Archives des mots-clés : United Kingdom

Creating a Community of Data Champions

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Authors : Rosie Higman, Marta Teperek, Danny Kingsley

Research Data Management (RDM) presents an unusual challenge for service providers in Higher Education. There is increased awareness of the need for training in this area but the nature of the discipline-specific practices involved make it difficult to provide training across a multi-disciplinary organisation.

Whilst most UK universities now have a research data team of some description, they are often small and rarely have the resources necessary to provide targeted training to the different disciplines and research career stages that they are increasingly expected to support.

This practice paper describes the approach taken at the University of Cambridge to address this problem by creating a community of Data Champions. This collaborative initiative, working with researchers to provide training and advocacy for good RDM practice, allows for more discipline-specific training to be given, researchers to be credited for their expertise and creates an opportunity for those interested in RDM to exchange knowledge with others.

The ‘community of practice’ model has been used in many sectors, including Higher Education, to facilitate collaboration across organisational units and this initiative will adopt some of the same principles to improve communication across a decentralised institution.

The Data Champions initiative at Cambridge was launched in September 2016 and this paper reports on the early months, plans for building the community in the future and the possible risks associated with this approach to providing RDM services.

URL : Creating a Community of Data Champions

DOI : https://doi.org/10.2218/ijdc.v12i2.562

Open Access in the United Kingdom

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Author : Martin Paul Eve

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland has been a leader in the advance towards open access (OA) to scholarship and research. Indeed, a combination of centralized, state research-funding bodies, coupled with a nationwide openness and transparency agenda has created an economic and political climate in which discourses of open science and scholarship can flourish.

Although different parts of UK policy on open access have not been universally well received by those in the academy and those in publishing, there have also been two official parliamentary hearings into open access; a set of reviews and recommendations, headed by Professor Adam Tickell; and a variety of implementation strategies from different private and public funders and institutions.

In this chapter, I briefly cover the political and economic elements of open access as they have emerged in the UK, spanning: funders, politics, institutions, publishers, and academics. Please note that this chapter will be available openly one year after publication.

URL : http://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/16684/

Monitoring the transition to open access: December 2017

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The studies on which this report is based were undertaken by a team led by Michael Jubb and comprising Andrew Plume, Stephanie Oeben and Lydia Brammer, Elsevier; Rob Johnson and Cihan Bütün, Research Consulting; Stephen Pinfield, University of Sheffield.

Following the Finch Report in 2012, Universities UK established an Open Access Coordination Group to support the transition to open access (OA)  for articles in scholarly journals. The Group  commissioned an initial report published in 2015 to gather evidence on key features of that transition.

This second report aims to build on those findings, and to examine trends  over the period since the major funders of research in the UK established new policies to promote OA.

URL : Monitoring the transition to open access: December 2017

Striving Toward Openness: But What Do We Really Mean?

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Author : Vivien Rolfe

The global open education movement is striving toward openness as a feature of academic policy and practice, but evidence shows that these ambitions are far from mainstream, and levels of awareness in institutions is often disappointingly low.

Those advocating for open education are seeking to widen engagement, but how targeted and persuasive are their messages? The aim of this research is to explore the voices often unheard, those of the teachers and professional service staff with whom we are engaging.

This research presents a series of interviews with those involved in open education at De Montfort University in the UK, with the aim of gaining a better perspective of what openness means to them. T

he interviews were analysed through an interpretive lens allowing each individual to create their own story and reflect their own personal view of openness. The results of this study are that in this university, openness is represented by five elements – staff pedagogy and practice, benefits to learners, accessibility and access to content, institutional structures, and values and culture.

This work shows the importance of adopting critical approaches to gain a deeper understanding of the philosophical and pedagogic stances within institutions. By giving a voice to all those involved we will be able to develop appropriate and more persuasive arguments to widen our sphere of influence as a community of open educators.

URL : Striving Toward Openness: But What Do We Really Mean?

Alternative loation : http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/3207

The role of the library in scholarly publishing: The University of Manchester experience

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Author : Simon Bains

The emergence of networked digital methods of scholarly dissemination has transformed the role of the academic library in the context of the research life cycle. It now plays an important role in the dissemination of research outputs (e.g. through repository management and gold open access publication processing) as well as more traditional acquisition and collection management.

The University of Manchester Library and Manchester University Press have developed a strategic relationship to consider how they can work in partnership to support new approaches to scholarly publishing. They have delivered two projects to understand researcher and student needs and to develop tools and services to meet these needs.

This work has found that the creation of new journal titles is costly and provides significant resourcing challenges and that support for student journals in particular is mixed amongst senior academic administrators.

Research has suggested that there is more value to the University in the provision of training in scholarly publishing than in the creation of new in-house journal titles. Where such titles are created, careful consideration of sustainable business models is vital.

URL : The role of the library in scholarly publishing: The University of Manchester experience

DOI : http://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.380

 

New models for open digital collections?

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Authors: Paola Marchionni, Peter Findlay

This article discusses the potential for new community-based funding models to support digitization and open access (OA) publishing of digital collections. Digital collections of archival material such as texts, images and moving images are an important complement to journals and books in the ecosystem of scholarly resources that researchers, teachers and learners use.

However, institutions find them expensive to acquire from publishers or to digitize themselves. In the US, Reveal Digital (RD) has set up a ‘library crowdfunding’ programme based on a cost-recovery OA model.

The article describes how Jisc has collaborated with RD to introduce the model to UK institutions through their ‘Independent Voices’ collection of 20th-century alternative press materials and, in doing so, explores the potential and challenges for developing a similar approach in the UK.

URL : New models for open digital collections?

DOI : http://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.375

 

The Surge in New University Presses and Academic- Led Publishing: An Overview of a Changing Publishing Ecology in the UK

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Authors : Janneke Adema, Graham Stone

This article outlines the rise and development of New University Presses and Academic-Led Presses in the UK or publishing for the UK market. Based on the Jisc research project, Changing publishing ecologies: a landscape study of new university presses and academic-led publishing, commonalities between these two types of presses are identified to better assess their future needs and requirements.

Based on this analysis, the article argues for the development of a publishing toolkit, for further research into the creation of a typology of presses and publishing initiatives, and for support with community building to help these initiatives grow and develop further, whilst promoting a more diverse publishing ecology.

URL : The Surge in New University Presses and Academic- Led Publishing: An Overview of a Changing Publishing Ecology in the UK

DOI : http://doi.org/10.18352/lq.10210