you get through the first 10 seconds can be really helpful to be able to handle objections positively and not react defensively. Again I found that articulating this process was really useful, this is something I am aware of but rarely consciously consider. As a result of this session I feel more strongly armed to diffuse potential conflict and influence.

Later in the day our panel of experts, Bill Hubbard, Jackie Wickham and Miggie Pickton handled common objections that repository mangers hear on a daily basis.  In addition to a bank of tried and tested responses to common objections, what we all took away from this session was a sense that in the year since we first ran this event, we have made huge progress. We have a real sense of confidence in our position as a community and there is a real sense that the changes we have been working to implement are inevitable. One attendee said:

“I left with a new sense of confidence in our advocacy strategies and some specific actions to improve our pitch”

You will see from the pictures included that our venue was really bright and colourful, the pictures were too nice not to share with you! We were really impressed with the surroundings despite the fact that it poured with rain for most of the day – classic Manchester weather I’m led to believe.

DSpace workshop, Friday 20 May, Edinburgh

RSP ran an introductory training workshop in Edinburgh on Friday, bringing together a small group of repository practitioners with a range of experience from those wishing merely to fill in gaps in their knowledge to complete beginners.   Although DSpace users are still in a minority in the UK as compared with Eprints, I was surprised to hear that the majority of delegates had not accessed any DSpace training until the RSP workshop.  Our training took place in Edinburgh University Library and, when we weren’t concentrating on our screens,  we enjoyed lovely views over the meadows through the full height widows of the training room.

Our trainers, Rob Ingram and Ianthe Hind, provided us with a thorough introduction to working with DSpace and a good grounding in the basics. In addition to this there was plenty of time throughout the day to have group discussions where delegates shared their experiences and addressed particular issues with answers coming not only from the trainers but also the group.  This provided a really excellent balance for the different needs of the delegates. Towards the end of the day we enjoyed an interesting discussion on the use of statistics in DSpace with general agreement from the room that unique downloads are one of the best measures of success for a repository and also that community by community statistical comparisons can be a useful tool to generate healthy competition between depositing departments and more interest in the repository as a whole. Ianthe also pointed us to Graham Trigg’s talk at OR10 on enhancing statistics  which gives a really good overview of the options available.

One issue that came up for most institutions was the need to integrate with their CRIS. As we get closer to the REF this is an issue that is likely to come up for most repository managers and administrators.  There is work underway exploring best practice methodologies and approaches for this issue for example the JISC funded RePOSIT project, and readers may be interested in attending the upcoming RSP event ‘Repositories and CRIS: working smartly together’   in July this year.

SHERPA/RoMEO for Repository Administrators- A Day in the Sun

Image authors own : Water Feature in Aston Business School Conference Centre

It has been a busy week for RSP with the ‘SHERPA/RoMEO for Repository Administrators’ event on Thursday (24.03.11) and  ‘Supporting and Influencing the deposit of E-Theses in Higher Education’ on Monday (28.0311). It’s set to continue to be busy too as we are holding ‘RoMEO and CRIS in practice‘ on Friday (01.04.11)!

I’ll start with a quick run through of ‘SHERPA/RoMEO for Repository Administrators’, and post later about our Etheses event. We  had a beautiful day for the event with the sun shining on us in the lovely rock garden courtyard at Aston Business School Conference Centre as you can see from my picture of their water feature.  The day started off with Jane Smith from the SHERPA Services team giving us a run through of some of the newer features of RoMEO before a question and answer session with herself and the rest of the team. We broke for coffee and returned for an entertaining presentation from Andy Gray from SOAS, but formerly of University of the Arts London, on his experiences of working in Arts repositories and the particular copyright this field can throw up. And true to his Artistic background he gave a really colourful and beautifully illustrated presentation, You can download all the presentations from the day here.

Next up was Charles Oppenheim, one of the UK’s foremost experts on Copyright. Charles regaled us with interesting anecdotes and answered a host of questions from the audience.

Following a delicious lunch, and networking in the sun lit courtyard we returned for the afternoon programme which kicked off with another case study, this time from Valerie Spezi of Leicester research Archive focusing on their workflow and how they use RoMEO as part of their copyright checking. Valerie also gave the team a lot of useful ideas from her wish list of RoMEO services.  We were next to hear from Rachel Proudfoot of the White Rose Consortium, however due to the UCU strike action that day Rachel was unable to join us. We were really quite lucky that this was the only disruption the strike action had on our event, other’s were less lucky. Jane Smith stepped into the breach and led the session as Rachel had planned it. We split into groups and discussed the four scenarios provided and shared experiences about contacting publishers.

We broke again for even more coffee and biscuits before returning to hear about the future of RoMEO from Peter Millington and Azhar Hussain.  Peter described future features and Azhar introduced the delegates to the work he has been doing planning for the sustainability of RoMEO in a future where public funding is increasingly scarce. It was clear from the lively question and answer session at the end of the day that the delegates were understanding of the challenges faced by the team and were very happy to engage on ways forward. What was very clear was the RoMEO is vital to the activities of repository staff on a day to day basis and that they are very invested in its continuing future.

You can read the SHERPA Services team’s blog on the day here.