not cater for commercial organisations and advising our scientists against publishing in their journals
l Improving RB’s success rate for publi- cations by providing guidance and training to potential authors
l Creating a more reliable process for complex search strategies
l Increasing internal awareness
The internal awareness strand will involve a new project for Arwen: “Although we have a number of collections that include our publications, we don’t at present have a dedicated repository for them. Creating this collection, and developing the right metadata, could bring enor- mous benefits to the company’s corporate memory. This is just the sort of added value that the library can bring to RB.”
Pay as you go
Another reason for the central role of the library is technical. “We do things differently to most other pharma, law, and university libraries. They have a lot of subscriptions to publications and services. At RB we use a pay-as-you-go model. There are pros and cons to both, but we think this gives us a lot of advantages.” These advantages include highly tailored collections and the ability to sustain sophisticated metada- ta to in-house classification standards, which wouldn’t be possible with a broader, less-relevant database. It also means that RB scientists receive high-level training on research skills, such as search strategies, referencing, and copyright. As everything is pretty much at the point of use, it puts live copyright checks front and centre. “The staff of institutions that rely on subscriptions working in the background don’t always have the level of apprecia- tion for copyright legislation as ours do; we force our users to consider copyright. Our oversight also gives us lots of KPIs and metrics, but the biggest advantage is how much money we save every year by only paying for what we want and cutting duplicated costs.” Arwen’s team has done so much work to consolidate and digitise legacy collections that for the first time in 2017, over half of all journal articles used by the business were filled from internal repositories. “So, we saved 50 per cent of the total cost of reusing articles in our dossiers!”
Professional challenge
One of the difficult areas for Arwen is the clash between corporate and academic worlds in the Open Access (OA) debate. “As OA has become more widespread and variations in licence terms have increased, quite a few have a blanket prohibition on commercial use. The trouble is that ‘com- mercial’ often isn’t defined, and publishers
26 INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL
Front entrance to the Science & Innovation Centre, opened in 2019.
rarely delineate between for-profit activi- ties and research undertaken by a com- mercial employee. We wouldn’t expect to get the former for free – but I don’t think we should be banned from doing the latter. As we’re commercial, however, there is less sympathy for our needs.” She says: “As a librarian, I know the drive towards OA is done for the right reasons, but in terms of working in a commercial organisation it’s a nightmare.” Last year a big publisher withdrew from their licensing agreement with the Copyright Clearance Center (CCC), the US licensing agency. Because RB can’t use their non-commercial OA model and can’t pur- chase the appropriate permissions through their CCC licence, Arwen finds herself falling through a gap.
“OA is academic sector-facing, and that makes sense, but there is a problem in the industry if others are completely shut-out of the model. I’d like to be an advocate, that ‘voice in the room’, reminding pub- lishers and rightsholders that commercial companies need access to high-quality information too.”
Reputation
This willingness to take to the stage has generated interest back at the office. Arwen spoke at the International Clinical Librar- ian’s Conference (ICLC) in October and reported back to her internal stakeholders. One director in the business commented ‘I didn’t know librarians did that’. “For years we’ve been building our rep- utation from the ground-up – rather than trying to get top-down support,” says Arwen. “When I joined RB in 2012, the library just
didn’t have the profile to speak to senior management – we just weren’t impor- tant enough to be on the radar.” Now however, the library is being invited to sit on projects and boards, and is expected to be visionary in its own right. “I have big plans,” laughs Arwen. “We used to talk about ‘next year’s battle’ as a joke – ‘next year’ being a fictional future place where we might achieve a change.” However, at the beginning of 2020, Arwen’s team really are planning the direction that they want the RB Library to go in. Roll-out of the new publication process is top of the list, along with fur- ther work on a training programme for literature searching. As for Arwen, 2020 marks her eighth year at RB. “When I first started as assistant librarian, the agency that RB contracted the library service to told me this was a two-year job. They didn’t believe that the library could ever become significant to the business. They were clearly wrong! It was an underestimation of what can be achieved by dedicated librarians, but also, crucially, it showed a lack of under- standing of RB’s vision for medical and scientific excellence across the business. We saw that and believed in it, and now our library helps to underpin it. When the library and its team were brought in-house, that was RB clearly telling us that we were important to the business’s future, that we had done well, and that they wanted us to do more.”
So how long is Arwen planning to stay at RB? “Maybe for as long as they want me,” she replies, “Definitely for as long as they challenge me!” IP
January-February 2020
Arwen Caddy Interview
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