Event report
research agenda. She described how there are ‘slight tensions;’ between central services and local services, with different departments of the university operating in different ways. ‘There is also a plethora of committees,’
she joked. ‘There are committees all over the place.’
The workshop session proved popular with delegates
research: ‘People are doing this because they want to, and because it important to them, and we need to keep a close eye on the entire system and make sure that it is useful to us all.’ She added: ‘There has been a whole
shift in research culture; we are not just focussing on published outputs. We are much more holistic and are looking at the whole research system; what we want researchers to do, how can we incentivise them – and of course we need as much information as possible about what researchers are currently doing in terms of the process around dissemination.’
Identifiers for navigating research Rachael Kotarski, head of research infrastructure services at the British Library, and Christine Ferguson of the European Bioinformatics Institute, explained to delegates how persistent identifiers such as DOIs have long been used to create lasting links to research papers – and how, increasingly, the allow the scholarly community to link and disambiguate a wide range of outputs, contributors, funders and other entities on which research is built. Kotarski described how the EU-funded
FREYA project is working to link together all these identifiers, enabling discovery of research, collaborators and impact, and attempting to create a persistent identifier graph.
She outlined examples that link facility
use and funding to theses in the British Library’s EThOS collection, and show how Europe PubMed Central is linking from preprints to published articles and back. Ferguson gave examples of preprint
www.researchinformation.info | @researchinfo
“There is also a plethora of
committees. There are committees all over the place”
records used within her institution, which highlighted the fact that the record was a preprint, how it varies from the version of record in terms of peer review, and the links between the preprint and the published article. All versions are linked through a persistent identifier, as well as being lined to the citation network.
Cambridge’s journey Lauren Cadwallader, deputy manager of scholarly communication at Cambridge University, described how in 2015 the institution set up its Office of Scholarly Communication – a team dedicated to helping with open access and research data management support across the university. Four years on and the University is one of the first in the UK to have a position on open research. Cadwallader’s talk described progress on the project – from compliance to good practice as a normal part of research to preparation for challenges such as Plan S and the increasing use of preprint servers. She outlined how Cambridge, though in
many ways different to other institutions, in fact shares many things with other universities in terms of their scholarly communications systems and the way in which they are handling the open
Cadwallader described how the early months and years of her department were taken up with compliance, and convincing researchers of the benefits of open access: ‘Then, slowly, around 2016 we began to talk more about open research. Our team grew fast, reflecting the scale of the work we had to do at Cambridge.’ A pilot with the Wellcome trust followed, along with increased training around open research, and then an agreement from the University in 2017 that it should adopt an agreed position on open research. Members of the universities were questioned about their practices around open research, and training courses were set up for researchers. Earlier this year, Cambridge signed the DORA agreement. Cadwallader admitted that the
university was ‘not there yet’ in terms of a fully-formed strategy, but that strong progress had been made in implementing holistic initiatives. She said further progress would depend on third-party timelines and requirements, academic engagement, and new developments in scholarly communications.
Monograph mess? Martin Eve, professor of literature, technology and publishing at Birkbeck, University of London, described how open-access monographs have been acknowledged as difficult, economically, to implement. The recent pan-European declaration,
Plan S, however, specifies an impending mandate for monographs that are the result of funded work. This talk explores the challenges and opportunities in this space as well as detailing the recently announced COPIM initiative, funded by Research England, that is designed to bridge the infrastructural gaps for OA monographs. Eve explained how monographs are
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