Open Access Week 2018 Bangor University

This year’s International Open Access Week (http://www.openaccessweek.org/) runs from 22-28 October and takes as its theme “designing equitable foundations for open knowledge.” 

Here is our programme at Bangor:

Launch of Open Access week at Bangor – drop in for tea/coffee and cake – table in the main entrance

Monday 22^nd October, 1-2pm

Main Library

Audience: All staff and students welcome

Open Data Discussion: Cataloguing marine data. Beth Hall (Repository and Research Data Manager - maternity cover) – will discuss research data management with Cathy Blakey (Data Librarian for iMarDIS (SEACAMS 2)). 

Tuesday 23rd October 11am-12

Deiniol Building room 008

Audience: All staff and students welcome

Drop in session.  

Free tea/coffee and biscuits.

Open Access week training session: How to make your outputs Open Access via PURE. Drop in session.  All welcome.

Tuesday 23^rd October, 1-2pm

Deiniol AD035

Audience: All staff and postgraduate researchers welcome

Open to library staff: WHELF copyright roadshow.  Come along and play the Copyright card game and hosted discussion on all thing copyright.  Facilitators: Marie Lancaster (Cardiff Metropolitan University) and Scott Pryor (Cardiff University).  

Wednesday 24^th October, 10.30am-3pm

Reichel Hall

Audience: Library staff (other interested staff and postgraduate researchers should contact Jenny Greene (j.greene@bangor.ac.uk) for more info) 

Doctoral School training session: An introduction to Open Access publishing.  

Thursday 25^th October, 10-11am

Alun_101

Audience: Postgraduate researchers

Book here: https://www.bangor.ac.uk/doctoral-school/workshops/programme/

PhTea conversation about Open Access with free tea/coffee and cakes. 

Thursday 25^th October, 12-2pm

Audience: Postgraduate researchers

Undeb Bangor (4th Floor, Pontio building)

Drop in session https://www.undebbangor.com/voice/campaigns/phtea/

#ThesisThursday and #OAThesis

Social media campaign promoting Open Access Theses

Thursday 25^th October

Online only

Royal Society Publishing workshop
Friday 26th October, 10-11.30
Pontio PL5
All staff and students welcome
On Friday October 26th the Publishing team at the Royal Society will be visiting Bangor to deliver a publishing workshop aimed at Masters, PhD researchers and Post-docs, but all staff members are welcome to attend. The session will cover all aspects of how to publish a scientific paper in high-quality international  journals. The interactive session will included presentations and exercises, with a Q&A session. Information will also be provided on the Royal Society and its journals. 
The areas covered include: How to choose a journal to publish your research; How to prepare your paper for submission; Journal policies and ethics; Different models of publishing e.g. open access vs non-open access; How to promote your paper once it has been published.
Please follow this link to register and add the event to your Outlook calendar: https://www.bangor.ac.uk/doctoral-school/workshops/programme/royal-society-publishing-workshop-37945

Love Data Week event 14th February 2018

On the 14^th February Research staff, Postgraduate students and support staff gathered to mark International Love Data week with an afternoon of lively and informative talks under the heading Straeon Data Stories. The presenters brief was simple; 10 minutes on any aspect of Research data. What followed were presentations which posed questions, addressed challenges and discussed innovations in the area of Research Data Management, all showing the vibrancy of Research Data Management here in Bangor.

Dr Dave Perkins kicked off the presentations treating us to a selection of images taken from the world around us. He detailed how in order to transfer the real world into the digital world there is some translation which goes on in terms of computer bits. Due to the nature of this translation there is an element of inefficiency, leading, in some cases due to the nature of zooming, to pixelated images. He finished by posing the question ‘Does it matter if it is not as good as the real world?’ Are we happy to accept these inefficiencies?

We were delighted to welcome colleagues from Natural Resources Wales and Harriet Robinson gave us a fantastic overview of the breadth and depth of data which is available from them. This data is collected by NRW and ensures that decisions to do with the Natural World are made on sound evidence. They have several collections of data available, all available under an Open Government Licence, including: Recorder 6, Marine Recorder, Arc GIS, WIRS and WISKI (hydrometry and telemetry data taking recordings every 15 minutes across thousands of locations). One place to access NRW data is via Lle, a geo-portal developed as a partnership between Welsh Government and Natural Resources Wales, available at: http://lle.gov.wales/home. NRW ensure that the data is discoverable, accessible and reusable and are currently operating on 3* level of openness. There are some exciting developments in the pipeline. They are aiming to become as Data by Design organisation achieving a maximum 5* level of openness, improving the technology for the publication of data, innovate data usage and a wish to go Global.

Laurence Jones a PhD student from Bangor’s business school talked us through the types of data that he uses, the financial databases researchers in the Business School have access to and the models used to analyse the data they access. In this case data is not created, but accessed and analysed on computer terminals (jokingly referred to by Laurence as those see in films like The Big Short). This data includes stock market data (daily, second, millisecond) Credit ratings data and company data which includes financial balance sheets. He talked us through how he would analyse and interpret this data and how he would deal with outliers (…specific observations, Trimming, Winsorizing), given that the data is not always 100% accurate. Then using progression models they are able to control different things which may be affecting dependent variables, such as the impact regulation may have on company fortunes.

A new postdoctoral fellow to the University’s School of Ocean Sciences, Adel Heenan, gave us a ‘fishy tale’. Prior to arriving at Bangor Adel worked at the University of Hawai’i collecting data for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA, US department of Commerce) monitoring the coral reef fishes across the Pacific. Adel added atmosphere to her presentation by playing a video in the background of a fish sampling survey. This project generated a huge dataset and a report of its findings was presented to the Congress of the United States of America. The 2012 President Obama issued a directive pushing the Open Data agenda in the U.S. There was a need then to extend access to this data, to put in place quality control measures, to ensure efficiencies in terms of dealing with data requests and improve data archiving. Adel advocated the use of both GitHub and the Reproducible Research open educational course available via Coursera.

At the half way point we broke for refreshments, a chance for questions and networking as well as encouraging contributions to our Love Data Pledge and Data developments heart. Everybody was asked to pledge one thing that they plan to do with their Research data and suggest developments they would like to see at the University with regards to Research Data Management.

Professor Jonathan Roberts kicked off the second half of proceedings claiming: Love Data: Love Visualisation. He led us through 4 stories which have led to 4 lessons for good Research Data Management as follows:

·         D: Define the problem

·         A: Design and generate Alternatives

·         T: Critically Think

·         A: Assess outcomes with users.

Along with Panos Ritsos and Chris Headleand, Jonathan has published a book entitled Five Design-Sheets: Creative Design and Sketching for Computing and Visualisation, which leads the reader through sketching as a way to establish a problem and create a solution.

Graham Worley joined us to talk about the new SEACAMS 2 project aiming to make 20TB of data available to the Marine Renewables Industry. They have created iMARDIS, The Integrated Marine Data Information System to make this data available. The motto of the project has been “Measure once, use many times”. A phrase that encompasses the Open Data movement. Their aims are to offer a data download service, develop data products and create analytical and modelling tools. They have designed an infrastructure which offers more than just a repository for data, it offers granular metadata, dynamic access, the ability to retrieve subsets of the data and the use of APIs for programmatical access to the data for real-time feedback. They have also designed a metadata manager and have processed approximately 4TB of the data. The most difficult part of the journey so far has been the data licensing aspect by trying to make the data as open as possible but balancing alongside academic concerns.

Our second PhD student to present was Cameron Gray from the School of Computer Science. By using Learner analytics he has been able to assess the retention rate of students based on the first 3 weeks of attendance and produced a predictive model. This model can be used to identify at risk students and form the basis for strategies for intervention. The data also allowed the identification of any events which may trigger a fall-off in attendance. This will lead to Data Driven Decision making.

Our final speaker for this inaugural Data Stories event was Dr Panos Ritsos who talked us through Visualization beyond the desktop, the next big thing? Mixed/Augmented reality and the internet of things is set to change our perception of informational and physical space. Data can, and is, becoming more pervasive and this could lead to the death of the desktop as we move to more mobile technologies. He is working on Synthetic visualisations, real-time physical space representations of data. Augmenting the environment through interaction, reworking objects. This is leading to a different kind of openness, an openness of convenience. He encouraged anybody with an interest in visualising data to get in touch.

We would like to thank all speakers for their contribution to a lively and engaging event.  Good ideas were shared and good practice highlighted.  The event highlighted the scope and range of data that is being produced, handled and managed at the University.  A better understanding of what’s happening in practice, will help us understand how best the University can support research data management developments in the future.

This event also took part during the Bangor Sustainability Carnival, which aimed to showcase the range and variety of sustainability-related events that run in a typical month at Bangor University.  Good research data management support is essential to ensure data is available in the long-term. It is also essential that data critical for global sustainability efforts can be openly shared for the collaboration and the greater good.  Bangor University is not working alone, and we should be tapping in to developments in Research Data Management initiatives across the UK HE sector for UK-wide sustainable solutions.

Thank you to Dr James Wang, School of Electronic Engineering, who engraved these Data tokens for our presenters.

Open Access publishing at Bangor: Reflections on our progress by Dr Michelle Walker for Open Access Week 2017

As another International Open Access Week approaches, it seems to be an opportune point in the year to reflect on what has been achieved over the past year and to look forward to the next in Open Access here in Bangor. Our blog post for Open Access week in 2016 gave a detailed review of Bangor’s relationship with Open Access. Reflecting on this blog has highlighted the forward-thinking nature of some of our staff, although at points it felt like we were making slow progress. It does seem however, that great positive steps have been made this last year.

In April 2016 we began a cross-institutional project to implement PURE as our CRIS and repository. There is still some way to go until we reach full implementation as we have been proceeding with a phased roll-out since April 2016. In the interim we have imported all existing Research output information the institution held and made PURE our institutional repository. We have trained approximately 400 staff (Academic, central service, and Administrative staff), in 43 different training sessions, how to use PURE for updating and maintaining their profiles, and interacting with the functions of the repository.

At this point last year PURE still felt like a relatively new change and we have embedded not only the system, but also a new way of working. I had cause to revisit our old Publications database the other week and I could not believe how much things have changed. That is not to say that our installation of PURE is perfect yet, but it is so much better than what we had before.

The move to our PURE repository has contributed to changes we have seen in both the volume of items in our repository and the workflows associated with its maintenance. We have seen an increase in the numbers of full-text items being deposited by 147%. Prior to PURE all items in our repository were added and checked manually by repository staff. Since the switch, 68% of the records have been deposited Academic staff. We still check, supplement and validate all records (with our modest repository team) but this has been a positive step forwards. Not all of these changes can be attributed to the implementation of PURE alone. The REF Open Access requirements have focussed attention and effort and increased the need for central systems to monitor all these developments. We have also seen an increase in academic staff adding historical publication information. Historically, as a result of limited manpower, the institution only recorded the publication information of our academic staff from 2000 onwards. In the move to author-deposited metadata, we are seeing an expansion in the time-frame and volume of records we now hold.

The move to PURE has allowed us for the first time to start connecting all this data together. We our awaiting some exciting further developments with the delivery of our Advanced portal. This will allow us to visualise far more content to the outside world than we can currently and allow us to populate research content into School web pages with data harvested from PURE. It will also allow us to move our theses from their old home in our ePrints repository to PURE.

At various conferences, webinars and mailing lists over the last year it has become increasingly obvious the strides that institutions have been making in the arena of Open Access. It is heartening to hear the increasing volumes of open access content and repository deposits that some institutions are making, and also reassuring to raise awareness of the issues we are all grappling with. It is positive that such strides are being made towards open access, and it all adds to the collective development of the Open Access agenda.  These developments mean that Open Access in Bangor looks far more positive now than ever before.

We do not subscribe to the content you want?

Bangor University Library and Archives Service understand how frustrating it is when you cannot access the content you need to read. 

We aim to provide access to content that meets your research and teaching needs; every year we conduct a robust journals review in consultation with academic staff, library reps, college managers and deans to recommend cancellations (based on cost and usage data) and make requests for new resources.

In light of rising journal costs, it is increasingly important that researchers are aware of other avenues to obtaining full text content.

If the Library does not have the item you require, and it is essential to your research or study, we aim to obtain it as an inter-library request.  Please note the service is subsidised by the Library and Archives Service. For further details, please see here: https://www.bangor.ac.uk/library/using/docdel.php.en

Alternative sources of full text content include:

• Google Scholar provides links to full text where it is available freely online, they harvest from authors personal webpages and University repositories, but often the links take you to the publisher’s webpage requiring payment to access. 
• PubMed also has a LinkOut option for articles, which includes free versions available in institutional repositories.
• OpenDOAR is an authoritative directory of academic open access repositories which allows you to search across repository contents http://www.opendoar.org/search.php
• ScienceOpen works as an aggregator bringing together open access content from across a wide range of publishers and platforms including PubMed Central, arXiv and SciELO.  ScienceOpen also includes citation and usage data and encourages post-publication peer review of articles to eliminate bias. https://www.scienceopen.com/

Please also check out these new tools that might help you get free, legal access to pay-walled articles:

• Open Access Button – is a free, open source tool that can be used online via the website or as a browser extension for Chrome or Firefox. At the Open Access Button website https://openaccessbutton.org/ enter an article URL, DOI, PMID ID, Title or Citation. If the article is available, you will be provided a link to where it can be accessed. Alternatively, if you have downloaded the extension for Chrome or Firefox, just visit the article page on the journal’s website and click the OA button in your browser, which will show its availability.  You might also be interested to read about a new JISC project that is exploring a new service, which would embed Open Access Button functionality in the discovery/interlibrary loan workflow.  This project aims to: prevent multiple interlibrary loan requests for the same article; improve the user experience of the interlibrary loan process; contribute to making more articles open access; offer cost and time efficiency by checking if requested material is already available under open access conditions. https://www.jisc.ac.uk/rd/projects/supporting-inter-library-loans-with-the-open-access-button
• Unpaywall - is a newly launched browser extension developed by Impactstory. The browser extension can be downloaded for Chrome and Firefox and allows you to find free, full text versions of articles, where they exist. Once installed in Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox, Unpaywall brings up a green or grey tab on the side of the screen.  A green ‘unlock’ sign means that a free version of the paper is available and a grey ‘lock’ icon means that the tool could not locate a free version. http://unpaywall.org/

Further reading:

• https://goldsmithslibraryblog.wordpress.com/2017/04/10/open-access-button-and-unpaywall/
• http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2017/04/04/announcing-unpaywall-unlocking-openaccess-versions-of-paywalled-research-articles-as-you-browse/?platform=hootsuite
• http://www.chronicle.com/article/How-a-Browser-Extension-Could/239714
• https://www.nature.com/news/unpaywall-finds-free-versions-of-paywalled-papers-1.21765

Problems accessing the full text of a journal article?

The most common cause of problems off-campus is following an external link or going directly to a publisher’s webpage.  You can access all of the Library's electronic books, journals and databases from computers off-campus, but the resource provider needs to know that you are a Bangor University member.  If you have arrived at the publisher’s webpage, look for an option to sign in via Institutional Sign In, Shibboleth, or UK Access Federation and then select Bangor University from the list. Please note that if you are browsing the publishers’ sites, they will also present content that is not included in our subscription.

The best way to ensure you get the full text content off-campus is to find the article or the journal in Library Search and follow the link to the full text content.  By default, Library Search will display only items for which there is full text access. (You can tick the box “Also show results without Full Text access” if you require). If you are off-campus, clicking on the link from the “View Online” box will prompt you for your Bangor University username and password before taking you to the full text. Some journals are available to us from a number of different providers, so you will see a number of options with different date ranges; ensure you choose the right link.

 

If you are searching on a bibliographic database such as Web of Science or ProQuest, you will need to follow the full text links to access the full text, we do not subscribe to all the content you will find in a bibliographic database. 

If you are searching on Google Scholar, we have enabled many of the full text links for our subscribed content; on campus, you will see the “full text at Bangor” links.  To enable this on your own computer off-campus, go to the Google Scholar homepage, select “library links”, then search for, and select Bangor University.  We have not enabled all content links, so it is wise to always double check Library Search for content; also, you never know we might also have it in print.

If you think we should have access to an article but it is not working, please contact us (details below) with full details of the article (author, title, journal, issue/volume, year, page numbers) so we can investigate for you.  All publisher websites look and behave slightly differently and our library links can get broken, please contact us any time you are stuck.

For further help, please contact the Academic Support team on libsupport@bangor.ac.uk

 

A recent history of Open Access publishing at Bangor University

On the theme of “Open in Action” for International Open Access Week 2016, we would like to give you a short recent history of Open Access publishing support at Bangor University.  If you would like to send us any comments about this blog post or if you would like to share your own reflections on Open Access publishing at Bangor please contact us at repository@bangor.ac.uk and we’ll get your comments up on the blog.

This blog post details what has been happening at Bangor, this [link] previous blog post will give you a very brief timeline of Open Access publishing in the UK.

In 2005, Claire Davis, Research Assessment Manager  (Research and Enterprise Office) started an internal closed access database to record all published outputs by Bangor University staff (this was later developed by the Research and Enterprise Office and IT Services as the internal CRIMS system).  The Publications Database was vital for external reporting and research assessment, and included detailed, validated and enriched bibliographic records, but no open access full text copies. A project was begun to feed the bibliographic records into a DSpace repository with the aim of adding full text copies where possible, however lack of staffing and investment meant this full-text linking was not achieved at that time.

In 2012, Bangor University’s Library and Archives Service established a cross-university working group on Open Access publishing; launched a new set of informative webpages on Open Access; and drafted a new publishing policy for the University which encouraged Bangor’s researchers to publish Open Access.   This work was led by Sue Hodges (Director of Library and Archives) and Tracey Middleton (Digital Services and Development Manager, at the time Electronic Resources Librarian).

In 2013, Graham Worley (Research Co-ordinator, IT Services) and Dr Beth Hall (Research Support Librarian, Library and Archive Services) did a thorough review of repository software and proposed that rather than trying to revive the original DSpace repository, that instead we move to using the E-Prints open source repository solution. (This decision was largely based on requirements for research data as driven by EPSRC expectations on research data management from the 1st May 2015).  We took a fresh import of data from the Research and Enterprise Office’s Publications database and fed this into E-Prints.

In 2013, the first year that we received RCUK block grant funding, we aimed to make all RCUK-funded outputs open access via the Gold route as the Green route was not available to Bangor researchers until 2014 when the new E-Prints Repository, eBangor was launched.  In 2014, Dr Michelle Walker joined the Library and Archives Service in a new post as Repository and Research Data Manager (Michelle was previously Publications Officer in the Research and Enterprise Office). Michelle, along with maternity cover provided by Marjan Baas-Harmsma, started the process of linking bibliographic records with full text copies in the new repository eBangor.

Promotion and awareness-raising amongst academic staff at Bangor University on open access publishing options and funder requirements has been vital.  Since 2012, we have visited University Schools and Colleges, provided training sessions via the staff training and doctoral school training programmes, briefed the University’s Research Strategy Task Group, and continued to advocate for open access at every opportunity.  We have also arranged annual events for International Open Access week with excellent guest speakers.

We have benefitted from agreements that JISC have reached with a number of publishers to off-set open access charges, particularly SAGE from 2012.  The Royal Society for Chemistry open access vouchers for their “Gold package” subscribers is also a scheme we have benefitted from. We continue to engage publishers in discussions about off-setting of open access costs during renewals of subscriptions. We make use of the excellent Springer open access agreement and we would like to see more publisher agreements like this one.

In direct response to the new REF requirements for Open Access applying to publications from April 2016, we have seen an increase in the number of items being sent to the Repository team. 

During 2016 we have also been implementing PURE, a cross-university research information management system.  Claire Davis (Research and Enterprise Office), Michelle Walker (Library and Archives Service) and Graham Worley (IT Services) are leading the implementation of this new system across the University. PURE draws together research information from both internal and external sources and facilitates an evidence-based approach to Bangor's research and collaboration strategies, assessment exercises RCUK and HEFCE open access compliance and real time visibility of current research activity. We have moved all research publications from eBangor into PURE.  Using PURE as the new Repository software has advantages of workflow management for the Repository team, and also allows researchers to self-deposit publications and manage their own public profile on the University’s Research Portal http://research.bangor.ac.uk. 

This year the University Publications Policy has been rewritten as an Open Access policy by Dr Michelle Walker and approved by the University Executive and we hope to see Open Access Publishing become the default at Bangor University for the publication of journal articles and conference papers.

We also look forward with interest to developments in open access book publishing; we already actively support the Knowledge Unlatched scheme, where many libraries from around the world share the payment of a single Title Fee to a publisher to make the title Open Access. We are also actively exploring institutional “in-house” publishing options, and we want to ensure more of Bangor’s research data is published open access. 

If you are still not convinced of the benefits of open access publishing, then have a look at this report on the citation advantage of open access articles: http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.0040157  and watch these researchers talking about why they choose to publish open access: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2JT23E1bRE&feature=related 

References:

Eysenbach, G., 2006. Citation advantage of open access articles. PLoS Biol, 4(5), p.e157. http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.0040157

Brief timeline of Open Access Publishing in the UK

This blog post will give you a very brief timeline of Open Access publishing in the UK, the next post in this series details what’s been happening with Open Access publishing at Bangor University.

In order to highlight how long sharing research openly has been the norm in some disciplines, let us go back to 1991 for the advent of the online archive of free pre-prints in physics: arXiv.org.  Since 1991, over a number of years the Open Access movement gained momentum and in 2001, 34,000 scholars around the world signed “An Open Letter to Scientific Publishers” calling for them to establish an online public library making research outputs in medicine and the life sciences freely accessible.  This resulted in the establishment of the Public Library of Science (PLOS).  In 2002, the Budapest Open Access Initiative was a gathering of scientists who signed an agreement to preferentially publish their findings in open access journals; and in 2003, the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities was published.

Academic libraries have been at the forefront of promoting the Open Access movement; primarily due to ever-increasing subscription costs from publishers coupled with decreasing budgets from their academic institutions. But also driven by the role of libraries in facilitating the sharing of knowledge for the benefit of wider public good.

Since the early 2000s, we witnessed a steady increase in the number of research outputs being published open access by UK academics, and an increase in the number of institutional repositories giving researchers an option for “Green Open Access Publishing” (making an author-accepted manuscript live on the institutional repository after a publishers embargo period has lapsed). At the end of 2007, OpenDOAR (a quality-assured listing of open access repositories around the world as provided by SHERPA) had 1,009 repositories on the register, by July 2016 this number has risen to 3,201 repositories worldwide (this list includes subject-specific and institutional repositories).

In June 2012 the Finch Group (Working Group on Expanding Access to Published Research Findings, chaired by Dame Janet Finch) published their final report which supported the case for open access publishing through a balanced programme of action, and in particular recommended support for the “Gold route” to open access.  The UK Government accepted all recommendations in the Finch report and asked the UK higher education funding bodes and RCUK to put the recommendations into practice.  The RCUK policy supports both Gold and Green routes to open access, but promotes the gold route primarily with the allocation of a block grant of funding to each UK research institution starting in April 2013.

JISC have been successfully supporting the sector with Open Access publishing by reaching agreements with a number of publishers to off-set open access charges (article processing charges/APCs) with costly subscriptions to journal packages. From October 2015, JISC Collections and Springer reached an agreement to allow researchers in the UK to publish their articles open access in over 1,600 Springer journals without any costs or administrative barriers.

In April 2016 the HEFCE policy on open access came into force, requiring researchers to make open access any articles they want to submit to the next research assessment exercise. 

References:

1.       http://www.openaccessweek.org/profiles/blogs/open-access-week-2011-a-short-history-of-open-access

2.       http://www.hefce.ac.uk/rsrch/oa/whatis/

3.       https://www.jisc.ac.uk/content/open-access/our-role