Oxford Scholarly Communications Debate

An invitation from Bodley's Librarian to Oxford D.Phil. authors

2012-01-12T10:43:00.002Z

Response to the Bodleian Libraries’ call for DPhil theses to be digitized has been extremely good (and if you have already proposed your thesis for digitization, there is no need to contact us again). We are pleased to let you know that there is still an opportunity to take up this offer and add your digitized thesis to the Bodleian’s digital collections at no charge.

Theses in digital format are rapidly becoming ubiquitous, as scholars want to make their research widely available and easily find the work of others. Thanks to the generosity and vision of Dr Leonard Polonsky, the Bodleian Libraries are able to offer to digitize a number of Oxford D.Phil. theses. This opportunity enables us to add to the growing Oxford digital thesis collection, and should result in new citations to your work. Digital copies will be made available online in ORA (Oxford University Research Archive).

ORA is the university's principal online collection of research outputs produced by Oxford scholars. It offers high visibility for Oxford research. Wherever possible, the full text of research is made freely available for easy online access. You can find out more about Oxford digital theses on the ORA Help & Information website.

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If you would like us to digitize your DPhil thesis and make it available in ORA, please send details to

thesis-digitisation@bodleian.ox.ac.uk
as soon as possible, having provided the information below:

* Your name (as it appears on your thesis):

* The title of your thesis:

* The year of your thesis:

* If possible, the Bodleian shelfmark of your thesis on SOLO [eg MS.D.Phil. d.2804] (You may be able to find this on SOLO):

* An email (or postal) address where we can contact you:

You will be informed if your thesis is included in this digitisation and the URL will be sent to this address.

Also, please indicate your responses to the following questions:

* Do you grant the Bodleian Libraries permission to digitize the print copy of your thesis and make the digital copy available online in ORA? YES/NO

* I agree to be bound by the terms of the ORA Grant of Non-exclusive Licence and I warrant that to the best of my knowledge, making my thesis available on the internet will not infringe copyright or any other rights of any other person or party, nor contain defamatory material. I AGREE / I DISAGREE 

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If you already have a digital copy of your thesis which you would like to deposit in ORA, please contact ORA@bodleian.ox.ac.uk.

I very much hope you will take advantage of this exciting opportunity.

 Please send details for the digitization of your thesis to

thesis-digitisation@bodleian.ox.ac.uk

Non-publication of negative results: Today on 'Today'

2012-01-04T12:43:00.002Z

This morning the 'Today' programme on Radio 4 featured a problem that is highlighted in the current issue of the BMJ. In its editorial, 'Missing clinical trial data' the BMJ goes as far as to use a subtitle 'A threat to the integrity of evidence based medicine.' This is not a new problem and I am no medical scientist, but the main points seem to be:

selected results of clinical trials are published. Inconclusive, un-interpretable, negative or (in the words of Prof Colin Blakemore on the Today programme) 'boring' results are not favoured by traditional journals and therefore remain unpublished
results of trials can be scattered around various locations and difficult (even impossible) to locate
although the Government and Research Councils are doing sterling work to ensure that the publications and data of publicly funded research are made freely available (see previous blog 'Government research strategy for innovation and growth'), this is not necessarily the case for research funded by private organizations nor for all publicly funded research (possibly because of 1).

This can result in:

an incomplete picture of the results of trials
erroneous conclusions about the efficacy of treatments - both positive and negative
possible harm to patients

The BMJ states that 'what is clear from the linked studies is that past failures to ensure proper regulation and registration of clinical trials, and a current culture of haphazard publication and incomplete data disclosure, make the proper analysis of the harms and benefits of common interventions almost impossible for systematic reviewers.'

The logical conclusion would appear to be that results of trials need to be:

easily available
in a timely fashion
and complete (ie include all information provided that allows for the most accurate conclusions to be drawn)

Prof Blakemore agreed with Evan Davies on the Today programme, that making information freely available online is easy and 'everything should be out there' so that scientists can scrutinze, use and datamine the data produced by their fellow researchers. The editor-in-chief of the BMJ, Fiona Godlee, agreed: 'technology can improve the access to data.'

This is where services such as ORA (Oxford University Research Archive) provided by the Bodleian Libraries can step in. An online archive like ORA provides a means for researchers to disseminate research outputs where the papers (or reports or other documents whether published or not) can be safely stored for the long-term (including after an academic has left the university), easily discovered and read by other researchers. Such services do not offer peer review, however the current problem seems mainly in disseminating this information so that other researchers can have an opportunity to evaluate the findings. In doing this, other researchers check, review and comment on these 'boring' results, which will then add to the body of knowledge and could lead to a different direction in treatments and other outcomes.

Such archives are not going to solve all the problems, and as An-Wen Chan describes in the article 'Out of sight but not out of mind: how to search for unpublished clinical trial evidence' (BMJ 2012;344:d8013), there are plenty of existing places that researchers can track down evidence information. Most HEIs now provide some form of managed online repository for research outputs that can contribute to rectifying this unacceptable situation. In addition, here at the Bodleian Libraries in Oxford, we're working on creating a data repository and Oxford data catalogue to do much the same thing for research data.

Fortunately the articles published in the BMJ about this matter are open access, so anyone who is interested can easily get hold of them and read about this topic for themselves. The editorial and item by An-Wen Chan aren't.

SallyR

Government report on Innovation & Research Strategy for Growth

2012-01-03T17:07:00.000Z

In Dec 2011 the UK Government published its paper 'Innovation and Research Strategy for Growth.' This paper is of great interest to anyone working within the area of research dissemination be they author or other actor in the dissemination process, because the government states its view of the economic benefits to the country of open access to research publications and data.

In the section 'Expanded Access to Research Publications and Data' (paragraphs 6.6 - 6.10) the Government states that it is 'committed to ensuring that publicly-funded research should be accessible free of charge.' Harvard University is cited as an example of a university where academics often make their research publications freely available via the University's DASH service. The report is more than a statement of the status quo: it sets out concrete actions, some of which are already underway. An independent working group has been set up under Janet Finch to consider how access to research publications can be improved. Other actions include those for investigating how research data might be made more accessible, and for making government data more accessible. The government has also asked the Research Councils to ensure that researchers comply with Council policies on access to publications. It's great to see positive actions such as these actually getting off the ground. Let's wait to see if these concrete actions deliver concrete results.

The main tenet of this report is one of economic advantage to UK PLC by supporting innovation, leading to economic growth, and it acknowledges that change will not happen quickly. It is hardly surprising that the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills would do anything other than focus on the economic benefits of open access, particularly in the current challenging economic times. However, one should not be completely swept up by the economic argument: there is one section that reads 'free and open access to taxpayer-funded research offers significant social ... benefits by spreading knowledge.' This not only points out that the hard-pressed taxpayer has a right to access what he/she has ultimately paid for, but also raises the prospect of enabling easy access to knowledge which offers other significant benefits to society.

SallyR

Open Access Week

2011-10-13T12:31:00.000+01:00

I expect many academic authors are not aware that open access week exists. But here we are on the brink of the 5th annual OA week which takes place 24 - 30 October 2011. International OA week is organised and promoted by SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) and is described as "A global event...promoting open access as a new norm in scholarship and research."

In a nutshell, open access (OA) means free and unrestricted online access to research publications. The idea being that publications can be accessed by anyone, online without the need for payment or any other form of barrier to access. This model for access is promoted by many major research funders who require funded authors to provide free and open access to publications produced as a result of their funding. You can check major funders' policies in this matter on the Sherpa/Juliet website.

There are two ways to achieve open access to publications:

The GOLD route: publishing in an open access journal, or selecting the open access option in a journal that offers it
The GREEN route: depositing a copy of the work in an online open access repository such as ORA (Oxford University Research Archive)

The Bodleian Libraries offer guidance and information for Oxford authors in matters concerning open access. The Libraries provide the ORA service, Oxford's OA archive, as a green route to OA for University authors*. To mark Open Access week, the Bodleian Libraries are running a lunchtime event:

There will be two short presentations:

The OA movement in Law: Ruth Bird, Bodleian Law Library
Access to digital theses: Sally Rumsey, ORA, The Bodleian Libraries

Date: Wednesday 26th October 2011
Time: 13.15 - 14.00
Venue: RSL Lounge, Radcliffe Science Library

Members of the University are welcome to attend. Light refreshments will be available

* NEWS FLASH: Watch this space for news about easy deposit in ORA using Symplectic.

SallyR

Research data workshop, Oxford, 14 - 16 September

2011-09-02T09:56:00.001+01:00

The UK Digital Curation Centre is running a series of inter-linked regional workshops as part of the DCC Roadshow, aimed at supporting institutional research data management planning and training.

The fourth DCC Roadshow is being organised in conjunction with the Oxford eReseach Centre, Oxford University Computing Services and the Bodleian Libraries, and will take place from 14 - 16 September 2011.

Running over 3 days, different workshops will provide advice and guidance tailored to a range of staff, including PVCs Research, University Librarians, Directors of IT/Computing Services, Repository Managers, Research Support Services and practising researchers. We encourage you to select the workshop/s which addresses your own particular data management requirements.

Click here to find out more about the workshops

Registration for the workshops is free.

Sent on behalf of Dr Liz Lyon, Director, UKOLN and Associate Director Digital Curation Centre, Anne Trefethen, Director of the Oxford eResearch Centre, Professor Paul Jeffreys, Director of IT at the University of Oxford and Sally Rumsey, Bodleian Libraries.

New URL for ORA

2011-08-30T15:44:00.002+01:00

We’re pleased to report that ORA (Oxford University Research Archive) has a new URL. This removes the now outdated reference to OULS.

ORA can be found at http://ora.ox.ac.uk/

The old URL will continue to work for now but we’d like to start using the new one with immediate effect. Please update your bookmarks, records and any references to ORA to the new URL as soon as possible.

There's a lot going on with ORA at the minute. We're getting a number of things sorted for the new term. The new URL has been one of our long-term ambitions.

SallyR

2011-05-17T17:35:00.002+01:00

An open access challenge for Oxford

We were recently fortunate in welcoming Sir Mark Walport to give the latest lecture in the series on new developments in scholarly communications. He began with two main points: ‘scholarship is incomplete until it is published’ and ‘knowledge is power.’ Within these topics he argued that signing away the copyright of research is ‘an extraordinary thing to do’: Creative Commons licences could be used in place of the more common copyright transfer agreement. He questioned why anyone would not want the widest possible dissemination of research, but that there are vested interests that have a negative effect. There are complaints from academics that too much importance is placed on the REF, impact factor scores are weak and can be gamed, and that there is little reward in publishing research data.

He posed a number of provocative questions about academic use of Wikipedia, about placing teaching materials such as lectures online, about using the digital medium for the benefit of publishing multi-authored textbooks, and about changing the practice of updating reviews in order to reduce quantity and improve quality.

Sir Mark stated that open access is not a threat. He described some new models of publishing and peer review such as post publication review which he believes will become a commonly used model. He appealed for academics to take control of the dissemination of their own work.

A BODcast of the lecture is available

SallyR

Walport and Theses

2011-03-15T16:57:00.002Z

We've got a couple of big things on at the moment that we're managing in the ORA office. Firstly, we have members of the University reserving places for the lecture by Sir Mark Walport on 19th April. There's obviously a lot of interest in this and places are filling up fast. If you've not contacted me to reserve a place yet, then don't delay.

Business is brisk too for our thesis digitisation activities. We are delighted that Dr Leonard Polonsky has generously provided the resources so that the Bodleian Libraries can offer to digitise a number of Oxford DPhils. We've been making contact with alumni to invite them to participate and have been excited by their enthusiasm. Many people have commented on how pleased they are to be offered this opportunity. So far it looks like we'll be digitising theses from the last 50 years or so, with even a smattering from the 1950's. The discipline coverage couldn't be wider either. There's much to do before the theses appear online in ORA, but it will be great to be able to make this research easily available to a wide audience.

SallyR

Sir Mark Walport lecture at Oxford

2011-03-01T11:20:00.003Z

We are delighted to welcome Sir Mark Walport, Director of the Wellcome Trust, who will deliver the fourth lecture in the series on scholarship, publishing and the dissemination of research. The series is designed to stimulate debate in Oxford on the issues surrounding changes in scholarly communications.

Title: The role of open access in maximising the impact of biomedical research

Date: 19th April 2011

Time: 12.30 - 1.30pm

Venue: Convocation House, the Bodleian Library

There will be time for questions. All members of the University of Oxford are welcome

To reserve a place contact sally.rumsey@bodleian.ox.ac.uk

New OA journal from Nature

2011-01-18T16:36:00.002Z

There's been a fair amount of activity on the ether this last week about a new journal that has been launched by Nature Publishing Group. The journal, Nature Scientific Reports, is published online and is open access. Key points about the journal are:

it is multi-disciplinary (all areas of the natural sciences)
rapid peer review
the author publishing charge is £890 ($1350) which is identical to PLoS One
continuous publication
all articles will be freely available under a CC licence
authors retain copyright
it belongs to the respected Nature stable

SageOpen is doing some similar things - open access and rapid peer review.

The rapid peer review model being adopted by these three OA journals, Scientific Reports, PLoS ONE and SageOpen, is a step away from the traditional format.

Nature SR says it has a streamlined and rapid peer-review system with "peer review by at least one member of the academic community" who may be a member of the editorial board

PLoS ONE states that it will publish "all papers that are judged to be technically sound" thereby leaving the final judgment of papers to readers - presumably by which ones they choose to read, use and cite.

SageOpen has no limits to its content. It "evaluates the scientific and research methods of each article for validity and accepts articles solely on the basis of the research." Readers can comment on papers via the online comments function.

It appears that the three journals are attempting to speed up publication by implementing these new review models. In a couple of cases they are also harnessing more power of the Web by reducing the traditional peer-review activities and leaving the final word to the readers. We'll have to wait for 2013 for Scientific Reports impact. In the meantime, we'll wait for the reaction of the authors to see how large these boundary-free journals become and what is the impact (if any) on each other (in the case of Sci Reports and PLoS ONE), and on other journals, traditional submission model or otherwise.

SallyR

Versions

2010-12-07T16:47:00.002Z

This morning in the ORA office we were thinking about how we should describe a paper that is available in the archive. The post-print of the paper (i.e. final submitted peer-reviewed version) is freely available - any user can download the full text. On the record page there are also details of the version that is formally published in a journal, together with links to that version - a DOI link for those who have a subscription and a link to the journal home page for those who do not (and therefore are likely to have to pay to obtain the full text from that source). The question was, how should we make it crystal clear to users which version is referred to in each element of the item details.

A number of researchers have expressed concern about multiple versions of an item being available on the Web. This is a topic of interest for us at ORA because authors are more often than not able to make their own submitted version of an article available in ORA, but not the publisher's PDF. We are aware from work at the LSE that users tend to discover items in ORA, use the freely available version to check if it's what they want, and then when it comes to citing the work, get hold of the publisher's version. However, when multiple versions start popping up all over the Web, there is understandably confusion about what has become to be known as version control.

If, for a moment, we think about the possibilities offered by the Web for research dissemination and discussion, the term 'version' takes on a whole new meaning. Increasingly researchers are communicating their ideas and research via blogs and other similar channels. When dealing with such sources do we ever have a final version? When do we step in to take a snapshot of a work and give it a version number? There are increasing numbers of applications available that have tools for open peer review or for readers to add comment and annotations. The author can then choose to make updates and changes to the item to reflect comments. Can we ever expect to 'control' the versioning of such publications? When it comes to debate about the research, some people might find that this is an excellent means to get the discussions going. It demonstrates that research does not always stand still.

The question of citation then becomes an interesting one. How should one cite something that may in the future change numerous times as comments are added? Most of us encounter similar problems as web links die and web sites are edited and amended. Common practice is to use an [accessed on] element in the citation and give the date when the material was last accessed and alive and well on the Web.

This raises the question of whether the scholarly publication preserved in aspic and unable to morph, adapt and evolve as scholarly debate of the content continues will persist. I strongly think it will. But its purpose may change to become a trusted snapshot of the research which is heavily relied on for research assessment and citation, whilst alongside there are more mutable versions keeping the dialogue going and the research discussion alive.

SallyR

Scholarly dissemination seminar

2010-11-29T17:11:00.004Z

It's always helpful to stand back and hear what others have to say about scholarly dissemination from outside Oxford. That was the case at yesterday's scholarly dissemination seminar where three speakers gave three different angles on how things are changing. Although aimed at the social sciences, the talks had resonances across all disciplines.

Neil Stewart (LSE Research Online (LSERO)) explained how LSERO aims to be a record of the research of the LSE. LSERO is a similar service to Oxford's ORA. One important point he made was that LSERO is not intended to sit in isolation, but links to the 'LSE Experts' service where academics' publications are listed: the list being generated and fed by LSERO. In fact many of the hits to items in LSERO come via the Experts pages. LSERO holds about 21,000 citations, around 4,000 of which have the full text freely available open access. Neil made three predictions:

that open access will become more predominant as the major dissemination channel for scholarly works
that repositories such as LSERO and ORA will become more trusted as sources for scholarly information
that we will see more integration of services and re-use of data (for example, like LSERO's and Oxford's data feeds to the federated 'Economists Online').

I can only agree with these predictions - the signs are already there.

Prof Dave de Roure (who only recently joined Oxford, so still retains a partly external perspective) took a broad view of new developments in scholarly communications. He described work going on in the sciences and humanities that is relevant to the social sciences. He described how research data is being gathered as soon as it is created (either in the lab or in social science 'experiments') and how with new data sources being made available (such as data.gov.uk), more people are consuming data than they were before (even if the data themselves were freely available before).

He posited that although the web was originally designed to disseminate research findings, in fact, we're only really getting to grips with this aspect of its use now. How true: we're still suffering from data and content being locked up in PDFs and only now grasping linked data as a means to benefit from what the web does best - linking from one thing to similar things. The new model enables research methods to be captured as well as the data. Such information can then be added to supplement papers where discussions and conclusions can be described. Coupled with this, data can be shared in a way that the 'old linear form' of a paper cannot. Repositories such as ORA will become not just a 'place to put' research papers, but crucial services that support and enable new research, particularly as items such as datasets, slides, methodology data and other supplementary information are grouped together.

The final speaker was Dale Heenan from ESRC who explained how the ESRC wants to increase compliance with its open access policy. The policy is fairly accommodating such as only requiring deposit of research outputs in an open access repository 'at the earliest opportunity.' He believes that institutions will be the driver behind accessibility to research outputs because of them wanting the showcase their research from a single location.

He raised the problem of repositories sharing items between them to resolve the problem of authors wanting (or having) to deposit their work in multiple repositories. Repository systems need to talk to each other at a system level: this is already beginning to happen, but is as yet at an early stage. He described the citation advantage of lodging work in an open access repository and how doing so aids collaboration between researchers.

Questions from the audience were on a variety of related topics:

duplicate submissions to different repositories - how do poor academics deal with this? Dale Heenan explained that Oxford authors should deposit their work in ORA, and ESRC and ORA will sort it out between themselves. [there is development in ORA in this area - we are publishing our bibliographic data as open linked data, we will be adding a tool called SWORD to assist with deposit in other repositories, and we are part of the OA Repository Junction project where publishers lodge metadata and full text into a 'hub' from where it is funnelled into appropriate repositories - no effort required by the author]
Versioning and version control. This can be a problem at web scale. It was noted that not all authors are happy for the final author version being made available. Journals offer a valuable editing service for papers. [Note - ORA stats show that visitors go on to visit publishers' sites, presumably from the URLs of the 'publisher version' included on ORA records. People easily discover the ORA item (eg via Google), then use the published version to cite the work]. It is up to the author whether or not they want to make their final peer-reviewed version available. Repositories are now a part of the dissemination cycle in addition to the published version. The point was made that repositories work in parallel to published journals, and are not intending to supplant them.
It was pointed out that we need to get the problem of storing and accessing research output data sorted.

Dale Heenan's 'Open Access and ESRC' and Neil Stewart's 'LSE Research Online' presentations are available in ORA.

I shall look forward to our next event which will be a lecture by Sir Mark Walport, Director of the Wellcome Trust to be held at lunchtime on 9th February 2011. Mark it in your diaries now.

SallyR

The OU goes even more open - thoughts from Oxford

2010-11-23T15:04:00.003Z

Interesting news from the Open University this week. A press release entitled 'The Open University embraces the linked open data movement' claims it is the first UK university 'to open up access to online data from across the institution as part of the Linked Open Data Movement.'

The data are available via the web at data.open.ac.uk and includes:

publications from Open Research Online (the OU's ORA)
OU podcasts
courses from the 'Study at OU' website

Future plans are to include the library catalogue, content from the OU open learn system and public information about staff and locations.

Now our ORA publications are already exposed as open linked data. We have a registry for elements of that data already operating underneath ORA which is being developed to simplify deposit in ORA. This registry is built using the same sorts of technologies employed by the OU and which are becoming ubiquitous for data on the web. The registry contains the ORA authors and their research. Obtained (with permission) from various websites around the University and beyond. We didn't have to re-enter the data. The aim was to be efficient and re-use existing data.

It is that registry which we developed as part of the BRII project and which underpins our proof of concept Blue Pages (working title). The Blue Pages enables a search across all the data held in it (the aim is to obtain data about all disciplines at Oxford) to find out about researchers and research activity going on at Oxford from a single location. At the moment, this is impossible and researchers and potential students and collaborators have to search across umpteen different websites. Try it for yourself. See how long it takes to find out all the research, people involved and publications at Oxford focusing on say HIV/Aids or on aspects of China or about climate change.

At present you can see the Blue Pages only in the Oxford domain. I could continue waxing lyrical about how the registry makes it easier for web creators by saving re-typing data; how they can draw on existing data to make new say, themed websites; how the registry thereby supports data accuracy and consistency; and how it has the potential to be a key publicity tool for Oxford research. The Bodleian Libraries has been with the front runners in this area and has built up a reputation for our work with semantic web/linked data.

Good luck to the OU. They're doing some great things. If anyone wants to find out more about what we're doing at Oxford, drop me a line (sally.rumsey@bodleian.ox.ac.uk).

SallyR

Vision for the future

2010-11-16T11:21:00.002Z

Over the last few weeks I have been future gazing for ORA. We're embarking on a new phase of development and it is important to know where we're heading. This is true both in my role as manager of the service, but also so that colleagues and management within Oxford can easily be appraised of our plans and intentions.

It's not just a case of 'where are we heading?' We also need to know how to get there. There are limited resources and so unsurprisingly development plans have to be prioritised. There are dependencies of course, but there's a danger of wanting to do everything now. Unfortunately we can't upload batch loads of records, create a whole raft of export formats, re-design the deposit form, implement auto-complete, produce structured reports etc etc all in one go and have it done and dusted for Christmas.

The roadmap for development extends over the next two years and will result in some rather 'nice to have' services for members of the University. However, the trouble with attempting to plan development in this area is that new possibilities keep opening up. There's always more we want to do. Exploring such new possibilities is not just limited to the technical but also to the attitudes and policies that are affected. There are areas in the scholarly community where, before too long, radical change could really take off. For example, changes to traditional peer review methods could happen in certain disciplines much quicker than expected. We want to respond to such change, or if possible, pre-empt it so Oxford academics can benefit at the earliest opportunity. Such radical change is particularly likely as we move to a more open world. The future is certainly bright and there are exciting prospects ahead. The semantic web offers tantalising potential for all sorts of new ways to use data and the Web. It's not going to happen though without a great deal of discussion and care in making sure new hard and soft systems operate in ways that are acceptable for the research community.

SallyR

P.S. I note with interest that the UEA climate people are now running a project to release climate data as open linked data. Data will be published so they can be re-used and cited and with full provenance information. From the ashes of disaster... See the ACRID project.

Scholarly communications seminar - 29th November

2010-11-04T14:13:00.004Z

I'm pleased to be able to announce the next event in our series on 'Scholarship, publishing and the dissemination of research.' It will take the form of a seminar with time for open discussion. The focus this time is new directions in scholarly communications in the social sciences. It's worth noting that although the speakers are social science biased, the topics they will talk about are relevant to all disciplines. All members of the University of Oxford are welcome.

The speakers are:

Prof Dave de Roure: Professor or e-Research and National Strategic Director for e-Social Science, OeRC
Dale Heenan: Economic & Social Research Council
Neil Stewart: LSE Research Online, London School of Economics

The seminar will be chaired by Richard Ovenden, Keep of Special Collections and Associate Director, Bodleian Library

Date: Monday 29th November

Time: 12.15 - 1.30pm

Place: Seminar Room C, second floor, Manor Road Building, Manor Road, Oxford

To reserve a place: contact sally.rumsey@bodleian.ox.ac.uk

Make a note in your diaries

SallyR

Cameron Neylon

2010-10-14T14:36:00.005+01:00

Following on from my last post, I have been interested to read more of Cameron Neylon's writings. There's a nice piece on his blog posted on 2nd Sept, 'What would scholarly communications look like if we invented it today' which is a fuller exposition of his comments made at the RIN meeting last week. One point of note: the comment that 'our primary means of communication [i.e. the journal article]...does not enable even simple replication of results.' I strongly recommend readers of this blog take a few minutes to read Cameron's post. Comments anyone?

I could continue to discuss more topics covered on the 'Science in the open' blog [N.B. not just of relevance to scientists], for example, forward looking thoughts on peer review and impact, but it's better you read it in full for yourselves.

I supposed I shouldn't end without mentioning that this week is Open Access week. Although we haven't run any particular schemes or activities, or made any earth shattering announcements here at Oxford, in my opinion there have been some small but important steps forward. Firstly, our new ORA Developer is now in post and together we have drawn up a plan of action for short and medium term work for improving ORA. Secondly, we are seeing a steady stream of deposits into ORA from a variety of disciplines. And finally, we have started a programme with a Bodleian subject librarian who is acting as a key link with members of academic staff who would like their research made available in ORA.

SallyR

the future of scholarly publishing

2010-10-12T09:51:00.004+01:00

Yesterday I attended the first in a series of Autumn events being presented by the RIN (Research Information Network). The title was 'The future of scholarly publishing: where do we go from here?' The format was that of talks by four speakers followed by a Q & A session. The speakers came from different perspectives: major funder (Robert Kiley, Wellcome Trust), publisher (Martin Richardson, recently retired from OUP), researcher (Cameron Neylon, STFC) and librarian (Phil Sykes, Liverpool University).

The speakers were all well qualified to deliver their 10 minutes-worth and all had something of interest to say. However, I was a bit disappointed that discussions didn't really get round to addressing the question in the title. There was quite a lot of focus on how things have changed in the last 5 years, but not so much of the direction of the road ahead. Only Cameron Neylon bit the bullet and described possibilities for the future. Of course, Wellcome Trust is developing UKPMC to be even more useful to researchers than it already is, and without doubt OUP has been one of the most innovating publishers as far as open access is concerned. But that doesn't really grasp the nettle.

Cameron started out by posing the question of 'if we were designing a research dissemination process now, what would it look like?' Certainly not the model that we currently have which was designed to serve researchers in the 17th and 18th centuries. I suppose that is the view of the idealist: we've got an existing model and are now considering how it can be improved (it reminds me of that old joke of the old bloke when asked for directions replied, 'well if I were you, I wouldn't start from here').

The event revealed the usual obsession with journal articles and science bias when anyone starts talking about scholarly publishing. Articles have been extremely important, but WHY are we continuing to stick with the paginated PDF model when so many publications are online only? It's convenient and people know how to cite references correctly. But it also lacks imagination in how the 21st century technologies available to us are being shoe-horned and severely limited to support existing formats. There are also many other research outputs that have significant value in addition to articles: conference papers and posters, reports, supplementary material and all the other grey literature that is produced. Science too is important - but let's not forget all the other disciplines and their needs.

We had the opportunity to continue discussions over drinks and (scrumptious) canapes after the formal procedures had ended. There's a lot for all the players in the research publication arena to think about, not least challenging topics such as trust and quality and who and how we pay for it. I'd like to think that the community is applying some creative thinking to the topic rather than sticking with the status quo just because it's what we've always done. But it's easier to continue with what you know.

SallyR

Making research more visible

2010-10-06T09:10:00.003+01:00

Earlier this week I had to provide some ORA statistics for the Bodleian Libraries' annual report to SCONUL (Society of College, National and University Libraries). It's heartening to see that, although ORA is still a fledgling service, we are seeing tens of thousands of hits and downloads to the collection.

Now this can only be a good thing, especially when the University's strategy states as Strategy III (a) 'Ensure that the fruits of the University's research activities are exploited and disseminated for the benefit of society and the economy.' The specific paragraph (Para 70) on provision of ORA to support this strategy states that it will 'provide greatly expanded access to Oxford's research corpus for students as well as other researchers and the public.' There's a lot to do to develop ORA, but I feel that we have made good inroads and are beginning to see the fruits of the service.

There were over 78,000 accesses to ORA records during the last academic year and over 10,300 downloads of full text files. The top 10 hits and downloads ALWAYS includes a good number of doctoral theses. Unsurprisingly most accesses came via Google.

Now I am the first to admit that Web access statistics are not an exact science. Far from it. But the figures provide strong indicators that we're on the right lines. So when I go out talking to academics, administrators, managers and research students about how ORA can help increase the visibility of Oxford's research, I have the figures to support my claims. I'll be explaining this to the new Post-doc people in Humanities later on today.

SallyR

'What we do'

2010-09-07T11:41:00.003+01:00

Seeing a list of 'What we do' on the Wiley-blackwell website prompted me to think about how the list compares with ORA. Does 'what we do' at ORA bear any resemblance to what this established and large publisher does (or claims to do). Wiley and ORA are decidedly different beasts, but it's an interesting exercise to compare notes. The Wiley list goes like this [I've added comments in square brackets]:

New technologies enable Wiley to:

Deliver content anytime and anywhere [Like any other web service, ORA is freely available online so does this]
Create transformative ways for people to interact with content [It's early days at ORA, but we have plans for adding many features and services to the repository that include means to interact with content. We need to get the basics in place first. One of the areas we're working on currently is methods of making ORA data available for access and use].
Address different learning styles [Not something we're addressing at ORA]
Engage with authors, readers and partners [We do this at ORA, but probably in rather different ways to a large publisher. Authors tend to be within our own University, readers are incredibly dispersed and varied (as far as we can tell for access logs) and partners are a mixture of University academic, service and admin departments, publishers and other interested parties]

Yet the core of what we do remains unchanged. We:

Facilitate learning and teaching [As does any collection of scholarly works including ORA]
Refine content into finished works [If this refers to the editorial/typesetting process then we certainly don't do that at ORA]
Add credibility [Again peer review is something we don't do at ORA which is a storage and access tool]
Promote scholarly discourse [Definitely an ORA feature as is any collection of scholarly works. We probably add to it as we include grey literature/unpublished works as well. Early versions can generate discussion]
Validate research [This comes back to peer review. However, making research freely available promotes comment and therefore a different form of validation]
Help authors connect with readers [we do that by providing easy access to content]
Transform information into knowledge and understanding [I'm not sure Wiley can claim this. They (and we) can make information available. We provide access to works where authors have taken information and processed it into a form that offers comment and explanation to readers. I can't see how a journal or a repository can actually claim to do this transformation - don't the authors and the readers do that?]

So what conclusions can I draw from this? Indeed Wiley journals add important value to academic research (mainly via peer review). But the other claims are not necessarily exclusive. Material does not have to be published in a journal to be delivered 'anytime and anywhere,' to 'facilitate learning and teaching' or to 'promote scholarly discourse.' It's important that scholarly authors are clear about where the exclusive value of different systems lie - and also where similar benefits are offered by different services.

SallyR

Closed article, open evidence?

2010-09-01T09:42:00.004+01:00

Here's an interesting scenario. Authors are increasingly supplying supplementary materials to publishers to support the findings described in the article. Journals are increasingly concerned about the impact and costs of publishing supplemental material (as described on the OCLC blog in Economics of scholarly production: supplemental materials). In future if authors want to append supplementary material to their article then they might have to make it available elsewhere. Enter repositories like ORA to provide the ideal place to store, preserve and access other types of materials. These items might include additional text, diagrams, excerpts of data and so on. ORA's persistent URLs can be cited in the article so that readers can find the supplementary materials. Conversely, the records for the supplementary materials in ORA provide a link to the article.

This is where the conundrum comes in. ORA is open: we make as much as possible freely available on the Internet so it's not only easy to find, it's easy to access, and as a result the supplementary material can be easily read by many people. On the other hand, it is more than likely that the journal where the article is published is closed and content is protected behind a subscription. [As an aside: if the journal article has been through the peer review process, then will the supporting materials have a certain stamp of approval by association?]

When it comes to providing storage and access for raw data, a major form of supporting material, there's still plenty of work to do to provide a service for Oxford (at ORA we're working closely with Research Services Office, OUCS and national bodies on this problem). There also needs to be some sort of standard as to how to cite all these many and various types of materials properly, but that will eventually come out in the wash.

In her blog post Constance cites the situation of journals refusing supplementary materials and Dorothea Salo raises this conundrum of closed article/open supplementary material in a reply to her own blog post. Both posts are worth reading.

Where is this potential dichotomy going to lead? Closed article, open evidence. Will the article increasingly become the 'official' record of the research for the purposes of citation and assessment, with the additional materials becoming the content that is actually used on a day to day basis?

SallyR

Prior publication woes

2010-08-10T11:29:00.004+01:00

Following a query from a member of academic staff about disseminating a working paper via ORA, we sent out our usual note informing the author about the possibility of the work being considered 'pre-published.' We feel we have to alert authors to this as we do not want them inadvertently to use ORA and then not be able to publish their work in their selected journal.

This is one of those horribly messy situations where we cannot give a clear response to authors. The best we can do at the moment in response to the question of 'Will deposit in ORA be considered pre-publication?' is 'It depends.' It's much like the publisher copyright policy for deposit in repositories problem. Thank goodness for SHERPA/Romeo which provides a website where we can quickly check a repository copyright policy for many publishers and which eases the situation for everyone.

Half the problem stems from not knowing which journal the author is going to submit to. We can't just provide a blanket guide for all authors. Things are exacerbated if the paper is not accepted by the first choice, and the author then submits to a different journal with a different policy. This is particularly true for doctoral students wanting to publish their thesis (or parts of it) and who may submit to a couple of journals/publishers before acceptance. Elsevier has a helpful statement on its website for doctoral students and other authors, that is very clear. 'Science' on the other hand has one of those woolly 'you should contact us' statements, and the tone is that it takes a dim view of any form of prior distribution on the Web.

Having had a rummage around on the Web, it's clear we're all in the same boat. Repository managers like me are trying to help authors discern whether or not their work will be considered pre-publication but our help seems to come down in many cases to 'contact your publisher.' Not hugely helpful.

Isn't openly sharing early versions of papers in most disciplines a healthy part of the academic exchange? Economists have been doing it for years (although one might understand why medical people might not want to share early drafts openly). The resulting work benefits from pre-publication comments and can only help to improve the final work. Isn't distribution of a working paper/pre-print (i.e. before peer review) a markedly different situation to publishing a finished paper in one journal and then trying to get exactly the same paper published in another? ORA and similar repositories are excellent tools for disseminating work. They are vehicles for distributing work quickly, they provide easy access to readers scattered around the globe, and are highly visible thereby supporting the dissemination of the work to the widest possible audience. Coupled with that, repository managers like myself aren't in the business of contravening publishers' policies. In fact, we aim to help authors comply.

I have no answers to this conundrum. A 'Romeo' style central resource would be helpful if publishers continue to retain different policies. But that would take funding. In the meantime, if anyone has any easy solutions, or plans to tackle it in some way, then please let me know.

SallyR

'Reclaiming our scholarship'

2010-08-02T10:24:00.008+01:00

The title is a quotation from a blog post by Peter Murray Rust, a Cambridge chemist and tireless campaigner for open data (i.e. research data that are can be freely accessed and re-used*). It's pretty emotive and PM-R has strong feelings about the openness of data and the barriers that are put in the way to making data open. His latest blog states that he thinks that open data is gathering momentum in terms of gaining acceptance amongst users. But...that there are barriers being put up by:

'a core of members' (i.e. not all) in the publisher industry who create income by restricting the flow of knowledge.... Our scholarship is hobbled by copyrights, patents, firewalls, portals, restrictive conditions and contracts.' He goes on to say 'We create the scholarship. We create the meta-data. We create the tools. We can reclaim and reinvent the way that scientific scholarship is created and disseminated. It only needs enough people.'

The links between research data and publications is gaining momentum. A rash of new JISC-funded projects include the following of note:

Data linking with knowledge blogging project (Newcastle and Manchester Universities). Extending blogs for use as a semantically linked form of publishing environment with bi-directional links to other forms of data. The use of blogs provides a means for gathering feedback and comments
DRYAD-UK (Oxford, British Library, DCC and Charles Beagrie Ltd). Providing a UK version of the existing US DRYAD repository for research data. The aim is to establish an open access data repository providing long term access to research data underpinning articles in a range of scholarly journals. From January 2011 deposit of data in the repository will be mandatory
WebTracks: web-scale link tracking for research data and publications (University of Southampton). The project 'will explore ways of making research data more accessible and easy to use by enabling researchers to establish links which represent the evidential stages between data, analysis, scientific conclusions and publication.'

Now, making all raw data freely accessible is obviously not always desirable. But Peter Murray Rust's point is valid in that the ways that scientific scholarship is created and disseminated are being reinvented. We're on the cusp of a scholarly dissemination revolution. Access to data and its connection to other types of dissemination channels forms a major part of the new regime.

SallyR

* the word 'free' when used in the context of 'open' data etc does not necessarily mean completely without rights or payment.

Back from Madrid

2010-07-14T09:26:00.003+01:00

I'm recently returned from Madrid where, although there was much focus and preparation for the football antics (the semi-final between Spain and some other team), a much more interesting (in my view) and stimulating event took place. Madrid was the location for this year's Open Repositories conference. Admittedly the title doesn't sound particularly thrilling and even the (Spanish) organisers couldn't resist adding a picture of the victorious sportsmen to spice up the home page. However, it was an excellent conference with delegates and presenters working in key areas of repositories (i.e. online research stores like ORA) and scholarly communications. Many are working at the cutting edge, and it's a good event to keep up with developments and meet the innovators.

I met up with colleagues old and new working in libraries and universities across the world. Examples of notable conversations this year were with:

a representative from MIT where they are considering creating a type of 'Find an expert' facility along the lines of our research directory that we are developing for Oxford and want to know about ours
a representative from RCUK who wanted to know whether we publicise the funding agency and grant number on items in ORA (we do when we have the information - see this example)
Prof David de Roure who has just taken up the post of ESRC National Strategic Director of e-Social Science at OeRC inOxford and with whom we hope to work closely (sometimes it takes an international conference to talk to people close to home)

My paper 'Blurring the boundaries between an institutional repository and a research information registry' was well received judging by the comments I received. It discussed how ORA uses and is used by the registry of researchers and research that we have created for Oxford (as part of a JISC funded project), the benefits to researchers, administrators and the University as a whole and some of the problems we have encountered. People are genuinely interested in how Oxford is dealing with changes in publishing practice, research dissemination and how we are managing our research activities (outputs etc). It's clear that colleagues I meet from all these other universities are trying to find workable and easy-to-use solutions in response to similar needs for research dissemination and management. The developments we have put in place in the Bodleian Libraries seem to be generating interest and winning respect from colleagues across the world.

SallyR

The view from Walton Street

2010-06-02T10:42:00.004+01:00

There was much interest across the University for the recent lecture given by Martin Richardson, Managing Director of the Academic Books & Journals Divisions at Oxford University Press. The title was 'The future of research publishing: the view from Walton Street' and Martin gave an overview of findings from two surveys about author perceptions and practice . He included plenty of facts and figures to illustrate his talk whilst acknowledging that the views of many of the survey contributors might be as they are because of the self-selection of the respondents. It was clear from the evidence he presented that both attitudes and practice are changing - albeit slowly. Some new services being developed by OUP include Oxford Bibliographies Online and delivery of services to mobile devices.

OUP has been experimenting with different publishing options and it would appear that take up of open access publication has reached something of a plateau. There are numerous reasons why this might be the case because factors affecting such publication are many and various. They include access to publications, cost, funding body policies and so on and so on. One factor that Martin pointed out from the ITHAKA survey of 2008 was that despite efforts by facilitators such as publishers and librarians, systematic change is hampered by 'a conservative set of facility [faculty?] attitudes.'

I find this a fascinating situation. What, if anything, will cause change in practice and attitudes of scholars? Technology plays a part, so does convenience whilst retaining academic standards. But it is mainly the take-up of common tools and procedures. If all your colleagues are using a particular format, location or whatever, and that format enhances the dissemination of research in such a way that continues to retain academic respect, then you are more likely to consider using it. The benefits have to be obvious to the individual and for many of the 'new fora' they are not.......yet. So the status quo remains for many. Many academics like to skim the print copy of a journal to keep up to date. This is a preference that might never be satisfied whateverl the battery of technological wizardry available. However, this view was rather contradicted in the survey by the fact that over 80% respondents would be quite happy if the library were to cancel print subscriptions and make journals available electronically.

Martin showed a slide about academic respondents to a question on publishing formats of importance to their research and teaching, and which demonstrates that e-books are only of importance to around 10 - 13% of authors. However, respondents believe that they will be of much more importance in 5 years time. To make that a reality requires a change of attitude of authors and teachers as well as improvements in e-book publishing formats and access. We shall see if future survey capture any changes in practice.

The talk prompted a lively and sometimes passionate, debate with questions about print on demand, costs of publication, the reduction of print runs and open access. One questioner asked whether a change is expected in the style of writing prompted by new media. Martin thought that style would change eventually. Publishing is changing with the deposit of data, and popular magazine publishers have jumped on board adopting new publishing options using the new iPad. However, he thinks that things are not moving quite a quickly as he might have expected.

Martin presented a rather gloomy picture of institutional repositories. It is certainly true that self-archiving has not taken off as was originally imagined in the very early days of repositories, and for understandable reasons. However, repositories are becoming so much more than an online 'box in which to put copies of papers.' They are being ingeniously integrated as part of research infrastructure in many universities, and changing attitudes towards access could influence change. It's always uplifting to see the numbers of hits and downloads of items in ORA as well as seeing that users are finding ORA items via Google.

One slide in the talk showed a proposed model for populating institutional repositories using institutional identifiers. This is something that we at ORA have been talking to OUP about and hope at some point to have a proof-of-concept with the Oxford University Research Archive.

In his list of expected developments in the future of research publishing, Martin listed limited uptake of both open access publishing and use of repositories. This of course depends on many factors. Situations such as the current barny between California University Libraries and Nature Publishing (as reported in the Times Higher) may become more frequent, particularly if budgets are severely cut. What the fallout will be remains to be seen.

As Dickens says in Martin Chuzzlewit, "Change begets change. Nothing propagates so fast." Never was this more true than in our rapidly developing technical world. OUP is offering new dissemination methods for authors. The Bodleian Libraries are too. Both aim to offer services that improve dissemination for authors in different ways.

SallyR

The OA ball keeps rolling

2010-05-11T09:52:00.005+01:00

There have been a number of significant activities on the subject of access to scholarly works over the last few weeks. Firstly, in response to the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA) which is working its way through the legislature in the US, a group of key universities have signed an open letter in support of the act calling for greater public access to research that has been funded by major funding agencies such as NIH. The text states that "We believe that this legislation represents a watershed and provides an opportunity for the entire U.S.higher education and research community to draw upon their traditional partnerships and collaboratively realize the unquestionably good intentions of the Bill’s framers – broadening access to publicly funded research in order to accelerate the advancement of knowledge and maximize the related public good...The broad dissemination of the results of scholarly inquiry and discourse is essential for higher education to fulfill its long-standing commitment to the advancement and conveyance of knowledge. Indeed, it is mission critical." Signatories comprise senior members of institutions such as Harvard, Princeton, and Cornell Universities.

Next, MIT has teamed up with BioMed Central (the science, technology & medicine open access publisher) to implement a process for MIT articles published in the 200 or so BMC journals to be automatically deposited in the MIT open access repository as soon as they are published. This is a direct result of the unanimously agreed MIT open access policy of 2009. BMC is keen to work with other institutions to implement similar automated feeds.

Amidst all the UK election shenanigans, it was encouraging to read that the Lib Dems included the topic of acces to research in their manifesto. On page 28 they talk about supporting science, basing funding on peer review, ensuring that publicly funded research is freely available and that innovative science is funded and decisions are not taken on 'narrow impact factors.' How this will translate into action or whether it gets buried in other matters or lost in negotiations remains to be seen.

An article was published in Nature last month 'US seeks to make science free for all' (Declan Butler, 7 April). The article focused on what is known as 'gold OA publishing' i.e. publishing articles as open access in journals and didn't really mention the topic of 'green OA,' making items freely available via repositories such as ORA. It is important to consider both methods as charges, funding agency requirements, rights and digital preservation (along with a whole host of other considerations) all play a part in the options presented to authors. The article makes the point that there is rapid change towards open access.

We can ignore all this activity and discussion. We can stick our heads in the sand and pretend it's not happening. It can easily remain low priority because of other pressures. But it is clear that change in access to scholarly work is inexorable. And changes are being led by world leading universities and major funding agencies. How are we going to deal with this at Oxford? Are we going to wait until the dust settles and for others to lead the way? What is the best way to proceed to ensure the best outcome for Oxford? This is the nub of the Bodleian Libraries and ORA efforts to open up discussion across the University about such developments in scholarly communications. We have a marvellous opportunity to hear Martin Richardson, Managing Director of Academic Books and Journals at OUP talk about the future of scholarly publishing from an OUP perspective (see previous blogpost). OUP have been offering a variety of publishing options and is one of the more innovative publishers. The event offers an opportunity for those attending to take part in a discussion and ask questions.

The open letter mentioned above includes the the statement that "Many of us are already working on programs and policies to promote greater access to the wealth of research produced by our scholars; we are adopting policies for open access to the research outputs of our institutions; we are building open access digital repositories to collect research, developing advanced publishing channels, and working with our scholarly publishing partners to pursue the broadest possible distribution of scholarship at lowest possible costs." What direction should Oxford head in?

Sally R.

Lecture: The future of research publishing

2010-04-22T15:33:00.003+01:00

MARTIN RICHARDSON, Managing Director Academic Books and Journals Divisions, Oxford University Press, will lecture in the third of this series at 12.30 p.m. on Thursday, 27 May, in Convocation House, Old Bodleian Library, Oxford. The lecture will end with open discussion.

Subject: ‘The future of research publishing: the view from Walton Street'

This is the third in a series of lectures designed to stimulate debate in Oxford on the issues surrounding changes in scholarly communications. Developments in policy, practice and technology are influencing change in the dissemination of academic research publications and other products of research across all disciplines. These lectures will present the facts and philosophy behind these innovations. The events are sponsored by the Bodleian Library and the Oxford University Research Archive (ORA).

For more information and to register for the event please contact Sally Rumsey (sally.rumsey@bodleian.ox.ac.uk)

Open access and increased citations

2010-03-10T17:41:00.002Z

A technical report has recently been published that has aggregated existing studies on the topic of the citation advantage. This means that by publishing an article open access (i.e. the article is made freely available on the internet with no barriers to access such as a subscription being required) it attracts more citations. The report 'The Open Access citation advantage: Studies and results to date' (Swan, 2010) makes for interesting reading. It has drawn together the findings of 31 papers dating from 2001 to the present. The overall findings are that of those 31 studies, 27 of them found a positive open access citation advantage. The advantages ranged from -5 to +600 per cent increase in citations with open access. The disciplines covered were mainly science and medicine, but some social sciences were also included.

I'm sure experts will want to scrutinise each study, most of which were published in respectable peer reviewed journals, for its methodology and academic rigour. Even so, taken as an overview, this is encouraging news for those of us providing the means for authors to make their work freely available as open access publications - and I include repository managers like myself and OA journal publishers here.

Now this topic is something which has been argued about for some time. It is useful to see a summary such as this that pulls together the findings of investigations.

One important point is that over time, the citation advantage might be lost as EVERYBODY start to make their work open access. So, shouldn't we be getting in early and making the most of the advantage while it exists? And if we don't, then Oxford's research might remain more buried than other's for some time while we lumber around catching up.

I see the ORA usage statistics (more on this soon) and it's obvious that people are finding Oxford research and accessing the papers and other publications (I can't guarantee what they do with them then) that are stored in ORA. I can see from the regular accesses via websites, blogs and now even Facebook and Twitter that people are getting hold of Oxford research. I know that academics are sharing their work with their colleagues scattered around the world via ORA. I like to think that by providing this service, we are helping authors to accumulate more readers and by extension, more citations. This report makes me hope that I might be right.

The report, you will be pleased to know, is freely available at http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/18516/

SallyR

Disseminating Oxford's research in the era of electronic communications

2010-03-05T12:38:00.002Z

The first seminar held in the Bodleian Libraries series 'Scholarship, publishing and the dissemination of research' was held yesterday evening. It was well attended and seemed to touch a topic that provoked a lot of interest.

Professor Paul Jeffreys (Director of IT, OUCS) spoke first on the topic of ‘Research data management – can we do it?’ He described the problems associated with the sheer quantity of data being produced, and explained developments at Oxford and at national and international levels attempting to address the problem. He explained how Oxford is leading the way in the UK in management of data, and how the model of federated data repositories proposed for Oxford is being considered as a model for the UK by the UKRDS (UK Research Data Service). The UKRDS will be applying for funding from HEFCE in the near future to carry out work to address this difficult and important area and, if successful, Oxford will be taking part in the work. ORA is being proposed as the registry for Oxford research data (like a library catalogue for data with links to the actual data where appropriate).

Dr Anne Bowtell (Medical Sciences Division Web Manager) spoke next on the efforts of the Medical Sciences Division to provide web sites that meet their particular needs. She outlined the vision for the web presence of the Division and explained the difficulties including conflicting requirements that have emerged. The main problems are often not technical - it is more often than not policy and organisational matters that are the most taxing. Her talk ended with a webcast that demonstrates how the Division is simplifying creation of websites by using ORA to enable re-use of web material they have already produced.

Sally Rumsey (ORA Service and Development Manager) was the last speaker. Her presentation, ‘The times they are a-changing: dissemination services in an evolving scholarly landscape’ provided an overview of the wide range of services now available to academics to disseminate their research, including institutional and subject repositories, blogs and Twitter. She explained that academics are using these and other facilities on the Web because of the convenience, global dissemination and easy access to their work that they offer. She ended by raising a number of questions about whether researchers could or should change their publishing practise and what the Bodleian Libraries might offer to support the dissemination of Oxford research in the future.

The seminar ended with questions and comments from the audience and was chaired by Mr Richard Ovenden (Keeper of Special Collections and Associate Director, Bodleian Library). Paul Jeffreys' and Sally Rumsey's presentations are available on ORA. Watch out for more events in this series.

SallyR

A stimulating lecture by John Willinsky

2010-01-28T17:20:00.006Z

John Willinsky spoke eloquently and entertainingly last week on his chosen topic of 'Locke and the intellectual properties of learning.' He started out by describing the current situation where the chance of finding freely available learned articles has been rising steadily, and that faculty members now often have the right to post an author 'post-print' (refereed final author manuscript) on the Internet. He argued out that a university's economy is based on its reputation and its reputation is based on readership. Gunther Eysenbach in his 2006 article 'Citation advantage of open access articles' (PLoS Biology 4(5):e157) claims that citation rates are higher for open access articles.

Willinsky took the concept of knowledge being property and explained how Locke established the basis of property in his treatise. He talked about the concept of 'enclosure' and how possession of something automatically excludes others. This removing of something from what he called the 'commons' can be justified by the benefits for the greater good. He took the scenario of a scholar in a library where we all have equal access, the commons in the Lockeian world. The scholar takes the books for him/herself (possession) and retains them while doing their work. In the non-Lockeian sense, they are then returned to the commons (library shelves). What happens to the resulting paper? Willinsky said that Locke says it would be a waste for the scholar to keep it to themself i.e. exercising their full property rights. If it is returned to the commons then others can benefit.

Today we have a new opportunity via technology where we can share more than ever before. Restricting this opportunity to share, limits the ability of the university to build its reputation (which is based on readership).

He went on to talk about copyright and how it has now become a monopoly with only a few exceptions. He said that in the US they have the bizarre situation where a teacher can share copies of an item with their pupils if it can be described as 'spontaneous teaching.' However, if the teacher had PLANNED to use the material, it would not be allowed. He also pointed out how in the UK anything can be used for the purpose of an examination - another copyright exception - and argued that it is unlikely that any student would be inspired by what they read in an exam and fall in love with the literature under those conditions. This situation now means that we have lost sight of intellectual property with respect to public learning.

Making the case for Locke, Willinsky advised that we think of value in terms of the distribution of and access to knowledge. He encouraged authors to negotiate with publishers to have more opportunities to share their work. He did not argue that authors CANNOT sell their work, but that they cannot charge too much (he cited the iTunes model). The economics does not necessarily mean we can have completely free public access.

Moving on to peer review which he acknowledged is a critical part of the scholarly process, he questioned whether publishers should own it. Willinsky then discussed the cost of scholarly journals and questioned whether the cost can be justified. If the costs are calculated on a per page basis, some are extreme. He cited one journal that charges $26,000 p.a. whilst another costs only $300 p.a.

A questioner from the audience asked whether an open idealist be more apposite for this argument rather than Locke as an individualist possessionist. Willinsky argued that most people have 'bought into' about 80% of his (Locke's) logic which fits most of Willinsky's argument.

The second question prompted Willinsky to talk about students and their expectations - he believes that students should leave university with an expectation of the 'right to know.' He dismissed course packs with their poor presentation and limiting tendency i.e. they don't encourage students to 'read around' a topic. Would it not be better to offer students a link to a resource where they can then explore the world of knowledge around that material. Students should leave with the expectation that they can access knowledge which would then extend to a public expectation of the right to be able to access knowledge.

The evening closed with a reception, 'drinking with dinosaurs' in the main area of the stunning Pitt Rivers museum.

SallyR

Lecture: John Willinsky, Stanford University

2010-01-04T11:02:00.003Z

Scholarship, publishing and the dissemination of research

PROFESSOR JOHN WILLINSKY, Stanford University, will lecture in the second of this series at 5 p.m. on Tuesday, 19 January, in the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, Parks Road, Oxford, OX1 3PW. The lecture will end with open discussion. Wine will be served after the lecture.

Subject: ‘Locke and the Intellectual Properties of Learning’

Scholarly communication debates involving new models such as ‘open access’ generally lack any historical sense of why a right to run a profitable business off the circulation of this body of knowledge should be checked by interests in increasing access to this work. Thus, it seems worth turning back to Locke, whose otherwise highly influential theory of property has within it an unsung place for learning that can be said to bear on scholarly communication. What might then be termed the distinguishing "intellectual properties of learning" have played a critical role not only in the history of higher education, but in current intellectual property law, and, as such, these properties might be reasonably expected to inform new models of scholarly communication, if on the side of the increased access.

This is the second in a series of lectures designed to stimulate debate in Oxford on the issues surrounding changes in scholarly communications. Developments in policy, practice and technology are influencing change in the dissemination of academic research publications and other products of research across all disciplines. These lectures will present the facts and philosophy behind these innovations. The events are sponsored by the Bodleian Library and the Oxford University Research Archive (ORA).

The lecture is open to all. Enquiries may be directed to Sally Rumsey (sally.rumsey@ouls.ox.ac.uk).

Climate change storm

2009-12-08T14:50:00.002Z

Whatever one's views on climate change, it has been impossible to avoid the media excitement about the leaked emails from UEA this week. It would appear that a number of people are calling for the offending research data to be made publicly available (there has been some disagreement on the amount of information/data that were already freely available) so that the whole process and scientific findings could be publicly scrutinised and the truth be out.

This story has coincided with a presentation I gave at the e-Science All Hands meeting this week. My colleague, Luis Martinez and I ran one of the Birds of a Feather sessions which was on the topic 'Research data preservation and the role of libraries' (more to come on that in a future post). Data sharing (and collaboration) was one of the main themes of the conference.

There is much talk in various circles about open data: making research data freely available so that it can be 'read' along with publications and the like, and so it can be re-purposed in all sorts of creative ways. This is the sentiment of the quotation 'the coolest thing to do with your data will be thought of by someone else.'

Well I'm all in favour of that. It seems like a good idea. Especially with all the possibilities for combining data in creative ways and using them to make new discoveries. BUT...... it has to be balanced with restricted or even no access to data. There are good reasons why some data should be well protected. This might be for personal privacy of the subjects, patents pending, the opportunities for the data creators to do more work with their own data and so on. And then there's the grey area in between when some data might be available to some people for some of the time.

Where should the line be drawn between making data available and not doing? Who should be the arbiter in cases of disagreement. It is often these sorts of policy and organisational issues that cause major difficulties for everyone involved. And the problem is, that by not addressing knotty topics that need discussion, and ignoring them because they're too difficult, means that the result is often inaction.

As a first step towards doing something sensible for data, it would be a good idea to set up a simple internal data registry(the Aussies are already doing this on a national scale) so at least we know what is out there. It could act as a sort of data audit so that all the different areas of storage, data descriptions, preservation etc could be thought about in more detail. Quite how this is achieved so that a minimal amount of effort is required on everyone's part needs thinking about carefully. Also some sort of balance should be struck even at this level between making details openly available or not. Even a simple list of data 'sets' can cause problems.

Fortunately, Prof Paul Jeffreys is leading a couple of projects (EIDCSR and SUDIMIH) that are looking in to many of the issues as is Dr David Shotton with his ADMIRAL project. These projects are doing some detailed investigations. As far as I'm aware, we don't have any shallow but broad investigations going on at the moment (someone please correct me if I'm wrong here). Meanwhile, we in the libraries are developing a robust storage system that is designed to store, preserve and deliver any data it contains (remit for research data as yet to be defined in liaison with other data stores across the University).

At least creating a registry of data would be one of the first steps towards actually 'doing something' about Oxford's data. It could point to any data sets that are available. But who is going to run it, pay for it and so on............. This blog is supposed to encourage discussion. Maybe someone out there at Oxford has got some ideas.

SallyR

How research 'publications' can be really interesting

2009-11-30T15:03:00.004Z

I've mentioned new forms of publishing in previous blogs. Where the concept of a printed paper merely transferred to the screen seems an anomaly in the digital world where so many creative ways of delivering information are possible. Today I read an article about a development in the Netherlands that hits this nail right on the head.

Arjan Hogenaar in his article 'Enhancing scientific communication through aggregated publications environments' describes a new type of research publication. In it he describes a new 'publication and communication model' which uses current web technologies such as we are using in ORA. Using these tools and technologies it is possible to create what he calls an EP or Enhanced Publication. An EP allows for a collection of information objects to be aggregated into a unified whole. The example he cites is of a collection of 'documents' which comprises two articles and two videos. However, the collections of aggregated resources can contain a number of different types of elements: as well as documents there can be organisations, people, projects and topics. This immediately screamed at me 'BRII project' for indeed that is exactly what we are doing in our project - having these different elements as objects so that they can be used and manipulated flexibly and related to all manner of different Oxford research outputs. These elements are available to be used to be attached to publications and other outputs within ORA.

We are going to be looking VERY closely at the tools produced by the Netherlands team when they are released (December 2009). It could open up so many possibilities for how Oxford researchers disseminate their work. It focuses not only on the central item (article or whatever you want to call it) but all the scholarship and other relevant information that happens around that article.

Why would researchers want to stick with the constraints of pages and page layout when this is possible? Your views?

SallyR

Harvard and open access podcast

2009-11-18T16:57:00.002Z

Prof Robert Darnton, Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor, Director of the Harvard University Library, trustee of New York Public Library and the Oxford University Press (USA) has recorded a podcast on the subject of open access and Harvard's policy for all its research papers to be made available in their university repository, in an opt out basis. Worth a listen.

SallyR

Times Higher article

2009-11-12T13:00:00.003Z

I'd like to encourage everyone involved with research at Oxford , whether researcher, author, PI, manager, administrator, facilitator or whatever, to read the article in today's Times Higher Education, 'Learning to Share.' The online version has some comments appended. It's worth bearing in mind when reading the article that 'open access' is primarily about ACCESS to research. It's not in the first instance a financial topic - although the article focuses on the costs. I'm not going to rehearse all the pros and cons raised in the article again here. I would however, like to add a few things that are not mentioned in the piece:

Technological developments - incredible things are appearing where researchers are making the most of the online domain going way beyond the constraints of the traditional article. See for example Dr David Shotton's semantically enhanced article which I mentioned in a previous post.
Supplementary material - posting a copy online in full (no page limits) with all diagrams (no limit) and linking to related materials. Easy when you use ORA
Text mining - it's heading this way
Don't forget that open access is not just about articles - there is a stack of valuable research within conference papers, reports, newsletters, questionnaires and many other types of 'grey' or not formally published literature.
Is the article going to become purely a mechanism for prestige i.e. as a short summary of the actual research, used only to score brownie points when it comes to research assessment? Will other channels of dissemination that are more immediate, have no constraints on quantity or type of content, and allow for greater instant dialogue between like-minded colleagues become more popular with researchers to spread their research widely around their colleagues? Discuss.
Research data - again, very interesting things going on here - see in particular Peter Murray Rust's (Cambridge) concept of 'datuments.'
Peer review - obviously important. But will new methods of peer review become popular in some disciplines? The facility to add annotations is becoming more and more popular in many areas. Could there be a vital role here for learned societies offering peer review services? Discuss

And my bottom line - drop a copy of your research in ORA - it will be preserved (even if we can't make it freely available - you'll still benefit from the publicity/Google crawled item record in ORA), it will benefit from maximised visibility plus a long list of other benefits for both researchers, administrators and managers. And we don't mind how much supplementary material you include. Help and further info at the ORA help website.

SallyR

Portal for experts and subject repositories conference

2009-11-05T11:09:00.003Z

European economics researchers are benefiting from a large EU project to develop the Economists Online Portal which "showcases some of the world's leading institutions, their scholars and their academic publications and datasets." Oxford economists have participated in this via staff in the Social Sciences Library. I'm wondering if any other disciplines might do something similar. Some are already catered for but it's the interaction between the subject and the HEIs repositories which is interesting here - deposit your work in one place and it gets additional subject visibility somewhere else along with colleagues from other countries.

Economist Online is being launched at a conference taking place at the British Library on 28 and 29 January, 2010.

Subject repositories: European collaboration in the international context
"This conference will look at the progress made with subject repositories so far. It will also see the launch of Economists Online, the key output of an EC-funded subject repository project managed by the Nereus consortium of top European economics libraries. Nereus members will showcase this subject repository in both plenary and parallel sessions, sharing lessons learned and engaging delegates in discussions of the main issues such as content recruitment, search and retrieval services, usage statistics and datasets."
See the conference website for details

SallyR

Nature Publishing Group and Repository Junction

2009-10-01T12:29:00.009+01:00

One thing we're very keen on in the ORA office is that of making deposit into ORA as easy as possible. We also want to do everything we can to enable authors to deposit their items in multiple digital repositories if they want. This problem usually arises when authors (understandably) want to deposit their work in a subject repository (such as ArXiV, RePEc, SSRN and so on) and would ideally like a copy in ORA for the purposes of preservation, extra visibility, updating their website or other reason. We're in the process of identifying external digital collections where we're permitted to export a copy of Oxford-authored work into ORA to save extra effort on the part of the author.

So, we're particularly pleased to have been invited to participate in a project which is making it EVEN EASIER for everyone involved to obtain copies of Oxford papers. The project is called Open Access Repository Junction and is being lead by colleagues at EDINA at the University of Edinburgh. They are working in partnership with Nature Publishing Group (NPG) and the work is being funded by the JISC.

The basic idea behing the project is to provide a deposit broker system where item providers, for example publishers such as NPG, can deposit works which can then be 'delivered' to appropriate repositories at an appropriate time. A demonstrator service will be built and tested. The upshot will be that as part of the project, ORA will be receiving some recent Oxford-authored items from NPG via the Repository Junction.

Our ORA software engineer is advising on technical development of the Junction and will be implementing the necessary technical bits and pieces necessary for ORA to receive the NPG items.

We are very pleased that such a large and respected publisher as NPG is taking part in this work, and delighted that we will be a part of it. From a scholarly communications perspective, NPG has made some welcome changes to their archiving policy, described in a press release earlier this year and including the following [my italics]:

"NPG's License to Publish encourages authors of original research articles to self-archive the accepted version of their manuscript in PMC [PubMedCentral] or other appropriate funding bodies' archive, their institution's repositories [ORA] and, if they wish, on their personal websites. In all cases, the author's version of the accepted manuscript can be made publicly accessible six months after publication. NPG does not require authors of original research articles to transfer copyright."

The key word is 'encourages.'

More information about NPG's policies for authors can be found on its website.

SallyR

Back to work after the summer

2009-09-30T17:17:00.005+01:00

Taking a look at the ORA usage statistics today I was relieved to see usage picking up again after the annual summer dip. It always heartens me to go through these statistics because of the numbers involved. OK, so web stats are pretty flaky if you think you can get an accurate idea of usage. But if you consider them as an indicator of use and manage, as we do, to eliminate web crawler accesses and other statistics that only confuse the more figures, then they become an interesting and useful pointer to the activity around your web service.

The first thing of note is that in September 2009 alone there have been over 3900 visits to ORA via Google. Other search engines pale into insignificance by comparison. No wonder 'Google' is now appearing as a verb.

It's also interesting to see FaceBook links appearing. We can tell that people are starting to add links to items in ORA on their FaceBook pages.

This all goes to show that scholarly communication is a vibrant and varied activity and that ORA has a vital role to play. We've got people finding and accessing Oxford research and they are doing it in ways in which they use the Web in their everyday life.

Getting down to specifics, one member of the Philosophy Faculty is constantly in the top scorers for access to his research via ORA. He stores his work in ORA and links to it from his webpage - and people use it. The other usage of note is the Classics Faculty which has included a live link to ORA on its Faculty webpage. Again, accesses via this page are constantly in our top scorers.

Looking at the location of our users, we have had users accessing ORA from nearly 100 different countries this month, the US and UK being the most common. And we are seeing a number of accesses via the OULS SOLO service.

It's good to see that people are not only finding items in ORA, but there have been about 1000 downloads of files this month. The most popular this month have been items from a conference, 'Beyond Free-Variation: Scribal Repertoires in Egypt from the Old Kingdom to the Early Islamic Period.' Unsurprisingly, theses have also been very popular.

I'm sure members of the Oxford academic community are expert on the finer points of statistics, but looking at the general trends of ORA usage I find it encouraging to see the activity around ORA and where our users are coming from. Given the activity we're seeing, even in a new repository like ORA, it would seem to support researchers in maximising the visibility of their research. It will also help with the expected 'Environment' section of the REF. The latest HEFCE consultation paper (Para 79c) mentions that researchers will be expected to demonstrate 'engagement with the public, including the dissemination of research findings.' In addition to enabling other researchers easy discovery and access to research, isn't this exactly what ORA is about?

SallyR

New report

2009-09-18T16:23:00.003+01:00

The Research Information Network (RIN) and JISC have published a study this week that describes very well the concerns that have long bothered us in the ORA office: confusion suffered by researchers caused by a complex combination of rapid technological change, new dissemination methods, lack of clarity of expectations, pressures of assessment and the desire to publish widely. I strongly encourage everyone involved with research at Oxford to read either the full report or the summary. The summary provided at the RIN website gives a good overview:

“A new report Communicating knowledge: how and why UK researchers publish and disseminate their findings published by the Research Information Network (RIN) and JISC shows how researchers are concerned by what they perceive as mixed messages about the channels they should use to communicate their research findings. The report highlights the need for more consistent and effective guidance from funders and higher educational institutions. If they wish to encourage researchers to disseminate their work through a variety of channels as well as in high-status journals, they must give stronger and more positive messages about how those channels will be valued when it comes to assessing researchers’ performance they must give stronger and more positive messages about how those channels will be valued when it comes to assessing researchers’ performance.

The rise in investment in research over the last ten years has been accompanied by an increasing emphasis on measuring, assessing and evaluating research, its outputs and impact. Commissioned by the RIN in conjunction with JISC, this report investigates how researchers’ perceptions of how they are being assessed affects their decisions on when, where and how to publish and disseminate their findings. It demonstrates the significant variations between researchers in different disciplines not only in the dissemination channels they use, but also in their patterns of collaboration (and how they acknowledge the contributions that members of a team have made), and in how they decide cite the work of others.

All these patterns of behaviour are changing, in part as a result of technological developments. And there are signs that the citation practices, for example, of younger researchers are different from those of their more senior colleagues. But the readiness with which outputs in the form of scholarly journal articles can be assessed and measured has underpinned their increasing dominance over all other forms of publication and dissemination. Researchers’ perceptions and understanding of the messages they receive from funders and from universities may often be mistaken, but they influence what researchers publish and how, and they give rise to real concerns. Many researchers see a damaging tension between their desire to communicate via channels which enable them to reach and influence their intended audiences – often beyond academia – as rapidly as possible, and the pressures to publish in high-status journals. Changes in assessment procedures, whether via the Research Excellence Framework (REF) or from other sources, will change researchers’ behaviour further. Many are already considering citing their colleagues’ work more often.

The report provides important evidence for funders and policy makers, as well as for the research community, in the continuing consultations about the future mechanisms for assessing research performance. It also shows that it is necessary for this to be an ongoing process to keep monitoring the changes in technology and research practices. It is important that changes in those mechanisms are based on a detailed understanding of both the behaviours and the motivations of researchers across the full range of disciplines and subjects.”

SallyR

Back from the fringe

2009-08-14T10:46:00.005+01:00

I've now returned from the recent Repository Fringe 2009 event held unsurprisingly in Edinburgh. Ben O'Steen (ORA Software Developer) and I had been invited to give the opening keynote presentation at the event. Being a keynote it allowed us to explore some of the areas of repository development that we think will be of importance over the short to medium term future and to flag up areas of concern. Our presentation, "Where are repositories going?" is available online. There's a blog entry written by a member of the DataShare team which gives a summary of our talk

The main points we raised were:

New methods of publishing are likely to be attractive to authors. I used Dr. David Shotton's (Oxford, Zoology) semantically enhanced article as an example. There research data is provided in such a way that it can be manipulated and re-interpreted and terms within the article are semantically linked. This goes way beyond keyword search because relationships between specified words are machine readable eg all words concerned with habitat are identified, and all organisms are linked to their Linnaen classification. It makes for a very powerful document. Aren't authors going to want more of this aren't they?
New methods of publishing may lead, in some disciplines, to new models of peer review that takes advantage of the power of the web.
Current work with identifiers for individual authors will continue and ultimately bear fruit. This is a real problem which, when resolved will make life so much easier for ensuring that this Jane Smith is the same person as this J.Smith, this Jane M. Smith and this Jane Brown (after she was married).
Everything on the web should have a name. This is basically the linked data model that I described in a previous post
Repositories are going to become much more integrated within general research management at institutions - this is already beginning to happen at Oxford. It will mean, amongst other things, that academics are not constantly being asked for the same information by different people, and that the institution can easily access the data it requires for statutory and other reporting and for planning.
There are some areas where we need to cut the complexity: copyright (digital items are in danger of being 'locked away' more than print because of restrictive rights as reported in the BL paper 'Copyright for education and research'), open access (too many different and confusing models), multiple deposit of a single item into a number of appropriate repositories (eg local and subject repositories) and individual deposit (needs to be almost invisible).
Print on demand is likely to become more prevalent. Imagine being able to select a number of freely available items or sections of items from a repository and print them out as a nicely bound volume at minimal cost in 5 minutes. A bit like you might take a memory card of photos to print out in Boots the Chemist. It's so cheap that you wouldn't worry about writing your own annotations on the book.

One service I saw which I liked was the annotation tool, a.nnotate, which can be easily (so I'm told) plugged in to repositories. It allows users to annotate PDF documents with comments. This is something I would like to add to ORA. As well as adding annotations for personal use, they can also be shared.

As usual, much value of the event came from the networking opportunities. I'm now in contact with the Edina people who are running some work to ease deposit into multiple repositories (the Open Access Repository Junction project). They are working with Nature Publishing Group with whom we've already been in contact, and they are keen to work with us.

The closing keynote was given by Clifford Lynch, digital library guru who is respected for his thoughtful insights on developments. One point he mentioned which came up more than once at the event, was that in the current financial situation, repositories like ORA may become more important sooner than we think. We’re used to the idea that institutions in 3rd world countries cannot afford journal subscriptions. There is a possibility that this could become the case in the developed world and be true for major institutions, with repositories taking a more important role for dissemination of research. He described huge cuts in library budgets in the US and this will have an effect on subscriptions. He posed the question of what would be the outcome if high energy physicists were forced to choose between paying for the upkeep of ArXiV (it has recently been reported that Cornell is baulking at paying for continued upkeep) or retaining journal subscriptions? Additionally, there is likely to be a reduction in subscriptions to second tier journals which could have a significant effect in some areas.

Cliff Lynch expects traditional peer review to reduce in some disciplines. Traditional peer review is profligate in its demands on human resources. Reviewers have far too much material to review. Authors spend too much effort re-submitting in order to find a publishing outlet. It is all too expensive and unsustainable to continue with the current enormous volume of literature moving through the peer review system, and the numbers of person hours involved. He would like to see more direct distribution of research via repositories like ORA or via university presses.

It was an inspiring conference. And as well as publicising Oxford library developments, we've come away with some excellent contacts and ideas.

SallyR

Web linking

2009-07-09T15:54:00.003+01:00

When Tim Berners Lee first came up with the concept of the World Wide Web in the form that we know it today, he was imagining a facility where one web item can be linked to others. This is achieved using hyperlinks – so you can say, click on a linked section of text or other content and are immediately taken to another location or page. Like this: Oxford University Research Archive (ORA). Generally, people can understand the content of websites, but not machines.

In fact, Sir Tim's concept of what the Web is and how things should link to each other goes much further than our commonly accepted perception of what the Web is, and takes linking to a higher dimension. He has recently written about this in a paper “Putting government data online” which, although concerned with official data, describes nicely what we are doing here at Oxford for both ORA and for the BRII (Building the Research Information Infrastructure) project. It is a topic that is highly relevant for creators of scholarly outputs.

TBL's underlying principal is that of Linked Data. Linked data is described on the Linked Data.org website as follows: “The Web enables us to link related documents. Similarly it enables us to link related data. The term Linked Data refers to a set of best practices for publishing and connecting structured data on the Web.” The data we’re talking about could be data produced as an output of research or the data describing that research (as we are doing for the BRII project enabling linking between people, projects, publications, funding agencies, departments, research groups and so on). It can be anything - a geographical location,statistics, a concept such as a project and so on.

The principals of linked data are that:

1. it can be accessed by others who have an interest in that data (although only the data you want to make available is made accessible)

2. “Linked Data can be combined (mashed-up) with any other piece of Linked Data…No advance planning is required to integrate these data sources as long as they both use Linked Data standards.” (Berners Lee, Putting government data online, 2009). It is all about joining data together that wasn’t previously connected, without having to go through the pain of trying to make separate systems interoperate. TBL cites the following example: “if the Department of Transport publishes road accident data, a cycling site selects the cycle accident subset, and can publish it as a map adding cycle routes and hills, and cycle shops. An agency publishes data about the amount of money given to different towns, another maps it against the per capital income levels in those towns. And so on in uncountable permutation.”

3. “Scalable: It's easy to add more Linked Data to what's already there, even when the terms and definitions that are used change over time.” (Berners Lee, Putting government data online, 2009).

The clever thing is, is that the data is understandable by machines, which is why you can do interesting things with it by joining it up with other data. The data can be described using terms from an growing set of vocabularies which are being increasingly used (see what we're using in our work here - work in progress so a growing collection). One major example is Library of Congress Subject Headings which have recently been made available in this way. More vocabularies and Linked Data versions of existing specialist subject vocabularies are being developed.

The concept of producing your data as Linked Data is something that is likely to become much more common as the semantic web gains in popularity and, over time, becomes the norm. It is already being used by the BBC and by the Guardian newspaper on its Guardian Open Platform. One part of this the Guardian Data Store, “a collection of important and high quality data sets curated by Guardian journalists. You can find useful data here, download it, and integrate it with other internet applications.” (Guardian, 10 March 2009). The BBC has stated that "over the last few months we’ve been continuing our expansion of the amount of Linked Data that we’re publishing on the BBC /programmes http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes and /music http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/ sites, to provide additional detail about episodes of radio and TV programmes, and more links between the data exposed from each site. So, for example, we’re now exposing segment data for Radio 2 & 6 Music programmes that link the artists in each section to the relevant data on the /music website.” (backstage.bbc.co.uk 10 June 2009)

Are many Oxford researchers producing their data as Linked Data yet?

SallyR

Launch of OASIS

2009-06-26T14:40:00.002+01:00

This has nothing to do with popular music culture. I heard today about the recently launched OASIS (Open Access Source Book Now) which is now online at www.openoasis.org. It is targeted at different groups including researchers, administrators and librarians and aims to be a community-building as much as a resource-building exercise. Users are encouraged to share and download the resources provided, and to modify and customize them for local use. It strongly promotes open access (OA) and includes many articles on the topics related to OA. Alma Swan, one of those behind OASIS, has done a lot of work in the field of open access and is well known to those involved in repositories (online archives like ORA).

UCL and open access

2009-06-24T11:02:00.003+01:00

Although there have been increasing numbers of instances around the world of universities adopting a policy to require academics deposit their research publications in the institution's repository, the recent announcement that UCL has adopted such a policy has been something of a landmark. This is not only because another elite institution has taken this step, but also because the announcement was reported in the Financial Times. The fact that a national broadsheet newspaper thought it fitting to include the 'exclusive' in it's content gives weight to its importance. It has since been reported in the Times Higher and in Nature News which reported it as 'University College London joins rapidly growing throng.' Ironically you have to pay for access/subscribe to Nature to read this particular online article on open access.

The FT piece said that 'UCL’s move to “open access” for all research, subject to copyright law, could boost the opportunities for rapid intellectual breakthroughs if taken up by other universities, thereby increasing economic growth.' It goes on to discuss some of the issues associated with open access and the problems facing libraries, and states that universities want repositories (like ORA) to enable additional access to research and thereby complement journals, rather see the eradication of journals. It is a question of amending the publishing model.

UCL's policy is to ensure that all research, subject to copyright permissions, is made freely available online to all via its open access repository, UCL Eprints. UCL has established a publications Board to oversee its open access mandate. In the press release there are statements from academics from sciences and humanities who say that the move is supported by the UCL research community particularly because of the impact it will have on, well, research impact. And looking at the UCL download statistics you can see why.

So what does this mean for Oxford? In itself, nothing unless an Oxford academic happens to be a co-author with a UCL (or Harvard, MIT, Edinburgh or other institution with a similar open access policy) author and therefore their paper falls under the institutional access to research publications policy. However, it is yet another example of change in a rapidly developing environment. Authors may like to consider very seriously lodging a copy of all their work in ORA – at the very least for the purposes of preservation. We can then talk about access and dissemination via the Internet, effect on impact, and even policies for deposit if that is what the Oxford research community wants, at a later date. At least in the meantime Oxford will hold a copy of the work.

SallyR

Research data: The time for action is now

2009-06-08T13:42:00.003+01:00

‘The time for action is now.’ This was one of the main messages stressed at “The Data Imperative: Libraries and Research Data,” an event organised by RLUK/SCONUL e-Research Task Force in association with the Oxford e-Research Centre and the Research Information Network and held at the OeRC last Wednesday. The title was taken from the UKRDS report 'The data imperative: Managing the UK's research data for future use.' There has been so much discussion about the ‘problem of research data’ that we need to stop talking and start acting. The Australians certainly are – Alma Swan of Key Perspectives reported that the Australian government is pumping millions of AUS$ into itsdevelopment of provision for the management and curation of research data over the next 3 years. And this at a time of global cuts and financial crisis. They must think it’s important.

The meeting was mainly attended by librarians together with others including representatives from the British Library, JISC, Research Information Network and Research Libraries UK. John Milner, Project Manager of UKRDS reported on their plans to lay the foundations for ‘pathfinder’ activities which will take place over the coming year and which will be funded by HEFCE and JISC . The pathfinder work will pave the way for the proposed distributed national solution for the management and curation of research data produced by UK HEIs. From a personal as well as a professional perspective, it was a relief to attend an event focusing on actual practical solutions in the UK. I have been at too many events where I have thought that if I hear one more speaker tell me how much data is out there, how the quantity is increasing exponentially and what a problem it is, I shall scream.

I’m pleased to say that at Oxford we are taking practical steps to build a service aimed at the Oxford research community and its need to manage the data it produces. Luis Martinez in the 'Scoping digital repository services for research data management project' led by Prof Paul Jefferies has been investigating the current situation regarding research data at Oxford. OULS has been contributing to this work from the beginning. As Luis described in his report 'Research data management services: findings of the consultation with service providers,' a joint effort is the only way forward, involving expertise from across the University. This will incorporate existing services at Oxford which possess expertise in areas such a research support and project management and legal, metadata and digital preservation expertise.

The event came only a day after the JISC announced its latest funding call, 'Data management infrastructure.' Simon Hodson (JISC Programme Manager, e-Research) gave a brief outline of the programme. The JISC is expecting to fund 6 – 8 projects under this call. I suspect they will receive more than enough submissions which should result in some innovative and influential projects and, as a result, move the UK further forward with data management. The projects will be running concurrently with the pathfinder work of the UKRDS in which Oxford is closely involved.

One other main point raised at the day is that all the work being done should not be project based. It has to form the basis for an ongoing long-term commitment for the data with which it is concerned. We can’t ‘do’ data management and curation for say, the 18 month period of a project, and then stop.

It’s all very well planning innovative and expansive solutions for data management and curation, but there is the not insignificant matter of spondulicks. Who is going to pay for it all? Should it be the funding agencies? HE institutions? What about research which is not externally funded? All of the bodies involved are keeping a tight hold on their purse strings. So the answer remains to be seen. As Roger Mills, Plant Science Librarian suggested, perhaps we should all move to Australia.

SallyR

Author Choices

2009-05-21T11:10:00.007+01:00

I was struck recently by the strapline used by the publisher Springer on its Open ChoiceTM web page. ‘Open Choice’TM is the Springer manifestation of open access publishing. On payment of a fee (currently $3,000 USD), the author’s paper will be made open access i.e. freely available to anyone with Internet access, with no subscription required to obtain the full text. The strapline phrase used by Springer is:

"Your research. Your choice."

This phrase strikes at the heart of the scholarly communications debate.

Firstly, let’s deal with the phrase ‘Your research.’ Well of course it is – this is stating the obvious isn’t it? However, although the ideas, proposal, actual research activities, writing up and reporting are carried out by the author/researcher (and their team), there are other parties who may have vested interests in that research and who might have some claim to ‘owning’ all or part of the research. This could be a commercial company or funding agency which has provided funds for some aspect of the work. As such, they may be inclined to make stipulations about procedures and practice for carrying out the research. But if we ignore these technicalities, more often than not, it would be fair to say that as a general rule, the research belongs to the author(s).

That brings us to the second clause ‘Your choice.’ Even within the constraints of funder requirements and ethical & legal issues, any author producing publications and other research outputs is faced with numerous options for how to communicate their research to other interested parties.

A relatively recent development has been that a number of the major funding bodies including the RCUK and Wellcome Trust have policies that require publications produced as a result of their funding be made freely available (open access). Apart from a couple of agencies that specify deposit in a named service such as UKPubMedCentral or the ESRC repository, others leave the decision of exactly where to publish and where to make the item available, up to the author. This usually comes down to two options (although the author could do both):
1. publication in an open access journal (which involves the usual peer-review process - see DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals) for a comprehensive list) or other scholarly journal that offers an open access option
2. making a copy freely available via a repository like ORA (often referred to as an institutional repository)

Option 1 will probably involve money changing hands for which the author (or research leader) needs to obtain funding for publication. Option 2 is free to authors.

When opting to deposit in ORA or other repository, the author needs to consider whether or not they choose to give away their copyright, or amend any copyright transfer agreement to suit their requirements. Some guidance is given on the ORA Help & Info website. Please note that ORA staff do not dictate where academics should publish.

Dissemination is not just about formal publishing. Increasingly researchers are sharing their work and findings via blogs and wikis (see for example the Nature Network blogs), thereby not just disseminating their research, but also opening up a dialogue with others. The tools by which this is achieved are those which promote openness, sharing and making connections.

As well as the growing popularity of open sources of research output such as open access, open data, open content and open notebook science, more 'under the bonnet' openness is also available for exploitation. These include enabling data and text mining, open search (as available on ORA) most of these achieved by means of open standards. Linked data sounds pretty techie (proposed by a certain Tim Berners Lee back in the 90's), but it is simply a means by which one thing can be related to another so that a machine as well as a human can easily make sense of the connection: this can be used for publications, other outputs, content in the research itself, the people... the possibilities are endless. And this is not Space Odyssey 3000. It is happening (it is for example, how ORA and the Oxford research directory we are creating as part of the Oxford BRII project are constructed). And as researchers find out about these possibilities, they may well choose to take advantage of these tools - or find someone who can help them reap all the benefits these technologies offer.

I’ll ignore the complex problem of how to capture, record and store research outputs such as blogs for now. I shall leave for another day its effect on traditional publishing (by which I mean traditional subscription journals and standard books) .

The author is faced with all these options and new technical, policy and legal developments are constantly appearing. The decisions are up to the author/researcher. Are all authors, across disciplines, familiar with all the options open to them? Is training, help and support available for authors wishing to use these various options. What should we be doing at Oxford to take advantage of new developments and to provide help and support?

Sally R

California follows Max Planck

2009-05-07T16:23:00.002+01:00

Back in 2007 the Max Planck Society (MPS) in Germany (a highly respected organisation of research-led institutes) decided that the cost of subscription to Springer journals was far too high and so it cancelled its subscriptions. To cut a long story short, the MPS came to an agreement with Springer whereby a subscription cost for journals was agreed, but would include payment for the Springer Open access option (Springer Open Choice) for any Max Planck articles published in Springer journals.

This model has also been implemented by California Digital Library on behalf of the ten campuses of the University of California (UC) in a similar deal with Springer. This means that any UC author who publishes with Springer can opt for the open access option without having to find additional funds - the cost is included in the (undisclosed) institutional subscription to Springer journals. Both sides are describing this arrangement as a pilot. This method will certainly ease some of the confusion of what to do about selecting the open access option and making sure the funds are available (for example, by including publishing costs in a bid for a funding grant), even when a research project has ended. We'll await the results and outcomes of this pilot with great interest.

The UC Newsroom reported a quotation from Ivy Anderson, director of collections for the California Digital Library that 'UC faculty members have told us that they want open access publishing options in order to increase the impact of their published work and eliminate barriers to educational and research use.' Do University of Oxford 'faculty members' feel the same? and what do authors at the University of Oxford think of this model?

SallyR

Who do you think you are?

2009-04-28T14:53:00.003+01:00

One of the major problems being encountered by anyone involved with providing and accessing digital research materials, is that of ensuring an author is identifiable as a specific individual. This means that differing forms of an author's name can be correctly related to the same person (J. Brown, Jane Brown, Prof J K Brown, and so on), and that people with the same names can be reliably identified as separate unique individuals. The traditional method for dealing with this problem with books and their catalogue records has been librarians working collaboratively to develop author authority files: not a perfect, comprehensive or foolproof method, but one which has been adequate for its purpose. Unfortunately, this is not the case for journal articles or any other type of research output such as conference papers. Moving into the digital domain means that there are many other factors further complicating the situation and where the situation is frankly, a mess.

There is much work taking place around the world on this particularly thorny problem such as the British Library's 'Names' project. There is a useful list of projects working on the problem of author identification on the International Repositories Infrastructure wiki.

Now that so much more scholarly material is being made accessible via the Web (such as technical papers, conference papers, reports, images, data and other works), there are more journal titles than ever (resulting in a wide variety of methods for citing names), institutions are keeping records of their members centrally for research management and other purposes, and there are national reporting requirements and additional services being set up (such as the Thomson Reuters Distinct Author Identification System) there is enormous room for confusion and inaccuracy. There has been mention that CrossRef, the reference linking service might be involved in a possible widespread way forward.

Academics might use OpenID, HESA staff identifiers, institutional single sign-on identifiers and the rest. All are 'unique' but, like the common observation about standards, the good thing about them is there are so many unique identifiers to choose from!

This has a fundamental and profound effect on the fast developing and dynamic world of scholarly communication. How do we know the J.Brown we are referring to is the same J. Brown as the one whose paper we read last week?

We in the ORA team have to deal with this problem. We will be tackling it as part of the BRII project (Building the Research Information Infrastructure) where we will be creating a 'Person' record where different forms of a name can be normalised, have different 'roles' assigned to it (Principal Investigator, Lecturer etc) and that data can then be shared with others at Oxford. It is not an insignificant problem though. We need to allow for different forms of a person's name - there may be many contexts which require use of different versions. Also, we've already come across the problem of two people with the same first AND surname within a single Oxford department - we need to ensure that situations like this can be clarified by the machine and human readable descriptions we provide for each person. Because names can change over time (marriage, personal choice), a temporal aspect also needs including. We will be making decisions based on the long-term application of individual identifiers, and conforming to appropriate and proven technical and other standards.

This is a serious and challenging problem for those involved in developing systems and enabling scholarly communication, be they commercial publishers, bibliographic database suppliers, higher education institutions, HEFCE, ORA or other interested parties. The list on the RepInfo wiki indicates the widespread concern with groups around the world working on solutions. We have to hope that all the work does not result in a myriad of different, 'unique' solutions that are not compatible with each other.

And to complicate matters further, not only does this problem exist for people, but also institutions. There is currently no standard, widely used and unique form to indicate even at the top level a higher education institution, a funding agency or other body. A list of work taking place on this topic can also be found on the RepInfo wiki. At a very broad level, are all Oxford authors ALWAYS including their affiliation with the University of Oxford in addition to their other preferred affiliations in ALL their scholarly works, so they can be more easily identified for the future?

As more and more researchers make increasing amounts of different types of research output and supplementary materials available on the Web, and as others try to find and use research materials, it is of paramount importance that we at least know who we're talking about.

SallyR

Stirring stuff

2009-04-03T15:45:00.012+01:00

Prof Robert Darnton got the Oxford scholarly communications debate off to an excellent start last Friday. After vehemently declaring that the book is not dead, he proceeded to describe some of the activities in the new scholarly landscape that are taking place at Harvard. These include the creation of an Office for Scholarly Communications to provides a focal point for all matters associated with scholarly communications for Harvard, particularly ensuring increasing the availability of Harvard research outputs, as well as creating and maintaining the Harvard repository (DASH - currently Beta testing) for research articles (like ORA).

He described what is commonly referred to as the serials crisis where subscription costs have risen by hundreds of percent over the last 10 years when inflation has been low in the same period. Libraries are therefore struggling to continue subscriptions when their outgoings have considerably increased and their income has not matched the rise in costs. The casualty of this mismatch is often monograph purchases which have been cut in order to allow libraries to meet high journal subscription costs. He cited examples of what he considered extortionate subscription prices in the range of many tens of thousands of dollars for single journal titles.

Prof Darnton used the phrase 'cocaine pricing' to describe the means by which he believes journal publishers get users 'hooked' on journal subscriptions, whatever the cost. In this model the cost starts out low to get the users 'hooked,' and then is ratcheted up over time as users become reliant on the service. The result is a body of users who cannot (or will not) cancel the subscription, however much the title costs.

Prof Darnton talked about the monopoly of Google, particularly with reference to the recent settlement for digitising out of print, but in copyright book titles. He is concerned with such a major player essentially controlling access to information, a situation that may ensue because of the legal terms of the agreement.

He suggested turning the publishing model on its head by adopting a model where payment for a journal takes place at the front end of the publishing process (the so-called 'author pays' model) rather than as the final act in the procedure (ie a subscription to a title). He cited the SCOAP3 inititative where institutions pay to join the consortium, a central sum of money is gathered which is then used to pay publishing costs and all articles are made open access for any reader. This moves the payment away from subscriptions for access. A margin is retained to provide a profit for publishers. SCOAP3 is based in the field of high energy physics. Prof Darnton acknowledged problems with the model such as defining the business model and disagreed that this method of publishing would promote vanity publishing, the reason being that peer review exists in the same way it does now.

Prof Darnton described the now famous Harvard open access policies for scholarly articles which was adopted after a unanimous vote by faculty members. He was keen to stress that academic freedom is retained by authors being able to opt out of the mandate for deposit should they want to publish in a journal that prevents deposit of a copy of the article in Harvard's open access repository. Otherwise, authors are expected to deposit their own final peer-reviewed version of the article. In this way academic authors retain the freedom to publish wherever they wish. Prof Darnton suggested that if a core group of institutions changed their policies and attitudes towards the traditional publishing model, there might be a wholesale change in publishing models for the benefit of both institutional subscribers and readers.

A question was asked about the role of the University presses in this new landscape to which Prof Darnton replied that he thought such presses ought to be leading the way. He was also careful to mention the place of professional scholarly societies which he thinks may in the end benefit from the new model. Another questioner asked whether digitisation should be undertaken by university libraries in order to promote quality of both content and of metadata. The questioner felt that even the low error rate of the Google digitisation is unacceptable.

It would be good to hear from members of the University on these matters and from those who attended the lecture to plug any gaps in my memory of the event. Prof Darnton's lecture was recorded and will be made freely available in due course.
SallyR

Harvard again...and now MIT

2009-03-25T11:23:00.004Z

I've already reported that Harvard Faculty of Arts & Sciences and the Harvard Law School have adopted a policy to retain copyright and deposit a copy of articles in the Harvard open access repository (see also my last blog about the Dental School). This has now been augmented by adoption of a similar policy by the Harvard John F. Kennedy School of Government. It has been reported in a recent press release that the faculty has voted 'to make all faculty members’ scholarly articles publically available online at no charge, providing for the widest possible dissemination of faculty research and scholarship.' This development is part of a Harvard-wide decision to encourage wider dissemination of Harvard's scholarly output. To further emphasise this stance, Harvard has created an Office for Scholarly Communication based in the library, a move that stamps Harvard's commitment to embrace new opportunities for scholarly communications. In the words of the OSC's director, 'It has the potential for worldwide impact through exemplary initiatives to maximize communication of scholarly research.'

And the same week another press release is published reporting that Faculty at MIT has unanimously adopted an open access policy for scholarly articles. 'The vote is a signal to the world that we speak in a unified voice; that what we value is the free flow of ideas' (Bish Sinyal, chair of the MIT Faculty and the Ford International Professor of Urban Development and Planning). Authors grant MIT the right to make the articles freely available and must provide a copy of the article for the Institute to make freely available via the MIT open access repository (like ORA). Most importantly, the policy comes into effect immediately. No messing around.

So what does this say about scholarly communications? When institutions like Harvard and MIT take such bold steps to not only encourage, but actively promote open access of their publications in this way, it demonstrates that they think it is worth the effort and that they are willing to change their established publishing practice. It's also worth noting that these open access policies have not been imposed by senior committees of the institutions. It is the faculty members themselves that have voted in favour of adopting the policies.

What does this mean for Oxford? What does 'faculty' at Oxford think of the developments at Harvard and MIT?

Come and hear Prof Robert Darnton, Pforzheimer University Professor and Director of Harvard University Library talk on the subject of open access to research publications on Friday 3rd April, 11.00 - 12.00 (coffee from 10.30) at the in the EPA lecture room, Lincoln EPA Science Centre, Museum Road. The lecture will end with open discussion. Join the debate.

SallyR

Another Harvard open access policy?

2009-03-10T11:53:00.000Z

For some time now Harvard University's Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the Law School have had a requirement that authors retain the rights of their publications and deposit a copy in their repository. It now appears that the Harvard Medical School is considering following these examples. According to the Harvard Medical, Dental & Public Health Schools online news, "A team at the Countway Library has developed a two-pronged strategy to help scientists smoothly manage the latest changes in scholarly publishing and further expand the open-access model at Harvard."

They are considering adopting an open access policy across the Medical School together with a school-wide repository for deposit of items to aid compliance with NIH policy and to maximise dissemination of research.

The discussions include the following topics:

submission of items on behalf of the author to PubMedCentral (PMC) in compliance with NIH requirements so that the University can monitor compliance with the funder's policy
deposit of a copy of the work in the Harvard repository
enable authors to retain copyright of their work and grant a non-exclusive licence to both the University and the publisher.
provision of immediate access to the full text of papers

By repository or library staff taking on responsibility for submission to PMC the confusion about such submission is removed. There is a mixed economy at the moment with some publishers submitting automatically to PMC, sometimes the author has to deposit the copy resulting in a confusing situation for authors. This model is one that deals with the problem of the use of multiple repositories by making deposit in the institution's own repository the only deposit, from where, relevant items can be deposited in (or harvested by) other repositories such as subject repositories.

Authors are required by NIH to ensure that they do not prevent open access to their work by signing anything that would prevent this. Harvard librarian Scott Lapinski is quoted as saying:
“It’s an eye-opener to most researchers that they as creators have control over the copyright. All a publisher needs is a nonexclusive license to publish what you wrote. It’s a misconception that you have to sign away whatever the publisher tells you.”

Nothing is definite yet, but universities across the world will be watching out for further developments at Harvard. Particularly after the adoption of their existing policies.

Readers of this blog might be interested to know that Prof Robert Darnton, Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and Director of the Harvard University Library is coming to Oxford as part of the Bodleian Library and ORA events focused on scholarship, publishing and the dissemination of research. His lecture, 'Open access and other openings' will take place at 11am on Friday 3rd April in the EPA lecture room, Lincoln EPA Science Centre, Museum Road, Oxford. Refreshments will be available from 10.30am. The lecture will end with open discussion. For more information contact sally.rumseyATouls.ox.ac.uk (replace AT with @).

Edinburgh Publications Policy

2009-03-10T10:20:00.000Z

The University of Edinburgh's Electronic Senate has recently approved an open access publications policy for the University. This is a major step as the policy "requires researchers to deposit their research outputs in the Publications Repository, and where appropriate in the Open Access Edinburgh Research Archive in order to maximise the visibility of the University’s research." Assuming that the policy has been approved by all the relevant university bodies, it will come into force in January 2010 and in the meantime, researchers are being encouraged to deposit their research outputs in the repository.

Edinburgh has two repositories: the publications repository for access by Edinburgh members only (similar to Oxford's 'dark archive') and ERA (Edinburgh Research Archive) which is open access (the same as ORA). A summary of the policy is that it:

requires each researcher to deposit the peer reviewed final accepted version of a research output. They can then select whether it should be restricted or open access.
encourages deposit of non-peer reviewed items
requires researchers to use a standard form of the University's address on items submitted for publication in order that university research outputs can be easily identified.

The deposit includes items where a publisher will not permit dissemination via a repository - such items will be stored in the restricted archive and only the bibliographic details made visible. As such the policy adhere to the ID/OA model - Immediate Deposit/Optional Access. This means the item should be deposited at the earliest opportunity and made open access if possible. If open access is not immediately possible, the copy will be retained until such a time when the full content can be made open access. However, as Peter Suber points out in his blog, there is no requirement for authors to retain rights for their work.

The document includes a list of points that present the case for the policy and a selection of FAQs for researchers. One service of note is that for subject repositories (such as ArXiV) . The researcher must deposit bibliographic details of the item in the Edinburgh repository. They can continue to use their chosen subject repository. Repository staff will harvest a copy from the subject repository to be retained in the Edinburgh archive.

There are cost implications of adopting this policy and Edinburgh obviously feels that the cost is worth it. The sentiment is that scholarly publications and communications are changing, the repositories form an important part of the new regime and should therefore be developed to support new models of dissemination, not only technically, but procedurally and strategically.

The main drivers for adoption of the policy appear to be:

maximising impact of research
maximum visibility and dissemination of research output
the importance of high visibility leading to maximum citations for future research assessment
easy compliance with research funding bodies
enhancing Edinburgh's reputation as a research institution
adapting to a changing world of scholarly communications
acting in line with other institutions such as Harvard, Stirling and Glasgow universities

How important are these points for members of Oxford University?

Oxford has ORA (Oxford University Research Archive) which is continuing to be developed and could provide the means to deliver a similar policy at Oxford. Comments?

SallyR

The final RCUK open access policy

2009-03-02T10:49:00.000Z

After a long wait the last of the RCUK research councils has agreed its policy for access to research materials resulting from the research it funds.

"Last UK research council mandates open access
12 February 2009
The Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) has decided to mandate open-access publication of the research that it funds. However, it says that academics should be able to choose whether they use the so-called green option (ie, self-archiving in an on-line repository) or to use the gold option (ie, pay-to-publish in an open access journal).

This decision, which was made at the EPSRC council's December meeting, follows a consultation by Research Councils UK, in collaboration with the Research Information Network and the Department of Trade and Industry.

ESPRC was the only one of the seven Research Councils UK, which hadn't already adopted an open-access mandate; the others having announced theirs back in 2006. ESPRC will publish further details of its policy later in the spring."
Taken from Research Information news.

More details of this policy will be made available later this Spring. At the moment, EPSRC is still publishing its commitment to the generic RCUK policy. Open access means that there are no barriers to access (such as cost) to the full text of the publications for anybody with Internet access.

Oxford researchers who fall into this category can use ORA (Oxford University Research Archive) as the means to self-archive their research in an on-line repository. When more details are available from EPSRC, ORA staff will answer authors' questions about compliance with the policy using ORA. In the meantime, ORA is open for business - any Oxford reseacher who would like to deposit their research in ORA can contact us at any time for help (ORA@ouls.ox.ac.uk).

Since the Wellcome Trust introduced its policy for open access to research publications resulting from its funding, increasing numbers of funding agencies have followed suit. Policies differ as to what materials should be made freely available, when they should be made available and where materials should be deposited. The SHERPA/Juliet website provides useful summaries of numerous funding agencies' policies on access to research publications and data.

Reasons for funders adopting these policies include:

public access to publicly funded research
demonstrating value for money
enabling the widest possible dissemination of funded research
to ensure that anyone is able to access the research, regardless of ability to pay
to ensure that the funding body itself has free access to the research it funds

The quality of the research and peer review processes remain with open access.

Open access publishing is a topic we shall return to in more detail throughout these discussions and should form a substantial part of this whole debate at Oxford.

SallyR

Setting the scene

2009-02-23T11:01:00.000Z

My name is Sally Rumsey and I am the manager of the Oxford University Research Archive (ORA http://ora.ouls.ox.ac.uk). It is partly because of the rapid developments of archives (sometimes known as repositories) such as ORA that the Bodleian Library and ORA have embarked upon this series of events to open up the debate about what has become known as ‘scholarly communications’ at Oxford. These sorts of open access digital archives are just one strand in a massive evolving arena that constitutes dissemination of scholarly research.

According to the JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) Scholarly Communications Working Group, ‘the scope of the term “scholarly communication” is wider than "scholarly publishing" and covers the authoring, publishing (in a broad sense), reading and other uses such as annotation, criticism and commentary of information produced by members of the academic community for teaching or research.’

The topic and related subjects have been extensively discussed by the Russell Group, governments (including our own), funding agencies and at individual institutions across the world. But what do we think here at Oxford? How can we take advantage of new developments to maximise the impact of our research? Do we know what options for scholarly communications are available to us? Have we adapted to change or is there more we should be doing? What can we do to ensure the scholarly communications facilities and policies are in place to support Oxford’s internationally renowned researchers? How should we change our work practices (if at all) to make sure that Oxford research is ‘out there,’ used and built on – and accessible for the long term? Are there any barriers to access to the research materials Oxford scholars need, and conversely, barriers to access for others to the research produced by Oxford scholars? If so, what can we do to remove those barriers?

Over the coming months we’ll be taking a look at topics such as:

discovery of and access to scholarly publications and other scholarly outputs;
author’s rights and how authors and others involved in research want to use scholarly outputs;
the changes publishers have made to adapt to this new world;
the rise of a new generation of Open Access publishing models;
the expectations and requirements of funding bodies;how changes in technology are being used (and could be used) in scholarly circles;
what is happening with other scholarly outputs such as research data, conference and workshop items and other unpublished works? Are they consigned to oblivion squirrelled away on an individual’s hard drive or stored ‘safely’ at the bottom of a dusty filing cabinet?
responsibilities to the wider community such as taxpayers who ultimately fund much research and the developing world;
the growth of open access repositories such as ORA;
where will we be in five, ten, twenty years from now when the amount of research output has doubled, tripled or more? How can we stay ahead of our competitors?

If we ignore what is going on and do not grasp opportunities, is there a danger of being well and truly sidelined for other more easily available, more easily discoverable, more easily accessible research outputs? How should Oxford rise to the challenge? Indeed, should it rise to the challenge? We’ve been around for some time, why should we change? In the past the scholarly world took note and has been influenced by the ‘model’ of Oxford. Will the same happen with the Oxford model of scholarly communications? Join the debate.

SallyR

Join the debate

2009-02-18T13:08:00.000Z

Welcome to the Oxford scholarly communications blog. This blog is designed to complement a series of initiatives developed by the Oxford University Research Archive (ORA) and the Bodleian Library to foster discussion within the University of Oxford on how publishing, scholarship and the ways that research is disseminated are changing. We hope that you will come to the lectures that we are organising (Prof Robert Darnton from Harvard will deliver the first on 3 April), participate in one of our seminars, or otherwise send us your comments! Richard Ovenden, Associate Director.