NEWS
Suffolk 100 Reads
SUFFOLK Libraries has helped the National Literacy Trust (NLT) to create a list of 100 books to inspire young readers in the county. Research from NLT revealed an all-time low in children’s reading enjoyment and in Suffolk the charity spoke to children, families, teachers, community leaders, and partner organisations to create a list of the county’s favourite children’s books and graphic novels.
Suffolk 100 Reads list has been carefully curated to include old favourites and exciting new titles, and every book featured can be borrowed from Suffolk Libraries.
Teaching skills for librarians
CILIP’s School Libraries Group (SLG) is running its CPD webinar “Teaching Skills for Librarians” on 18 January 2025. The course is designed for individuals without teaching qualifications who want to learn how to create effective learning experiences for students in the library. By the end of this webinar, delegates will have achieved an understanding of how to construct a learning experience for pupils; developed their knowledge of the language used by teachers, and gained some tips and ideas of how to begin teach- ing in their library. For more details visit https://tinyurl. com/2narcpy3.
RLUK conference on trust and integrity
CHAMPIONS of Knowledge: Libraries as beacons of trust and integrity is the title for the RLUK25 Conference in Liverpool on 19-21 March 2025.
Explore the philosophical and pragmatic challenges for research libraries and their role in upholding the values of trust and integrity with keynote speakers including Mahaletchumy Arunjanan, Global Coordi- nator of the ISAAA and Executive Director of Malaysian Biotechnology Information Centre (MABIC) and Christopher Smith, Executive Chair of the Arts and Humani- ties Research Council (AHRC). Register at
www.rlukconference.com.
8 INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL DIGITAL
Biggest questions for open access policy
THE BIGGEST questions facing open access publishing have been explored and prioritised by MIT Press in a new report. The report is based on a workshop – Building an evidence base to support the future of open research policy, which looked at how “funder policies are increasingly driving openness and transparency of research results, with varying degrees of success.” Top of the list of the consolidated and prioritised questions coming out of the workshop was scenario modelling – whether it can be used to anticipate out- comes and unintended consequences. The example it gives is “what are the potential impacts of immediate Green open access policies on subscription revenues for publishers and subscrip- tion spend for universities?” It also asks what mechanisms are needed to enable stakeholders to collab- orate for productive scenario modeling? Key discussion points set out in the report explore the current state of open access publishing and the problems it faces saying: “Publishing is incentivised to shift to a volume-based system, rather than a highly selective process that focus- es on quality,” and that supporting the “many models is complex and expensive for publishers and institutions. This is especially true for society and univer- sity press publishers who do not have the scale to support multiple models robustly.”
It asks: “How can we ensure that cur- rent and future policies lead to the most effective and trustworthy ways to share research?”
The workshop and the report start with “an economist’s provocation”, from Adam
B. Jaffe, Professor Emeritus and Research Professor of Economics, Brandeis University, which includes obser vations that under pin much of the discussion. For example, that institutions are “out- sourc ing professional evaluation of their employees to publishers” and that “Over- reliance on bibliometrics in academic evaluation is problematic and excludes quali- tative understanding of what researchers are doing for their employers.” And that if open access publishing sticks with this evaluation process it will be “a wasted opportunity to move beyond the World War Two-era conception of the relationship between government and the research enterprise.” Fundamental key research questions are posed like: “What do journals really do and how much do they improve things?” And “What is the correlation between what journals and referees do with what universities care about?” The answers may help solve which open access models work as preprint versions of articles are open access under the Green model: “What models would work for curation and evaluation? How can those preprints be edited, curated, and improved, and how would that be paid for? And do these science- focused meth- ods work for the humanities or social sci- ences?” The solution offered is to: “separate dissemination of research results from evaluation of those results. This would require reorganizing existing funding and processes. Research institutions still need a way to evaluate their employees.” For more and to see recordings of the workshop visit:
https://mitpress.mit.edu/the- mit-press-releases-report-on-the-future-of-open- access-publishing-and-policy/
Licence negotiations move to JISC
JISC is set to take responsibility for copyright licence negotiations on behalf of the higher education (HE) sector. The move recognises Jisc’s expertise
in licence negotiations and the impor- tance of the HE sector adopting more
systematic approaches to negotiation. The work will still be done by the Copy-
right Negotiating and Advisory Commit- tee (CNAC), but responsibility will pass from Universities UK (UUK) to Jisc after 36 years of UUK oversight.
December 2024
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