Promoting open access (OA) scientific publication practices to health sciences librarians, researchers and practitioners

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.

Workshop report part two : meeting the disciplinary challenges in research data management planning

As mentioned in my previous post I attended the JISC Managing Research Data (#jiscmrd) workshop on ‘meeting the disciplinary challenges in research data management planning’ last week. It was a well attended event with a packed and interesting programme, covering a range of research data management planning issues for different subject disciplines.

All the presentations are now available and are well worth exploring. In my previous post I covered DATUM in Action, DMSPpsych, and REWARD, and now I will provide a brief outline of two of the remaining projects.

MaRDI-Gross – research data guidance for ‘big science’. Presented by Norman Gray, he explained that this project aims to provide guidance for the strategic and engineering developments of data management and preservation plans for ‘big science data’. The context was described as:

Big money, big author lists, big data, big admin, and big careers

Norman outlined the challenges of data management planning and preservation for ‘big science’ multi-institutional collaborations and talked about how important ‘tone’ is and don’t necessarily think that ‘data sharing’ is a given, not everyone wants to share their data.

The project team have made the first version of their document on ‘DMP Planning for Large Projects ‘available for public comments, comment to be made by 13th April. The plan is available from here.

In his presentation on History DMP, Chris Awre, University of Hull, described how this project was stimulated by a specific academic need. Matt, a post-doctoral researcher in the Department of History had wanted to store his data in Hull’s digital repository, Hydra in Hull. Matt explained that he had two major problems: 1) he wanted the data to be made available to the public and b) he wanted his data to be located in a secure environment. The DMP remedied both of these problems and he said that he found the whole process straightforward.

Issues discussed included using the DCC checklist as a starting point and refining and re-phrasing it for a history focus, a DMP must meet the needs of the department and infrastructure, how linked data could contribute to data management, and ways of providing better support locally.

All the presentations from the event are available here.

Workshop report part one: meeting the disciplinary challenges in research data management planning

I was fortunate to attend the JISC Managing Research Data (#jiscmrd) workshop on ‘meeting the disciplinary challenges in research data management planning’, which was held in Paddington, London last friday. It was a well attended event with a packed and interesting programme, covering a range of research data management planning issues for different subject disciplines.

Image of Paddington Basin courtesy of Dave Patten's Flickr photostream http://www.flickr.com/photos/davepatten/

The morning session consisted of 8 presentations from the JISCMRD Research Data Management Planning projects showcasing project progress and a wide range of  innovative ideas and tools. The main focus of the afternoon sessions was the DCC’s data management tool DMP online and included a demo of Version 3 of the tool which is likely to be launched in April 2012.

I think the presentations will be made available online shortly (will link to them once they are available). They are now available from here. Below are some of the highlights that I took away from the event which gave me lots to think about. As so much was covered during this event I thought it would be easier to publish two blog postings on this event, the second one will be published tomorrow….[Friday 30th]

DATUM in Action this project led by the University of Northumbria supported health research staff on an EU project to plan and implement RDM. Their interim outputs included a data requirements questionnaire, a DMP template, RDM roles and responsibilities, a fileplan for the research project’s shared drive, folder and file name guidance, and information security guidance. They hope that the guidance they have produced could be used by other HEIs.

DMSPpsych this project led by the University of Sheffield aimed to provide practical advice and guidance on data management planning and storage for psychology.  Richard Plant delivered an excellent presentation and explained how their guidance and their one-stop-shop RDM website attempts to answer some of those frequently asked questions from researchers, for example:

Why bother with rdm? How can you help me? What is ‘metadata’? ?Why/how do I back-up my data?

The project team also made good use of the DCC’s DMP Online tool to construct the Wellcome fellowship RDMP and also set up a Sharepoint repository for DClinPsy trainees. Further information on project outputs and activities can be found on their blog.

REWARD (Researchers using Established Workflows to Archive Research Data) this collaborative project was led by the  UCL Institute of Archaeology, UCL Library Services and Ubiquity Press and it examined ways to use familiar workflows to encourage the archiving of research data using the UCL Discovery institutional repository.

The researchers were introduced to the Digital Curation Centre’s DMP Online tool, and then asked to make their data openly available in the institutional repository via publishing a data paper in the Journal of Open Archaeological Data (JOAD).

Some interesting observations from this project  included the possibility of a ‘digital divide’ where it was easier to engage with early career researchers, many of whom were more open to sharing and the difficulties in discussing the ‘broader’ relevance of their research. On a positive note many researchers were willing to share and citation is an added incentive. It was also suggested by the Brian (the REWARD project manager) that a DMP Online tool for PhD students would be beneficial.

To be continued….

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.

Green mandates and gold choices

My doctoral degree arrived by mail this past week in my office at the Centre for Research Communications, where I have been working for two months now as an Open Access Adviser for the Repositories Support Project (RSP).  Thinking back of the whole PhD process I believe that one word describes every part of it well, the adverb “amazingly”! When you are a PhD student, first, you are amazingly poor; second, amazingly enough, you can survive without sleeping; and, third, conducting research and writing a dissertation about open access is amazingly interesting.

I started my PhD in September 2007 at the Graduate School of Library & Information Science, Simmons College, Boston, Massachusetts, a prestigious library school with a long history. My plan was to study the open-access movement with Associate Professor Robin Peek, an open-access advocate and one of the first signatories of the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI).

The title of my dissertation is, “The Influence of the National Institutes of Health Public-Access Policy on the Publishing Habits of Principal Investigators“. The mandatory National Institutes of Health (NIH) public-access policy requires that the NIH-funded principal investigators (PIs) submit to PubMed Central (PMC) immediately upon publication the peer-reviewed copy of their article, which will then become available for public access through PMC no later than after a twelve-month embargo period. The policy has been effective since April 7th, 2008 (Division G, Title II, Section 218 of PL 110-161 Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2008).

The purpose of this dissertation was to investigate the effect of the NIH public-access policy on the NIH-funded principal investigators’ publishing decisions.

How embedded and integrated is your repository?

Last Friday the Repositories Support Project (RSP) held the free event “How embedded and integrated is your repository” at the Nottingham Conference Centre. This was an end-of-project event that aimed to showcase and share with the repository community the results of six JISC-funded tasks that participated in the “JISC Repositories: take-up and embedding” (JISCrte) project.

Since I joined the RSP team this January, this event was both the first RSP event I attended and also the first where I had some small organizing responsibilities and I have to admit I really enjoyed every aspect of it!

To begin with, I was not aware of all the six projects and their details; EXPLORER (De Montfort University), Hydra (University of Hull), RADAR (Glasgow School of Art), MIRAGE (Middlesex University), NECTAR (University of Northampton) and eNova (led by the Visual Arts Data Service, the University of the Creative Arts, and the University of the Arts London) and I was impressed by how much these groups have achieved in such a short period of time, less than a year.

Throughout the whole day I felt that the repositories’ technical difficulties were a prominent topic for discussion. The speakers described how they were able to manage these obstacles and exchanged ideas and tips with the attendees. It is astonishing how little funding, technical and staff support some repositories’ managers have available, but how much they are able to carry out with the little sources they have- kudos to all of them!

There were also two guest presenters in the event, who are not related to the JISCrte projects, but their work is relevant to the general idea of embedding repositories. The first was the RSP Coordinator Jackie Wickham, who presented on the embedding repositories guide and assessment tool and William Nixon from the University of Glasgow, who discussed issues on embedding exemplar.

Despite of the previously snowy night and the cold weather, the event was well-attended. The day concluded with a group activity monitored by the RSP Open Access Adviser Laurian Williamson [email: laurian.williamson@nottingham.ac.uk], who was the coordinator of the six JISCrte projects and the event planner. In this breakout session the delegates reflected on some of the issues that were covered that day and they found useful. The topics that emerged were: the variety of ways advocating and marketing for the institutional repository; the difficulties met with the technical skills and reaching the PVC agenda; and, the importance of MePrints and the practice of embedding repositories.

All presentations can be found here.

A visit to the Digital Repository Federation in Japan

 

Sapporo from Mount Moiwa

Last week, I was at the University of Hokkaido, in Sapporo, Northern Japan at the invitation of the Digital Repository Federation. The DRF is a federation of universities and research institutions which have established institutional repositories. I met with them to share information about the work of the RSP and the DRF. It was a fantastic opportunity to forge links with colleagues working in digital repositories in Japan and my hosts made me very welcome. My thanks to the DRF and the University of Hokkaido for their hospitality and friendliness.

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.

Free Workshops: How to make your Repository OpenAIRE compliant

Interested in learning more about making your repository compliant with the OpenAIRE infrastructure to support and monitor the implementation of the FP7 Open Access pilot?

Want to help your faculty members comply with the Open Access requirements of the European Commission (EC)?

Want to add EC project data to your repository records and use OpenAIRE value-added functionality (post authoring tools, monitoring tools through analysis of document and usage statistics)?

Register for a free online workshop on Monday, January 23, or Tuesday, January 24: How to make your repository OpenAIRE compliant.
Event dates and duration: Monday, January 23
10:00 – 11:00 CET (proprietary platforms);
11:30 – 12:30 CET (DSpace repository platform);
14:00 – 15:00 CET (EPrints repository platform);

or Tuesday, January 24
11:30 – 12:30 CET (EPrints repository platform);
14:00 – 15:00 CET (proprietary platforms);
15:30 – 16:30 CET (DSpace repository platform);
(please choose the date most convenient for you)

A draft agenda and more information can be found here.

Registration is free, but required. RSVP by Friday, January 20, to iryna.kuchma@eifl.net  stating your name, email address, job title, repository name and URL, repository platform and country.

And/or Book an individual consultation with the OpenAIRE team members on Wednesday, January 25, Thursday, January 26, or Friday, January 27. Contact person: Pedro Príncipe, Open Access Projects, University of Minho, pedroprincipe@sdum.uminho.pt.

More information about January as OpenAIRE compliance month is here: http://www.openaire.eu/en/news-a-events/news/330-january-is-openaire-compliance-month

New RSP Team member

This month, Nancy Pontika (on the right) joined the team. Nancy has a thorough background in Open Access information, having worked as an Assistant Editor and Project Manager with the Open Access Directory. Nancy has taught on courses for information professionals, as well as providing workshops and one-to-one consultancy services. Nancy recently gained a PhD in Information Science with a specialism in Open Access and the effects of public access policies, from Simmons College, Boston MA.

The rest of the team from left to right are: Laurian Williamson, Open Access Adviser with responsibility for the JISC Repositories Take Up and Embedding Projects; Jackie Wickham, RSP Project Coordinator and Bill Hubbard, RSP Project Director.

RSP support is available for all HEIs in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Consultancy visits are available to institutions with long-standing repositories as well as to those institutions in the start-up phase through our programme of repository health-checks. Please contact support@rsp.ac.uk or 0845 257 6860 for more information.