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Research Professional – all you need to know

Funding opportunities

Every BU academic has a Research Professional account which delivers weekly emails detailing funding opportunities in their broad subject area. To really make the most of your Research Professional account, you should tailor it further by establishing additional alerts based on your specific area of expertise.

Research Professional have created several guides to help introduce users to ResearchProfessional. These can be downloaded here.

Quick Start Guide: Explains to users their first steps with the website, from creating an account to searching for content and setting up email alerts, all in the space of a single page.

User Guide: More detailed information covering all the key aspects of using ResearchProfessional.

Administrator Guide: A detailed description of the administrator functionality.

In addition to the above, there are a set of 2-3 minute videos online, designed to take a user through all the key features of ResearchProfessional.  To access the videos, please use the following link: http://www.youtube.com/researchprofessional 

Research Professional are running a series of online training broadcasts aimed at introducing users to the basics of creating and configuring their accounts on ResearchProfessional.  They are holding monthly sessions, covering everything you need to get started with ResearchProfessional.  The broadcast sessions will run for no more than 60 minutes, with the opportunity to ask questions via text chat.  Each session will cover:

  • Self registration and logging in
  • Building searches
  • Setting personalised alerts
  • Saving and bookmarking items
  • Subscribing to news alerts
  • Configuring your personal profile

Each session will run between 10.00am and 11.00am (UK) on the fourth Tuesday of each month.  You can register here for your preferred date:

 

24 June 2014

22 July 2014

26 August 2014

23 September 2014

28 October 2014

25 November 2014

These are free and comprehensive training sessions and so this is a good opportunity to get to grips with how Research Professional can work for you.

Firsthand: HEFCE’s Open Access Policy

BU Challenges, Guidance, Info Days, Post-award, Publishing, Research assessment

A few weeks back we were privileged to welcome experts on the topic of Open Access to speak at BU in an event well attended by delegates from HEIs across England, Scotland and Wales. The event was enjoyed by all who attended and over a series of blog posts I hope to summarise some of the key points raised by each of the speakers. We also filmed the event so hope to be posting this soon for all to watch, enjoy and comment upon. 

A few days a go, I summarised Alma Swans Introductory Address on ‘The benefits of Open Access’. Today, I look at Ben Johnson’s presentation ‘Open Access in a Post-2014 REF’.

Ben Johnson is a policy adviser at the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), where he has worked for the past five years. He has a first class honours degree in music from the University of Southampton, and ten years’ experience working in strategic planning, process improvement and risk management. Since joining HEFCE, Ben has focussed on developing the Council’s thinking in novel, emerging and cross-cutting policy areas. Recently, these have included examining how technological advancements can drive openness in education and research. In 2013, Ben joined the research policy team to lead HEFCE’s work on open access, research information and infrastructure.

In April, HEFCE and the other three UK funding bodies published details of a new policy for open access relating to future research assessments after the current 2014 REF. To read this item in full visit: http://www.hefce.ac.uk/news/newsarchive/2014/news86805.html. In his presentation, Ben talked through this policy and answered questions from delegates throughout the day.

He opened his presentation by outlining Open Access its flavours and routes. GOLD being the journal making the work immediately and freely accessible online under a CC-BY licence and GREEN by the author depositing their work into an intuitional or subject repositories at point of acceptance – further information can be found in earlier blog posts (How to deposit to BURO, Green & Gold).

HEFCEs core principle behind the policy is that outputs submitted to a post-2014
REF should be Open Access and they have three objectives in implementing the policy:

  • Significantly increase the uptake of open access options
  • Protect author choice as much as possible
  • Stimulate the deposit of work in repositories

 

  The minimum requirements of the policy are that:

  1. The final peer-reviewed draft of your paper is deposited in an institutional or subject repository on acceptance
  2. The repository record must be discoverable ASAP
  3. The full text must be accessible ASAP (or once an embargo has elapsed)

 This will apply to all journal articles and most conference proceedings (those with an ISSN), he also stipulated that the maximum embargoes to be allowed will be:

  • REF main panels A and B – 12 months
  • REF main panels C and D – 24 months

An analysis of the REF 2014 submissions found that 96% of outputs could have been Open Access based on this criteria and the remaining 4% would be covered in the exceptions of the policy.

In addition to this, extra credit will be given in the research environment component of the post-2014 REF where an HEI can demonstrate that:

  • Outputs are presented in a form that allows re-use of the work, including via text-mining
  • Outputs not in the scope (books etc.) are made open access

 The prediction is that this will lead to:

  • Significantly greater uptake of open access (even within publishers’ current policies)
  • Increased visibility and usage of repositories
  • Many more immediate deposit mandates
  • Later: author-driven moves to faster and more permissive access
  • Later: open access is ‘solved’ for books etc.

Full slides from Ben Johnson’s presentation at Bournemouth University’s Open Access Event on the 7th May 2014 are available here internally.

If you would like to deposit your full text articles into BURO you can do this easily via BRIAN, full guidance can be found on the staff intranet pages.

New tourism texts by Professor Stephen Page

Fourth editions have been published of two popular textbooks by Professor Stephen Page from BU’s School of Tourism.

Tourism: A Modern Synthesis

 

This is a leading international full colour publication used as an introductory course text with a significant web learning resource supporting student learning.  It is co-written with Dr Joanne Connell from Exeter Business School. The new edition provides many new perspectives on the fast changing nature of global tourism.

 

 

The Geography of Tourism and Recreation: Environment, Place and Space

This written with Professor Michael Hall at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand and published by Routledge.  First published in 1999, this soon became established as the leading text used by Geographers (and many non-Geographers) as a scholarly introduction to the nature of tourism and recreation as a spatial phenomenon including its impacts in different environments.  A key feature of the book is its almost encyclopaedic coverage of the literature, acting both as a reference source and roadmap to the way geography has embraced the study of tourism, leisure and recreation over the last 100 years.

 

This new edition has been very well received and positively reviewed:

“They just keep getting better and better. This new edition of The Geography of Tourism and Recreation is an outstanding example of contemporary and cutting-edge thinking in the dynamic subfield of tourism geographies. It exemplifies a heterogeneous approach to understanding the spatial implications of tourism, the industry and its functions in diverse settings and ecosystems, and its impacts on human and natural environments. For an innovative examination of current trends in tourism, this book is essential reading for anyone who studies, teaches, or practices the business, art and science of tourism.”

Professor Timothy J Dallen, School of Community Resources and Development, Arizona State University, USA.

“In the often nebulous and many-sided world of tourism geographies, where space and place are simultaneously attraction and constraint, product and site, destination and experience, there are no more knowledgeable, versatile or sure footed guides than C.Michael Hall and Stephen Page. They have led a generation of students and researchers and in this fourth edition they continue the intellectual journey into the emerging social, economic and political realities of the 21st century.”

Professor G.J.Ashworth, Department of Planning, Faculty of Spatial Sciences, University of Groningen, Netherlands.

3rd edition of ‘Evaluating Public Relations’ published

Publishing

The third edition of the enduring public relations text, Evaluating Public Relations, has been published by Kogan Page. Much revised by authors Professor Tom Watson (Media School) and former lecturer Paul Noble, the book has greater emphasis on the measurement of social media and concepts of value created by that communication.

“When the first edition of Evaluating Public Relations came out in 2005, it mostly dealt with the measurement of media relations activity”, Professor Watson said. “In it, we included a chapter on how to measure PR-influenced coverage on a no- or low-cost basis. An updated version is included in the latest edition.

“But the world of PR practice has moved on and so the book includes the measurement and evaluation of social media, more focus on outcomes rather than outputs, and advice to meet increasing demands that PR/communication delivers value to the organisation.”

Professor Watson said that the new edition calls for PR/communication practitioners to take “a big step forward in the planning and strategy-setting processes.”

“Not only should communication objectives align with organisational objectives, but practitioners must ensure that communication is part of the organisation or client’s own objectives.”

The third edition includes new and revised chapters based on Professor Watson’s research into the history of PR measurement and his work, with Professor Ansgar Zerfass of Leipzig University, on methods of performance management in PR/communications.

The case for Open Access within a university…

Guidance, Info Days, Publishing

…is not simply political or economic or professional. It needs to rest in the notion of what a university is and what it should be … It is central to the university’s position in the public space”

Professor Martin Hall, Vice Chancellor of the University of Salford, UK

A few weeks back we were privileged to welcome experts on the topic of Open Access to speak at Bournemouth University (BU) in an event well attended by delegates from HEIs across England, Scotland and Wales.  BU’s Open Access Event was enjoyed by all who attended and over a series of blog posts I hope to summarise some of the key points raised by each of the speakers. We also filmed the event and will be posting the films shortly for all to watch, enjoy and comment upon.

So to part one of the day, after a wonderful introduction by our Chair and self-acknowledged novice of Open Access Professor Iain McRury, we welcomed Alma Swan to the floor…

Alma Swan is a consultant working in the field of scholarly communication. She is a director of Key Perspectives Ltd, Director of Advocacy for SPARC Europe, and Convenor for Enabling Open Scholarship, an organisation of university managers around the world that promotes the principles of open scholarship and open science. She is also a director of the Directory of Open Access Journals and of the umbrella organisation Infrastructure Services for Open Access. She holds honorary academic positions in the University of Southampton School of Electronics & Computer Science and the University of Warwick Business School. 

Alma lead the introductory address framing the day in a presentation titled ‘The benefits of Open Access’. She began the presentation looking at what open access is:

  • Immediate
  • Free (to use)
  • Free (of restrictions)
  • Access to the peer-reviewed literature (and data)

 And what it is not:

  • Not vanity publishing
  • Not a ‘stick anything up on the Web’ approach
  • Moving scholarly communication into the Web Age

She posed the question of openness using Tim Berners-Lees CERN proposal for an Information Management System (later to become the world-wide- web), drawing attention to his bosses Mike Sendall comments “Vague but exciting…”

 

As an aside there’s a great blog article on Tim Berners-Lees opinions on the Open Agenda  here – http://blog.digital.telefonica.com/2013/10/09/tim-berners-lee-telefonica-open-agenda/ if your interested! Any how, back to the matter in hand…

Alma covered the basics of Open Access highlighting BUs repository BURO, she addressed the disciplinary differences in approaches to Open Access. On average across all disciplines 37% of articles are made Open Access, rising to just under 50% in Mathematics and as low as 20% in the Arts.

She then took us through the advantages to authors for making their outputs Open Access:

1. Improves author visibility

Alma gave a number of testimonials from authors however, here we include Professor Martin Skitmore’s from School of Urban Design, Queensland University of Technology (QUT): 

“There is no doubt in my mind that ePrints [repository] will have improved things – especially in developing countries such as Malaysia … many more access my papers who wouldn’t have thought of contacting me personally in the ‘old’ days.

While this may … increase … citations, the most important thing … is that at least these people can find out more about what others have done…”

 2. Increases usage

We viewed download statistics from a number of institutional repositories – the University of Liege’s repository ORBi has approximately 70,000 references with full text and in April 2014 had just under 100,000 downloads. The University of Salford’s repository USIR has c.9000 records and clocked up over 45,000 downloads in January 2013 alone. In regards, to individual authors we returned to Martin Skitmore (QUT) who had 225,857 downloads and 4858 in the past 28 days!

It is also worth noting the usage of repositorys globally. MIT’s repository usage stats presented in the below map was particularly interesting:

3. More impact

From a citation perspective Open Access can increase citation impact by between 36 to 250% depending on the discipline. She highlighted the difference in citations from OA and non-OA publications across 3 disciplines; Engineering (shown here), Clinical Medicine and Social Sciences all showed significant increases in citations.

 Alma then went on to show the advantages for institutions to make Open Access mandatory, she also posed many topical questions and highlighted thought provoking research. One aspect which struck me in particular, was an analysis of PubMed Centrals unique users which revealed that only 25% of articles were accessed by Universities and the majority 40% were accessed by citizens:

  • 25% universities
  • 18% government and others
  • 40% citizens
  • 17% companies

 Fittingly Alma ended with a quote from Daniel Coit Gilman the First President of Johns Hopkins University in 1878:

“It is one of the noblest duties of a university to advance knowledge and to diffuse it, not merely among those who can attend the daily lectures, but far and wide. “

Full slides from Alma Swans presentation at Bournemouth University’s Open Access Event on the 7th May 2014 are available here internally.

Latest Major Funding Opportunities

Funding opportunities

The following opportunities have been announced. Please follow the links for more information:

BBSRC and NERC invite proposals for both research and research translation projects to the first call of the Sustainable Agriculture Research & Innovation Club (SARIC). Approximately £5M of funding is available for this call, divided between research grants (£3.5M) and research translation grants (£1.5M). A workshop for both calls will be held on 18/06/14 at the Royal Academy of Engineering, London.  The closing date for the Research Translation grants is 4pm on 29/07/14. The closing date for the Outline Research grant proposal is 11/09/14.

Following the BBSRC‘s first phase of the Multidisciplinary Synthetic Biology Research Centres (SBRCs) call in 2013, which established three SBRCs, the call will shortly be launched for phase two. This call has been developed by the RCUK Synthetic Biology Working Group. It is anticipated that the opening date will be in late May, with a closing date in July.

The EPSRC‘s Collaborative Computational Projects (CCPs) bring together the major UK groups in a given field of computational research to tackle large-scale scientific software development projects, maintenance, distribution, training and user support. They play an important role in EPSRC’s ongoing ability to deliver its Software as an Infrastructure strategy and as community based networks and projects they provide a focal point for communities to identify their scientific software requirements and take a strategic approach to software support in a particular field. Subject to quality, up to £2M of funding and 15 FTEs per annum of technical computational support from staff at STFC’s Scientific Computing Department is available to support new and existing Collaborative Computational Projects (CCPs) that underpin research and research communities within the EPSRC remit. Closing date: 4pm on 27/10/14.

The MRC wishes to encourage applications to all MRC research boards, particularly at programme-level, for “systems medicine”: using systems approaches in medical research to build on the research & training foundations laid by other research councils, and encourage a wider range of applications applying systems approaches to medical research – “systems medicine”. For closing dates, please consult the specific Research Board’s deadline date.

The MS Society and the MRC may jointly fund applications identified as a priority by the MS Society. Applications will be assessed in open competition across the MRC’s range of funding schemes. Please see the website for further information.

Nesta, in collaboration with the TSB, has announced the opening of the 2014 Longitude Prize, where the public is invited to vote (22-25 May) on the most pressing problems of our time. In September 2014, applications will be invited for the winning challenge. A total fund of £10m will be available.

NERC, under the Valuing Natural Capital scheme, is seeking to fund research that will help understanding of the implications for natural capital and the provision of ecosystem services of a range of future energy scenarios. These including scenarios that are compatible with the UK’s energy policy challenges of maintaining energy security, keeping energy affordable and cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 80 per cent by 2050. NERC, working closely with the UK Energy Research Centre (UKERC) and its Valuing Nature programme, will be running a two-day interactive strategic ideas brokerage workshop to develop research consortia that will subsequently submit grant proposals to address this challenge. This Announcement of Opportunity is a call for participants for the ideas brokerage workshop, which will take place on 21-22 July 2014 at Warwick Conferences. Closing date: 9am on Monday 16/06/14.

The TSB is to invest up to £3m to support the development of innovations that will enable the use and integration of data to improve the stratification of patients with neurodegenerative diseases  and the provision of business models to, for example, support repositioning of currently available drugs on the basis of stratification for treatment of neurodegenerative diseases. Proposals must be business-led and collaborative. This is a two-stage competition that opens for applicants on 27 May 2014. The deadline for registration is noon on 02/07/14 and the deadline for expressions of interest is noon on 09/07/14. The deadline for projects invited to submit a full-stage application is noon on 09/10/14. A briefing event for potential applicants will be held in London on 10/06/14.

Linked with this, the TSB are making an investment of up to £4m to support the development of products and services for the early diagnosis of neurodegenerative diseases and diagnostic tools to enable the stratification of patients for better treatment and care management. This competition also covers monitoring and aspects of telehealth and telecare as they relate to stratified medicine and the management of patient treatment and care.  Success relies on better and more integrated diagnostic tests to guide treatment and disease management decisions and get patients into the right care pathways. Proposals must be business-led and collaborative.  The deadline for registration is noon on 02/07/14 and the deadline for expressions of interest is noon on 09/07/14. The deadline for invited projects to submit a full-stage application is noon on 09/10/14. A briefing event for potential applicants will be held in London on 10/06/14.

The TSB is to invest up to £6m in collaborative R&D projects that stimulate innovation in the UK digital health sector. The aim of this competition is to support projects with novel ideas for health informatics – specifically, using data to address healthcare needs within a hospital setting. Collaborations that focus on one or more of the following areas – accident and emergency (A&E), planned specialist care, health analytics and connected care are welcome. The funder is seeking proposals that will make secondary care more efficient and empower care providers, patients and their families. Applications should also explore how health informatics can revolutionise existing therapies and services and also be an enabler for those that would not exist without digital technology. Proposals must be collaborative and business-led although project partners can include research and non-profit organisations as well as other businesses. Applicants must register by 25/06/14 with the deadline for expressions of interest being noon on 02/07/14. A briefing event for potential applicants will be held in London on 28/05/14.

The TSB, on behalf of the Home Office, is  inviting applications for projects which help to  identify substitutes for, or additives to, potentially harmful chemicals, to make them non-viable for dangerous and illegal purposes, without hampering their legitimate uses. A briefing event will be held on Tuesday, 10/06/14 in Central London. Applicants must register by 16/07/14 with full applications to be submitted by 23/07/14.

 

Please note that some funders specify a time for submission as well as a date. Please confirm this with your RKE Support Officer.

You can set up your own personalised alerts on ResearchProfessional. If you need help setting these up, just ask your School’s RKE Officer in RKE Operations or see the recent post on this topic, which includes forthcoming training dates up to November 2014.

If thinking of applying, why not add notification of your interest on ResearchProfessional’s record of the bid so that BU colleagues can see your intention to bid and contact you to collaborate.

PGR Development Fund Activity Report by Nada Sherief: SciTech

PG research

About Me

I am Nada Hany Sherief, a 2nd year Part-time PhD Student in Computing at the Faculty of Science and Technology.

The Conference (EASE 2014)

EASE’14, the International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering, is one of the top conferences in the area Software Engineering (CORE Rank: A).  This year, EASE was held on 12-14 May, in London, UK.

The Papers

I have submitted two papers to EASE’14. The first is titled by “Crowdsourced Software Evaluation”, and was accepted in the New Ideas track. The second is titled by “Software Evaluation via Users’ Feedback at Runtime” and it was accepted in the Doctoral Symposium of the conference.

The Benefits

The PGR Development Funds from BU enabled me to attend EASE’14, which was an ideal place to launch the new idea of my research and have it discussed with colleagues and experts in the empirical software engineering community.

The research idea of a socialized software evaluation was found very interesting. Both presentations discussed the preliminary results of my research. Also, I presented several research challenges that are not yet addressed in the literature, and could be a starting point for future work not only in my research but also in the wider scope of the community.

This participation has added several skills to me. On the personal side it gave me a good motivation and confidence to continue my work in that area. It also gave our research more visibility in the research community. On the research side, I have gained much feedback about how to enhance and better frame my work which will certainly consolidate my PhD experience.

 

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank the Graduate School at Bournemouth University for their PGR Development Fund which sponsored this activity which had very positive impact on my PhD journey.

PGR Development Fund Activity Report by Malik Almaliki: SciTech

PG research

The International Working Conference on Requirements Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality (REFSQ) is one of the leading international forums in the area of Requirement Engineering for software systems. My main activity was to present a full research paper at this conference which was held in Essen, Germany, April 7-10, 2014. The paper was titled “Requirements-driven Social Adaptation: Expert Survey” and was collaboratively written with colleagues from University of Birmingham.

In this research paper I disseminated a part of my findings of the first year of my PhD. It reports on the results of a two-phase Expert Opinion study that was conducted to identify core benefits, domain areas, styles of use and challenges for the socially-adaptive software and users’ feedback acquisition. The study involved around 30 experts in Requirement Engineering and Adaptive Systems which also helped us to know how our vision in the area is perceived by the wider community.

The Graduate School PGR Fund provided me with a great opportunity to attend the REFSQ’14 conference and get my work published and recognized. Being able to participate in REFSQ’14 was one of the distinguished events in my PhD journey. It played a significant role in increasing my motivations and confidence and giving my research a visibility in such a well reputed venue. The  reviews of the paper and the feedback given by REFSQ’14 attendees were invaluable and, together with the constructive feedback and critiques,  helped me preparing well for the transfer exam which went very well.  This activity consolidated my presentation and communication skills.

I would like to thank the Graduate School for this PGR Development Fund which enabled me to have this great opportunity.  Participation at REFSQ’14 was a huge motive that pushed me step further towards a successful PhD journey.

PG Researcher Development Workshops

PG research

WHAT’S ON in June 2014

  • Introduction to Bournemouth Research Information & Network (BRIAN) – 4 June
  • Managing Pressure Positively – 10 June
  • Nvivo (Day 1) Introduction – 16 June
  • Nvivo (Day 2) Advanced – 17 June (attendance Day 1 is mandatory – to register your interest in this workshop – please email pgrskillsdevelopment@bournemouth.ac.uk).  Numbers are restricted
  • Importance of Publishing – 18 June
  • Introduction to Case Studies – 24 June

Full details and sign up lists are available via myBU (Graduate School PGR Community).

Don’t forget that if you have both staff and student email accounts, you’ll need to log on with your student username and password.  Please check your student email account for email reminders.

Join us for a seminar on ‘Understanding Crowdsourcing and CCTV surveillance’

Staff and students are invited to join us for today’s Cyber Security Seminar…

‘Understanding Crowdsourcing and CCTV surveillance’

Tuesday, 27th May

Coyne Lecture Theatre 

4pm – 5pm

 

Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) has many different uses but is often considered an archetypal surveillance technology. These infrastructures generate large amounts of data; so much so that the technique of crowdsourcing has recently been applied to the problem of searching for abnormalities in live surveillance video; the premise being that many inexpert watchers are cheaper but as efficient as a small number of experienced security experts. However, the merits of crowdsourcing watchers of surveillance video are largely unknown.

In this talk Dr. Paul Dunphy will describe exemplar infrastructures of this type, and two user studies that assess the performance of the watchers of CCTV video online. The results prompt a discussion regarding the effectiveness of using crowdsourcing in such contexts, and the role such infrastructures can play in society.

Speaker Bio: Paul is a postdoctoral researcher in the Culture Lab at Newcastle University. He is interested in multi-disciplinary approaches to understand and design security and privacy technologies.

 If you would like to join us for this presentation, please book your place via Eventbrite.

AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Awards Call: internal competition

Funding opportunities

The AHRC expect universities to exercise demand management for the AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Awards call and therefore a special Research Proposal Review Service (RPRS) has been convened.

Therefore, colleagues wishing to submit an application to this call should adhere to the following time scale:

Colleagues are reminded of the following:

  • Throughout the development of their proposals, they should be liaising with RKE operations to ensure all the relevant costings and other bid information is developed in a timely manner.
  • Adherence to  AHRC guidance is crucial. In particular, colleagues should note that partnership working is especially important feature of this call. Notably from the guidance, the non-HEI partner is required to provide supervisory time and desk space as in-kind contributions. A written agreement is seen as essential for this partnership working alongside regularly reviewed project plans.