Half in, half out

Going slightly off the topic of Open Access and other research support related activities today and thinking about the work environment for those of us in support roles.

A while ago, I made a pact to only produce reports in electronic form, and not print them for anyone, just send them the files.  I also had a plan to try and reduce the amount of paper written notes I produce, that just get transcribed into electronic notes later on.

Why?  With one eye on the environment, and another on more easily accessing the information I need, whilst also reducing the amount of time I spend 'creating' notes from notes I have already created, it seems like the only way to go.

Weirdly, I find myself 'half in, half out' of the migration to digital.. I purchased a new set of notebooks yesterday.  There's nothing quite like paper notebooks, somehow my thoughts and ideas don't flow so easily in an electronic world.  My handwriting is certainly faster and more accurate than my typing!  It's more than this though.  With the need to move from meeting to meeting, or from training event and back to my desk, I'm not  really provided with the tools to be able to rove from one location to another and take my work life with me.  I'm not the only one, so it's not a personal thing, but it is slightly frustrating and something I am trying to change for the team I work in at present.

I have just had a peruse of my desk at work:

• Work issued computer
• Personal iPad (I wish I had a work issued one but there you go) with Mac wireless keyboard
• In-tray (overflowing with stuff I am already working on)
• 3 notebooks for the different parts of my role
• Leather bound personal/professional diary (it's posh, and I can't seem to live without it, my iPhone calendar just doesn't seem the same)
• RLUK strategic plan 2011 (passed to me by a colleague a copy of which also currently on my iPad)
• Post-its - a dead giveaway that I haven't entirely relinquished the paper world yet

File boxes, and lots of them fill my shelves, probably largely stuff that could be scanned and disposed of by now, and not replaced by new paper versions.  I do however find it difficult not to print lengthy reports for ease of transport and reading at my leisure, although I am getting better at doing this with my iPad when I am on the move.

So, back to open access.  If I find it hard to migrate to a more digital environment, how exactly do I expect my researcher colleagues to be any more successful in order to fulfill their open access obligations on research data?  Hmm, food for thought.

Implementing the Communication Strategy for PubLists and QMRO Series - part 1 - Speaking engagements

So, to start the ball rolling on this series looking at the different communication methods I will be using during this implementation project, I thought I'd talk a bit about speaking engagements.

I don't think anyone has ever accused me of being short of a word or three.  When considering what to say during these all-important speaking engagements, this can be both a blessing and a curse!  Whilst the fear of speaking before large groups has long since subsided, knowing what to say, and when to keep schtum has always been a difficult one for me.  I also find it difficult to navigate the fine line between 'formally informal' and just downright 'chatty'.

I recently spoke at two different 'events', one of which was a strategy group meeting, whilst the other was a larger research centre staff meeting.

The Research Centre meeting was an invitation to 'talk about open access' in 15 minutes.  Note the 'invitation, not a begging of time slots by me, but someone actually asking me if I could come and speak (could I ever!).  The staff attending this meeting were researchers in the main, so a really good opportunity to get my message across.  I therefore limited myself to the following four topics that I knew would be high on the agenda, and kept it quite informal, whilst I did use a presentation, I mostly spoke without notes (which I prefer anyway) and kept the slides to the minimum:

Benefits of open access (wider exposure is a good thing!)
The green route (you don't have to pay lots to do it!)
Copyright compliance (we check everything before we make it available)
Method of deposit (it's quick and easy)

For a first foray into speaking about open access at a research centre meeting, it actually went really well.  It was a post-lunchtime slot (not the best time to get everyone awake) and there was one person who basically sat and smirked the whole way through - which I prefer to imagine was due to the rather delicious luncheon they had partaken of before coming rather than any personal sleight on my presence at the meeting - otherwise, the audience seemed responsive, interested by the self-archiving option, and whilst nobody leapt up and volunteered to be the first one to become 100% OA, I left hopeful of some new uploads to the repository within a few days.

OK, so how naive am I?  Zilch.

The other event was a strategy meeting for faculty and was investigating the necessary information to put together a faculty-wide policy on open access.  This was an interesting opportunity to test my understanding of OA and research funding T&Cs, and also to get some useful ideas on where information is lacking on our webpages and in the literature we produce.  I have to say, I did feel like I'd been grilled quite thoroughly when I'd finished, and there were lots of questions that I needed to go away and find the answers to, but this was all good work that has helped the policy to be drawn up and for us to have started on a pilot implementation plan.

This second meeting has actually turned into a much bigger piece of work for me; resulting in a pilot project to talk on a 1:1 basis with researchers and engage them individually as well as at the broader centre, school or institute level.  Something I hadn't planned for in my strategy and which I have now added as an option.

From these two quite different meetings has come the following:

1. People are not wholly unaware of open access and they do recognise that they need to engage at some point
2. There is willingness and a recognition of the importance and benefits of OA
3. There is a recognition that the responsibility lies with the researcher to engage
4. Whilst I haven't encountered outright resistance yet, there is perhaps reticence, or just hearing it from me is not enough to get people started - is it a technical barrier, a time barrier or a knowing where to start barrier?  Probably all three
5. There is growing awareness that not engaging with conditions on research funding concerning open access could lead to significant problems down the line - and this is leverage

No doubt there will be more meetings a long the way and more to learn in the process.

Implementing the Communication Strategy for PubLists and QMRO - part 1

Back in the heady days (January 2011) of the JISC-funded RePosit project, I drew up a Communication Strategy that I planned to use to identify routes and methods of communication and advocacy once Queen Mary Research Online was launched.  At the time, this seemed like a long way off and I set it aside as something to work with 'later'.  Well, 'later' arrived with somewhat more bang than I expected in September 2011 with the strategy being taken up by the powers that be and with my strategy turning into a full blown project.

So, here I am 'Implementing the Communications Strategy for PubLists and QMRO' with a series of blog posts about my endeavours to engage the various echelons at QM in open access and publications management.

PubLists - QM's research publications management database, running on Symplectic Elements
QMRO - Queen Mary Research Online - the institutional repository, running on DSpace

To start with, my strategy needs a project plan, something I haven't drawn up before, and which is proving a bit daunting.  However, some of the strands on my strategy are already taking shape, so there is progress even without the plan itself having been finalised.

Over the course of the next few weeks I hope to do a series of updates focusing on various elements of the strategy, the first of which will follow shortly.

The views expressed in this blog are mine and are not representative of Queen Mary, University of London.

60% of Journals Allow Immediate Archiving of Peer-Reviewed Articles

Peter Millington at Nottingham University's Centre for Research Communications has just published recent analysis of self-archiving policies of journals indexed by the Sherpa-ROMEO service.  An impressive, and myth-busting, 60% of journals allow immediate archiving of peer-reviewed articles, and after embargoes have lapsed, this rises dramatically, to 80%.  In all, taking into account special requirements by publishers and embargo periods that vary from 3 months to 5 years, 94% of journals do allow self-archiving of the peer-reviewed article.  All good news for those of us hitting the advocacy trail at the moment.

The full article can be found here on the Sherpa Services Blog.

Measuring uptake of Open Access - addendum

So, having completed searching for OA journals in DOAJ, I have been trying to decide on the best way to work through the remaining 2600 journal articles in my spreadsheet.  I have started by working through the known publishers and identifying which have an OA (Open Choice, or similar) option on their subscription journals to try and reduce the number of articles I have to check.  So having added a step to my initial workflow, I am back at it, trying to get to the end data.

Correction - my original starting number of articles is 2771, of which so far I have identified 131 as Open Access, so my original post stating 1700 items to check was somewhat optimistic.  Still, it's good that our researchers are producing so much, and I now have a list of 131 items to target for Queen Mary Research Online.  Silver linings anyone?

Defining and describing a research collection - part 1

I have been working with Corporate Affairs here at Queen Mary to integrate Research Publications into the College's stylesheet and template for the Research website.  It's been an interesting experience!  As part of a broader aim to provide a better range of information for researchers, both internally and externally, I've been asked to provide details of research collections and services for researchers within Library Services.  On the surface, this seems simple enough, think about each discipline, identify where there are particular 'strengths' for researchers and how this reflects current research, and bob's your uncle.  Right?

Wrong.

OK.  Let's break this down a bit...

How do you describe a 'research collection' as distinct from a 'teaching collection'?
What makes a research collection 'strong' or denotes 'quality'?
Is there a shopping list of texts, and other content, that constitute the basis of a good quality research collection in a given discipline?
Would this shopping list, if it existed, provide the minimum that would be required, across the whole discipline, and if so, what else would be needed to provide a truly quality collection?

Where do you begin to review a collection that you already own, to identify what is research relevant?
How do you decide between what is research relevant to your own researchers, and what is research relevant externally?
What happens to the parts of your collection that are not currently research relevant to your institution, but might be relevant externally, or might be relevant in the future?  Is this a good enough reason to keep this content, and if so, what opportunities are there for promoting this content to the outside world?

Perhaps the term 'collection' is the problem.  A collection is a group of materials.  That's it.  Just a group of materials.  As librarians, we assign all sorts of other criteria to these collections by tacking on other words to describe their content and how they behave.  This then changes the definition to meet our needs.  Add the terms, 'development' or 'management' to 'collection' and things can get really complicated.

Should a research collection be subject to the same development and management strategies that teaching collections are subject to?
Should a research collection grow over time, because somebody somewhere will need to access something at sometime?  Or should the research collection evolve, as teaching collections do, to reflect a change in need, discarding content no longer useful to the institution?  Would this still constitute collection development?

Who decides?

Lots of things to consider over the coming months, starting with that shopping list!

Measuring uptake of Open Access at QM

I am currently trying to put together all the relevant bits of data, and there are plenty, that will allow me to calculate what proportion of Queen Mary publications are Open Access (OA).  So far, the process has been time-consuming and not a lot of fun, but I feel like I am starting to make some progress.  Please someone out there doing a similar job to me, is there a better way?

The plan:

• Extract a report from PubLists, the publications management system at QM - this gives me a recently updated and reasonably complete set of data (thank you REF dry-run!)
• Identify OA publishers where all journals are OA and flag all the records in my spreadsheet
• Identify OA journals by publishers whose other titles are subscription - judicious use of DOAJ very important here - flag more records
• Filter my spreadsheet to show only those records where I haven't identified them as OA and then start working through the remaining records to find out if they are OA papers in a hybrid journal
• Calculate the number of paid OA/OA published papers in 2010
• Check through the remaining records for self-archived copies in QMRO
• Start calculating how many of the 1700 records are available OA somewhere

I am still identifying OA journals at the moment and have spent 2 days working on it so far.  I was hopnig to have it finished by the end of the week, but this seems to be less and less likely.  The sheer size of the task is quite daunting, and I am only concentrating on 2010 for now, as the most recent full calendar year, but I'd like to be able to do this in a more systematic and timely way...

Initial thoughts about how to make this simpler:

1. Please, please, please could I have an extract from DOAJ that would make the process of identifying OA journals much easier
2. Please, please, please hybrid journal publishers, provide me with a report of my OA content, download and other usage statistics would be lovely, but at the very least I need to know what there is!