Category / Guidance

Implementation of the HEFCE Open Access policy for the post-2014 REF: a progress report to JISC

BU Challenges

Original post by Neil Jacobs on this JISC website.

Background

Over the past month, Research Consulting has been undertaking a review of UK higher education institutions’ progress towards implementation of the open access policy for a post-2014 Research Excellence Framework (REF). Based on the six institutional workshops, completed with the support of the Jisc Open Access Good Practice Pathfinder projects, as well as interviews with Jisc and HEFCE staff, the study has identified how much progress has been made across the sector to implement the policy and distinguished where there may be further opportunities to support institutions in this area.

Summary Findings

The Collaborative Institutional Assessment of Open access (CIAO) tool was used to gauge institutions’ current level of readiness of the REF policy. Based on responses from 37 participating institutions, summarised below, the study found that, whilst all institutions were actively pursuing implementation of the REF open access policy, research-intensive institutions were generally found to have more developed open access capabilities than teaching-led institutions.

CAIO-results-May-2015Key Challenges

Across all institution-types, however, the following key challenges were given high priority as potentially critically affecting the institution’s ability to comply with the policy:
• Difficulties in identifying accepted articles
• Difficulties in monitoring and benchmarking compliance
• Difficulties in tracking deposits in subject repositories
• Uncertainty over audit requirements, particularly in relation to exceptions
• Systems deficiencies which may result in significant compliance issues.

Other significant issues of note

• A tendency towards ‘gold-plating’ of processes and uncertainty over audit requirements which could be alleviated through reliance on institutional internal audit functions.
• The added value of self-archiving where articles are made OA through the gold route appears limited relative to the effort involved.
• The SHERPA/REF tool, in development, could save time and promote greater author engagement with the policy, if the results delivered were formally endorsed by HEFCE.

Resourcing also presented a further challenge for institutions, due to a rapid rise in deposits and potential inefficiencies in current processes. A large number of less significant issues were also raised, including difficulties in securing and identifying the AAM, uncertainties over dates of acceptance and publication, and concerns over staff recruitment and retention.

This PDF provides a full breakdown of the implementation challenges

Projects services directly/ indirectly supporting REF compliance

There are a range of existing Jisc projects and services with the potential to address some of the issues identified. The most important are considered to be the SHERPA services, Publications Router and the RIOXX/CASRAI projects, but institutions also see scope for ORCID, IRUS-UK, Jisc Collections and CORE to support REF compliance.

This PDF provides a full list of the Jisc projects and services seen by respondents to be useful for the REF

Recommendations

The recommendations to Jisc arising from this work are as follows:

1. Jisc should review its arrangements for supporting institutional repositories, in view of the concerns identified over usability, required levels of technical support and uncertainty over how some specialist institutions can achieve compliance with the REF OA policy.
2. A comprehensive picture of the current research information system (CRIS) and repository solutions in use by UK HEIs, and the interactions between them, should be developed in order to effectively inform planning of Jisc projects and services.
3. Jisc should actively develop relationships with the major CRIS vendors, to ensure the sector’s requirements in respect of the REF OA policy are clearly understood and reflected in supplier roadmaps.
4. A working group should be convened to explore the role of subject repositories, and consider what opportunities exist to enable REF-compliant deposit in these repositories, with metadata subsequently shared with institutions.
5. Jisc should explore opportunities to collect and share relevant data on compliance with the REF OA policy, for example through further development of the CORE service.
6. The OA Pathfinder programme should take these recommendations into account, and seek to develop and disseminate good practice in the management of exceptions, among other areas.

Next steps

Jisc is committed to supporting the sector in their implementation of the policy and to focus its efforts and resource on those areas recommended by this study. Over the coming weeks, therefore, Jisc will be considering how its projects/ services can potentially be refocused/ reallocated to address the most urgent issues faced by institutions and will release details of these plans as soon as they become available.

NERC publish demand management quotas

Funding opportunities, Guidance

nerc-logo-50thNERC informed us in March that they were implementing new measures designed to raise discovery science standard grant success rates.  This included a reduction in the maximum value of a standard grant award (will fall from the current £1·2m to £800k (100 per cent full economic costing (fEC), £640k at 80 per cent fEC)), and a new institutional-level submission policy which limits the number of applications an individual research organisation can make.

NERC have just issued an update on demand management measures, which includes a full list of the quotas that will apply to the July 2015 and January 2016 standard grant (including New Investigator) closing dates for each institution.

Please note that following on from my previous blog post explaining the selection process to be adopted at BU, if you wish to apply to the NERC standard grant scheme then please contact the RKEO Funding Development Team in the first instance (please note that the application has been selected for the July call and so no further applications will be accepted).

Academic induction to Research and Knowledge Exchange at BU

Guidance

The Research and Knowledge Exchange Office (RKEO) invite all ‘new to BU’ academics and researchers to an induction.  The purpose of the induction is to inform you of the following:

  • how we can support you when planning your research career;
  • how to apply for funding (the policies and processes around costs and approvals);
  • how to manage your successful research applications (including ethics, governance, risks and finance);
  • how we can support you on impact, public engagement, outputs and open access, case studies, and a whole lot more.

The second induction will be held on 16th June 2015 on the 4th floor of Melbury House.  The format of the day is as follows:

9.00-9.15 – Coffee/tea and cake will be available on arrival

9.15 – RKEO academic induction (with a break at 10.45)

11.30 – Opportunity for one to one interaction with RKEO staff

12.00 – Close

There will also be literature and information packs available.

If you would like to attend the induction then please contact Charmain Lyons, clyons@bournemouth.ac.uk for an official invitation.  We will directly contact those who have started at BU in the last five months.

We hope you can make it and look forward to seeing you.

Regards,

The RKEO team

Research Professional – all you need to know

Guidance

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.  The Funding Development Team Officers can assist you with this, if required.

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:

23rd June 2015

28th July 2015

25th August 2015

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.

Academic induction to Research and Knowledge Exchange at BU

Guidance

The Research and Knowledge Exchange Office (RKEO) invite all ‘new to BU’ academics and researchers to an induction.  The purpose of the induction is to inform you of the following:

  • how we can support you when planning your research career;
  • how to apply for funding (the policies and processes around costs and approvals);
  • how to manage your successful research applications (including ethics, governance, risks and finance);
  • how we can support you on impact, public engagement, outputs and open access, case studies, and a whole lot more.

The second induction will be held on 16th June 2015 on the 4th floor of Melbury House.  The format of the day is as follows:

9.00-9.15 – Coffee/tea and cake will be available on arrival

9.15 – RKEO academic induction (with a break at 10.45)

11.30 – Opportunity for one to one interaction with RKEO staff

12.00 – Close

There will also be literature and information packs available.

If you would like to attend the induction then please contact Charmain Lyons, clyons@bournemouth.ac.uk for an official invitation.  We will directly contact those who have started at BU in the last five months.

We hope you can make it and look forward to seeing you.

Regards,

The RKEO team

BRIAN Announcement to Faculty and Staff

Guidance, Post-award, Publishing, Training

We are happy to inform you that Bournemouth Research Information and Networking System (BRIAN) will be upgrading to a new version. The system will be offline from 8.30am, 20th May 2015 on Wednesday, and will hopefully be restored and functioning fully on the 26th May 2015, 8.30am.

Some of the benefits of this upgrade are:

  • Re-designed Deposit Page

The page shown when you deposit a publication to BURO has been completely redesigned to improve the flow through the page, to allow entry of an Open access location and to provide more visible guidance.

  • Assistance when adding publications, including duplicate prevention

This is a completely new mechanism designed to assist you and your co-authors when manually adding new works to BRIAN. The first step in this process is to perform a search using the title, partial title or identifier (ISBN or DOI). Using this information, records that already exist in BRIAN may then be claimed by you or your co-author, thereby avoiding the creation of unnecessary manual records.

The new mechanism applies to all publication types. In addition, for Books and Journal articles, searches are also performed against a number of external data sources (including Google Books).

  • Harvest publications using Scopus Author Identifier

 

 

We are happy to announce that in the new version of BRIAN, it is now possible to add a verified Scopus Author Identifier to your account (through ‘search settings’) which will result in all publications linked to the Scopus ID being automatically imported to BRIAN in a claimed state.

  • Improved Photo Cropping Mechanism

This new photo crop mechanism allows you to drag and drop photos in for use and it will also allow you to crop the pictures to the desired style.

We do apologise for the inconvenience but we hope that these exciting new features will be up and running for you to use on the 26th May.

All relevant guidance notes on the Staff Intranet will be updated in due course. If you need any help using the new system or if you encounter any problems after the upgrade, please do send an email to BRIAN@bournemouth.ac.uk and a member of staff will be able to assist you.

Monthly BRIAN training sessions will also start taking place beginning June 2015. Please watch out for announcement on future dates on the RKEO Research blog.

In the meantime, if you do have queries relating to the upgrade, please feel free to get in touch with Pengpeng Hatch at pphatch@bournemouth.ac.uk (01202 961354).

BRIAN Announcement to Faculty and Staff

Guidance, Post-award, Publishing, Training

We are happy to inform you that Bournemouth Research Information and Networking System (BRIAN) will be upgrading to a new version. The system will be offline from 8.30am, 20th May 2015 on Wednesday, and will hopefully be restored and functioning fully on the 26th May 2015, 8.30am.

Some of the benefits of this upgrade are:

  • Re-designed Deposit Page

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The page shown when you deposit a publication to BURO has been completely redesigned to improve the flow through the page, to allow entry of an Open access location and to provide more visible guidance.

  • Assistance when adding publications, including duplicate prevention

 

 

 

 

 

This is a completely new mechanism designed to assist you and your co-authors when manually adding new works to BRIAN. The first step in this process is to perform a search using the title, partial title or identifier (ISBN or DOI). Using this information, records that already exist in BRIAN may then be claimed by you or your co-author, thereby avoiding the creation of unnecessary manual records.

The new mechanism applies to all publication types. In addition, for Books and Journal articles, searches are also performed against a number of external data sources (including Google Books).

  • Harvest publications using Scopus Author Identifier

 

 

We are happy to announce that in the new version of BRIAN, it is now possible to add a verified Scopus Author Identifier to your account (through ‘search settings’) which will result in all publications linked to the Scopus ID being automatically imported to BRIAN in a claimed state.

  • Improved Photo Cropping Mechanism

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This new photo crop mechanism allows you to drag and drop photos in for use and it will also allow you to crop the pictures to the desired style.

We do apologise for the inconvenience but we hope that these exciting new features will be up and running for you to use on the 26th May.

All relevant guidance notes on the Staff Intranet will be updated in due course. If you need any help using the new system or if you encounter any problems after the upgrade, please do send an email to BRIAN@bournemouth.ac.uk and a member of staff will be able to assist you.

Monthly BRIAN training sessions will also start taking place beginning June 2015. Please watch out for announcement on future dates on the RKEO Research blog.

In the meantime, if you do have queries relating to the upgrade, please feel free to get in touch with Pengpeng Hatch at pphatch@bournemouth.ac.uk (01202 961354).

ResearchGate – An Overview

Guidance, Publishing

Picture by bschwehnLast year I wrote a post titled ‘ResearchGate Reviewed’ which outlined the pros and cons for BU researchers using ResearchGate. Here again I thought I’d summarise here what ResearchGate is and more importantly what it isn’t…

ResearchGate in a nutshell…..

ResearchGate is a social networking site for researchers (particularly those engaged in broadly scientific research) to share papers, ask questions and find collaborators.

What is it?

ResearchGate’s mission is “to connect researchers and make it easy for them to share and access scientific output, knowledge, and expertise”. It has similar features to networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn where users can create profiles, like and follow researchers and their publications, ask questions, feedback and share news items and updates.

It is free to join and currently has about 6 million members across the world. Once you have a profile, ResearchGate will email you with publication updates from those researchers you are following and developments in your skilled areas of research. On your home page it will include a live feed of activity from your connected researchers, display jobs you may be interested in and suggest connections to related researchers.

What isn’t it?

Accessing documents usually requires an account so ResearchGate is not considered to be Open Access.

(Why) should I use it?

ResearchGate is growing fast and is a useful tool for researchers to promote their work. However, if a researcher’s sole aim is promote their work then ResearchGate alone will probably not be sufficient and they should also consider using ResearchGate in conjunction with other sites such as Academia.edu, Mendeley, Google Scholar, figshare and others. Activity and membership varies from one site to another and from one discipline to another, so researchers will need to investigate for themselves in order to evaluate potential value.

Uploading research outputs to ResearchGate will not meet funder policy requirements for Open Access or Research Data Management; on the contrary you may be in breach of the publisher policy.

ResearchGate was built by scientists for scientists in 2008 and has received more than $35 million in investment capital over its lifetime from investors such as Bill Gates and Tenaya Capital.

(How) Does it fit with all the others?

You can add links in your profile to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Skype, your website and include your ORCID ID.

 Our verdict:

A great networking tool but has limitations which researchers should be wary of . The more effort you put into maintaining and regularly updating your profile, the more you will get out of ResearchGate.

Academic induction to research and knowledge exchange at BU

Guidance

The Research and Knowledge Exchange Office (RKEO) invite all ‘new to BU’ academics and researchers to an induction.  The purpose of the induction is to inform you of the following:

  • how we can support you when planning your research career;
  • how to apply for funding (the policies and processes around costs and approvals);
  • how to manage your successful research applications (including ethics, governance, risks and finance);
  • how we can support you on impact, public engagement, outputs and open access, case studies, and a whole lot more.

The second induction will be held on 16th June 2015 on the 4th floor of Melbury House.  The format of the day is as follows:

9.00-9.15 – Coffee/tea and cake will be available on arrival

9.15 – RKEO academic induction (with a break at 10.45)

11.30 – Opportunity for one to one interaction with RKEO staff

12.00 – Close

There will also be literature and information packs available.

If you would like to attend the induction then please contact Charmain Lyons, clyons@bournemouth.ac.uk for an official invitation.  We will directly contact those who have started at BU in the last five months.

We hope you can make it and look forward to seeing you.

Regards,

The RKEO team

Research Professional – all you need to know

Guidance

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.  The Funding Development Team Officers can assist you with this, if required.

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:

29th May 2015

23rd June 2015

28th July 2015

25th August 2015

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.

Royal Society Pairing Scheme Opportunity

Guidance

Each year the Royal Society’s pairing scheme matches up 30 research scientists with UK parliamentarians and civil servants. By spending time in Westminster and the researcher’s lab, participants learn about each other’s work and gain a greater insight into how research findings can help inform policy making.

Places are available for this year’s scheme, which begins with a ‘Week in Westminster’ during which you’ll meet your pair. Over the week you will spend two days shadowing them, taking part in workshops and hearing speakers. After the ‘Week in Westminster’ your pair will visit you in your lab to get an insight into the world of research. This year’s ‘Week in Westminster’ takes place from Monday 23 – Thursday 26 November.  More information or to apply visit the Royal Society website or contact Rachael Mann.

Open Access and the research lifecycle: a guide for researchers

Guidance, Post-award, Publishing, Research assessment

 

 

 

 

 

 

With recent requirements imposed by major research funders, researchers are presented with both opportunities and challenges – opportunities to re-use and re-purpose published outputs and datasets, and challenges in making one’s own work legally and ethically available to others.

Last year, thirty Northampton researchers contributed to focus groups looking at open access publications and data, with a particular focus on compliance with funder requirements. From the outcome of the focus groups, University of Northampton developed an Open Access and the research lifecyle guidance, which has been adapted to fit in with BU’s institutional policies.   

This guide, which is part of a JISC-funded Open to Open Access project, is intended for researchers who wish to engage with the open access agenda, but aren’t entirely sure how best to achieve this. This short guide highlights some of the issues to consider at each stage of the research lifecycle and the tools that are available to support you.

Please click here –  Open Access and the research lifecyle guidance to access a printable version of the guidance. For further queries, please get in touch with Pengpeng Hatch (pphatch@bournemouth.ac.uk) at RKEO.