Latest research and knowledge exchange news at Bournemouth University
RKEO will be delivering some ‘Brush up yer BRIAN’ training on 19th June 2014 1pm for Media School staff and students. The session will cover:
To book on please register here.
This is just to inform you that 
Research Professional are deploying an update to their site on Thursday, 5th June. The update will require a 10-30 minutes period of downtime between 12-1.00pm.
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:
The minimum requirements of the policy are that:
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:
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:
The prediction is that this will lead to:
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.
…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:
And what it is not:
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:
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.
Back in April 2011 we launched the BU Open Access Publication Fund. This is a dedicated central budget that has been launched in response to, and in support of, developments in research communication and publication trends. The fund is also to support research in complying with some of the major funding bodies who have introduced open access publishing requirements as a condition of their grants.
The fund is available for use by any BU author ready to submit a completed article for publication who wishes to make their output freely and openly accessible.
If you are interested in applying to the fund then you need to email Pengpeng Hatch in RKEO with the following information:
If you have any questions about the Fund then please direct them to Shelly via email.
Further information: BU Open Access Fund policy
Last Wednesday, BU hosted a sector-wide Open Access Event at the EBC. The day was a great success with attendees travelling from universities across the UK to hear keynote speaker Alma Swan and speakers from HEFCE, LSE Impact Blog, PLOS, University of Oxford and BU talk about Open Access, one of the key priorities for the sector at the moment.
Feedback from the event has been overwhelming positive with attendees finding the day extremely useful with lots of interesting discussion throughout the day. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be posting blogs summarising the key points from each of the presentations so keep your eyes peeled…
We recently received a Freedom of Information (FOI) request from a reporter at Research Fortnight asking (in summary) how many of our Research Council (RCUK) outputs were made Open Access in the last year. The request highlighted that there is a lot of confusion about what is required from academics with RCUK grants in terms of Open Access. So, almost a year on from when the policy was published and spurred on from the FOI request I thought it was worth recapping on what the policy is and how we should be adhering to it. The full policy is available on the RCUK website. However, the key elements are as follows:
When
In April 2013, Research Councils UK (RCUK) launched their revised policy on Open Access with more gusto and clearer targets then ever before.
Aim
Current and future research fundamentally relies on access to the findings and ideas that come out of publicly-funded research. Research Councils UK (RCUK) fully support the concept of universal access so that everyone can benefit from this knowledge. Their policy on Open Access aims to achieve immediate, unrestricted, on-line access to peer-reviewed and published research papers, free of any access charge and their vision is for all users to be able to read published research papers in an electronic format and to search for and re-use (including download) the content of published research papers, both manually and using automated tools (such as those for text and data mining), provided that any such re-use is subject to full and proper attribution.
Scope
The policy applies to peer-reviewed research articles (including review articles not commissioned by publishers), which acknowledge Research Council funding, that are submitted for publication from 1st April 2013, and which are published in journals or conference proceedings.
The policy does not (currently) cover monographs, books, critical editions, volumes and catalogues, or forms of non-peer-reviewed material. However, RCUK encourages authors of such material to consider making them Open Access where possible.
Expectations of Researchers
Such works should be published in academic journals that comply with the policy. A Journal may comply with the policy through two routes:
It must make the work immediately and freely accessible online under a CC-BY licence. An ‘Article Processing Charge’ (APC) may be payable. BU has a central fund to cover these costs – the Open Access Publication Fund.
The journal must allow deposit of the full and final text of the work (as accepted for publication including all changes arising from peer review) in a freely accessible online repository and without restriction on non-commercial re-use. An APC will not be payable. BU encourages researchers to deposit all articles upon acceptance in our instititional repository BURO via BRIAN.
The choice of route to Open Access remains with the researchers and BU, both ‘gold’ and ‘green’ routes to Open Access are acceptable. However, the policy preference is for immediate Open Access with the maximum opportunity for reuse (i.e. ‘gold’).
Works covered by the policy must acknowledge the funding source(s) using the standard format . They must also, if applicable, include a statement on how the underlying research materials – such as data, samples or models – can be accessed.
Implementation & Compliance
RCUK recognises that the journey to full Open Access is a process and not a single event and therefore expect compliance to grow over a transition period anticipated to be five years. The expectation is that:
HEFCE and the other three UK funding bodies have published details of a new policy for open access relating to future research assessments after the current 2014 REF.
The policy describes new eligibility requirements for outputs submitted to the post-2014 REF (commonly referred to REF2020). These requirements apply to all journal articles and conference proceedings accepted for publication after 1 April 2016. They do not apply to monographs, other long-form publications, creative or non-text outputs, or data.
The requirements state that peer-reviewed manuscripts must be deposited in an institutional (BURO) or subject repository on acceptance for publication. The title and author of these deposits, and other descriptive information, must be discoverable straight away by anyone with a search engine. The manuscripts must then be accessible for anyone to read and download once any embargo period has elapsed.
There are limited exceptions to the policy, where depositing and arranging access to the manuscript is not achievable.
This policy was developed following an extensive two-stage consultation during 2013, to which they received over 460 written responses.
To read this item in full visit: http://www.hefce.ac.uk/news/newsarchive/2014/news86805.html
If you would like to know more about Open Access, Bournemouth University are hosting asector-wide Open Access Event on the 7th May with Ben Johnson from HEFCE presenting on the policy, places are limited so if you’re interested, please register here.
In the meantime, 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. Alternatively, there are two BRIAN training sessions scheduled which you can book on to here.
Research Councils and funding bodies are increasingly requiring evidence of adequate and appropriate provisions for data management and curation in new grant funding applications. In July, the Digital Curation Centre (DCC) will be holding two half day workshops which will provide an introduction to research data management and curation, the range of activities and roles that should be considered when planning and implementing new projects, and an overview of tools that can assist with curation activities.
The Learning Objectives of the workshops will be to:
There will be two workshops each pitched to a slightly different audience on the dates below:
Further information can be found on the Staff Intranet. If you are interested in attending, please book on by emailing staffdevelopment@bournemouth.ac.uk
A last Reminder don’t forget to book yourself into our 2 events taking place on this Wednesday the 2nd of April.
I would like to draw your attention to:
Our BRAD (Bournemouth Research Academic Development Programme) which offers a range of additional training opportunities with helpful tools for developing your personal skills and grant proposals for UK or EU funding. We are delighted to include the following session:
At Talbot Campus, on the 2nd April, from 2.30-4:30pm (for more info click the link above or to book in send Staff Development a quick email)
This follow on BRAD session complements our previous BRAD Grant Writing Session held last week and provides an ideal opportunity for you to learn how to develop strong UK or European collaborative networks.
Additionally please be aware that our Horizon 2020 (H2020) information session is also taking place prior to this and is the last of our Lunctime Info sessions (before Easter)
At Talbot Campus Wednesday 2nd April, 12noon-2pm (for more info click the link above or to book in send Staff Development a quick email)
Info on H2020 can be found by clicking on the link below to access the recent Blog post detailing further resources available.
What does Horizon 2020 mean to you?
Why not come along to all the available training sessions we are running and boost your chances of being successfully funded by the UK Research Councils or the European Union?
Due to popular demand we are hosting training sessions for the new research webpages together with BRIAN training.
These sessions are open to all BU academic staff, post graduate research students and those supporting researchers in their communications activity.
During the session you will learn the following:
Research Webpages
BRIAN
To book on one of the following sessions please use the links below…
Thursday 27th March 2pm in P227 Poole House, Talbot Campus
Thursday 17th April 2pm in P227 Poole House, Talbot Campus
Wednesday 23rd April 11am in S102, Studland House, Lansdowne Campus
If you have any queries, please email Shelly Maskell on smaskell@bournemouth.ac.uk
BU has a number of internal systems that enable research activity and outputs. To find out what the systems are, what they do and how they interact with each other, visit the ‘BU Research Related Systems’ page, which can be found under ‘Research Toolkit’.
The new page contains all you need to know about:
BRIAN (Bournemouth Research Information And Networking) – BU’s publication management system and how it’s linked to the BU staff profile pages. If you have any problems accessing the system or you have any queries please contact BRIAN@bournemouth.ac.uk and the BRIAN team will be happy to help.
BURO (Bournemouth University Research Online) – BU’s institutional repository. If you require help assessing whether an open access version of your work can be contributed to BURO please contact your Subject Library Team or SAS-BURO@bournemouth.ac.uk.
RED (Research and Enterprise Database) – this is a record of all the research and knowledge exchange activity which takes place at BU. If you have any problems accessing the system or you have any queries please contact the R&KE Office .
Please note that Shelly Maskell is the new Research Outputs development officer within R&KEO and as part of this role, Shelly now manages BRIAN.
Due to popular demand we are hosting training sessions for the new research webpages together with BRIAN training.
These sessions are open to all BU academic staff, post graduate research students and those supporting researchers in their communications activity.
During the session you will learn the following:
Research Webpages
BRIAN
To book on one of the following sessions please use the links below…
Thursday 27th March 2pm in P421 Poole House, Talbot Campus
Thursday 17th April 2pm in P421 Poole House, Talbot Campus
We hope to follow these with a session at the Lansdowne Campus (room pending). If you would be interested in a Lansdowne session or you have any queries, please email Shelly Maskell on smaskell@bournemouth.ac.uk
On Wednesday 7th May, Bournemouth University will be hosting a sector-wide Open Access Event looking at the benefits of Open Access from both the green and gold perspectives, as well as, focusing on how Open Access can support the achievement of research impact.
So far confirmed external sessions are as follows:The Benefits of Open Access
Alma Swan – Director of Advocacy Programmes, SPARC Europe
Open Access and Implications for REF2020
Ben Johnson – Higher Education Policy Adviser, HEFCE
The Twitter Effect and How Social Media Can Promote Engagement with Research
Jane Tinkler – Manager, LSE Public Policy Group
Sierra Williams – Managing Editor, LSE Impact of Social Sciences Blog
The Open Access Framework
Catriona MacCallum – Advocacy Projects Manager, Public Library of Science (PLOS)
Case Study: Successful Implementation and Best Practice
Catriona Cannon – Assistant Director, Bodleian Libraries University of Oxford
There will also be sessions delivered by Bournemouth’s BURO team and Bournemouth academics talking about their own open access experiences.
Places are limited so if you’re interested, please register here!
Picture by bschwehn
Recently a number of researchers have been asking about ResearchGate and how it relates to BRIAN. In November, Jill Evans from the University of Exeter posted a Review of ResearchGate on their blog, this was a comprehensive review which I would recommend reading. However, here are some of the pros, cons and recommendations tailored to BU.
ResearchGate is a networking site for researchers, particularly those engaged in broadly scientific research.
Pros
ResearchGate is free to join and currently has about 3 million users mainly in the sciences. It offers the following benefits to researchers:
ResearchGate incorporates many elements of familiar social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn such as creating profiles, liking and following researchers and their publications, ability to comment or send feedback and the ability to share news items and updates easily and quickly.
ResearchGate links researchers around selected topics and specialisations – these can be chosen or edited at any time by members. Members can track and follow the research publications of others in their field.
Members can upload copies of papers (either pre- or post-review) and the associated raw data. All will be searchable. Non-peer-reviewed material can be added only through manual file upload.
Researchers are encouraged not only to upload successful results but also those results from failed projects or experiments – the latter are stored in a separate but searchable area.
ResearchGate finds publications for members from a number of major databases, for example, PubMed, arXiv, IEEE, RePEC and CiteSeer enabling automatic creation of a publications list. Lists can also be created or added to manually or importing from a reference management database such as EndNote. It also appears to trawl University web sites and repositories so that if you have papers in the Bournemouths repository, BURO, it is very easy to create profiles and publication lists. Members will be asked to accept or decline publications (as is the case with BRIAN, for example).
Members are automatically subscribed to a co-author’s feed, so that they can see work from and connect with their co-authors’ co-authors.
ResearchGate offers the ability to search and filter on a variety of topics: author, institution, journal, publication, and so on.
Members can request a copy of a paper from the author if it is not freely available.
Full text publications uploaded to ResearchGate are indexed by Google.
ResearchGate contains useful information about journals, such as impact factors, metrics and some details of open access policy – in this respect it is useful for bringing information together into one place.
Cons
ResearchGate claims to have 3 million users but it is not clear how many of these are active accounts that are maintained and updated regularly.
A quick look of Bournemouth members shows that many profiles contain only a small number of publications and many appear not to have been updated for some time.
Some members have complained about unwanted email spamming. To avoid receiving several emails a day, unwanted updates or followers, be sure to manage your Notifications and Privacy settings both of which can be accessed through Account Settings.
Many of the publications that are available through ResearchGate are actually uploaded illegally in terms of publisher open access policy.
Putting a copy of your paper on ResearchGate will not mean that you are compliant with funder policy. On the contrary, you may be in breach of publisher policy. You will still need to upload a copy of your paper to BURO via BRIAN if you are funded by any of the UK Research Councils, Leverhulme, NIHR and Horizon 2020.
Recommendations
The more effort you put into maintaining and regularly updating your profile, the more you will get out of ResearchGate.
ResearchGate is not a replacement for depositing a copy of your research in BURO. It is recommended that you deposit the legal copy of your paper in BURO via BRIAN and then link to that on networking sites such as ResearchGate.
It is worth noting that when you upload your paper to BURO the Editors (BURO@bournemouth.ac.uk) will check for you that it is a legal copy and will be in touch if there is any reason why the item cannot be hosted in BURO.
The extent to which ResearchGate will be useful to individual researchers depends on the researcher’s aims. If the aim is to promote work then ResearchGate alone will probably not suffice. Consider using ResearchGate in conjunction with other sites such as Academia.edu, Mendeley, Google Scholar or figshare. 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.
If you do use a variety of sites, this is where the advantage of having your paper in a single, freely available place, i.e., BURO, will come into play as you can simply link to the paper and know that anyone anywhere can get secure, long-term and free access. There will be no need to undertake multiple publication upload. Please note that all BURO repository content is indexed by Google and Google Scholar and typically appears at or near the top of search results.
The University of Utrecht has produced a very useful guide to increasing the visibility and impact of research and the use of metrics to track impact. Although written for Utrecht researchers, there is a great deal of generic advice that can be applied to any discipline.
These appointments are generally offered to Grants Academy members only however we have 1 slot left. If you feel you would benefit from a ‘face to face’ meeting with Martin in relation to any bid/proposal you are currently working on please contact me Dianne Goodman preferably today!
Martin currently has the following appointment available on the 5th of March at the following time in the EBC on Lansdowne Campus in Room EB603:
Morning
The appointments are approx 45 minutes long
Martin Pickard
With a career background in both Academia and Industry Dr. Martin Pickard of Grantcraft is a specialist in writing and supporting research grant applications and tenders as well as providing administrative and management support services for ongoing projects. During the last 20 years Martin has worked extensively across Europe with a large number of universities, and research institutes as well as industrial firms, ranging from small SME’s to major international companies.
Martin is providing individual 1-2-1 surgeries with any BU academic staff member and works individually and confidentiality with each Principal Investigator as the project is structured and prepared in order to optimize the application documentation from every aspect of the Funders perspective; guiding, steering and showing how to optimize the application throughout the bid process.
Academics at BU who have undertaken his guidance have stated:
‘his support and direction was invaluable – Martin gave me some pragmatic suggestions which really helped to shape the bid. His eye for detail made the document much easier to read and the message much clearer. I was very grateful for his input’ Assoc. Prof Heather Hartwell School of Tourism.
The process, although labour intensive, works; with a proven historical average success rates of close to 1 in 2 against norms of (1 in 8 to 1 in 10)
Book Now through me Dianne Goodman
Research Councils and funding bodies are increasingly requiring evidence of adequate and appropriate provisions for data management and curation in new grant funding applications. In July, the Digital Curation Centre (DCC) will be holding two half day workshops which will provide an introduction to research data management and curation, the range of activities and roles that should be considered when planning and implementing new projects, and an overview of tools that can assist with curation activities.
The Learning Objectives of the workshops will be to:
There will be two workshops each pitched to a slightly different audience on the dates below:
Further information can be found on the Staff Intranet. If you are interested in attending, please book on by emailing staffdevelopment@bournemouth.ac.uk
One of BUs priorities for 2018 is to increase our presentations at international conferences. Previously, only conference presentations that take place overseas were being considering in this calculation however, this week it has been agreed that the definition can be amended to include international conferences which are hosted in the UK, which is excellent news!
So, if you’ve presented at a conference (international or otherwise) remember to add these to your Staff Profile Page via BRIAN .
If you have any queries about BRIAN or the Staff Profile Pages then please direct these to BRIAN@bournemouth.ac.uk.
BU staff can login below:
Postgraduate Research Showcase & Celebration
Writing for The Conversation – upcoming training opportunities
Thinking about interdisciplinary research
Cancer Awareness Event at BU
BU Professor has been invited to a series of plenary and invited lectures.
An Interview of BU-lead EU H2020 FIRST project published in “Horizon”, the EU Research & Innovation Magazine
Update on Horizon Europe Guarantee
Research Information Network