Category / Publishing

Publish empirical or experimental data early whilst letting theory mature?

PG research, Publishing, Research assessment, Research Ethics, Research Integritiy, Training

My colleagues and I have written several papers to help budding researchers about the process of writing and publishing academic papers (Hundley, & van Teijlingen 2002; van Teijlingen 2004; Pitchforth et al. 2005; van Teijlingen et al. 2012; Simkhada et al. 2013). For all researchers – students and staff alike publishing research findings is important as new insights will add to the existing knowledge base, advance the academic discipline and, in the case of applied research, perhaps improve something in the lives of others such as, well-being, the economy or the environment. Apart from this general/altruistic drive to add to knowledge, the advice academics give our postgraduate students is: to get your study published as soon as possible. The two main reasons for publishing early are: (a) getting into print to potentially help your careers; and (b) staking once claim as an authority in the field and/or publishing your findings before someone else does.
As always there are exceptions to the rule. As academics we agree that trying to get into print early is a good personal strategy for an early researcher or a postgraduate student especially for those working with empirical or experimental data. However, occasionally it is better to wait and give the underlying idea in the paper time to develop and mature. The kind of paper that often improves with time is one based on theory. Let me share a personal example: a theoretical paper from my PhD (awarded by the University of Aberdeen in 1994). This paper started life as a theory chapter in my PhD thesis (van Teijlingen 1994). This chapter on models of maternity care was not the strongest part of my thesis and it took me another decade of fine-tuning to get it into a state worth publishing. The paper ‘A Critical Analysis of the Medical Model as used in the Study of Pregnancy and Childbirth’ was finally published in Sociological Research Online, the original online-only Sociology journal in the world (van Teijlingen 2005). The wait was worthwhile as the paper is today (May 2013), eight year after publication, the seventh ‘most viewed articles during the past eight weeks’ in the journal (see: http://www.socresonline.org.uk/stats/top20.html).
In conclusion, it is generally sound advice to new researchers and postgraduate students to publish early. Occasionally though, waiting and giving your paper time to improve through discussion with colleagues, presenting the ideas at conferences and on blogs may lead to a better final product.
Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen
Centre for Midwifery, Maternal & Perinatal Health
School of Health & Social Care

References
Hundley, V., van Teijlingen E. (2002) How to decide where to send an article for publication? Nursing Standard 16(36): 21.
van Teijlingen (1994) A social or medical comparison of childbirth? : comparing the arguments in Grampian (Scotland) and the Netherlands (PhD thesis), Aberdeen: University of Aberdeen. Available online in the British Library (search for: uk.bl.ethos.387237 ).
Teijlingen van, E. (2004) Why I can’t get any academic writing done, Medical Sociology News 30 (3): 62-6.
van Teijlingen, E. (2005) A Critical Analysis of the Medical Model as used in the Study of Pregnancy and Childbirth, Sociological Research Online 10(2) Freely available online at: www.socresonline.org.uk/10/2/teijlingen.html.
Pitchforth, E., Porter, M., Teijlingen van, E.R., Forrest Keenan, K. (2005) Writing up and presenting qualitative research in family planning and reproductive health care, Journal of Family Planning & Reproductive Health Care 31 (2): 132-135.
Teijlingen van, E., Simkhada. P.P., Simkhada, B., Ireland, J. (2012) The long and winding road to publication, Nepal Journal Epidemiology 2(4): 213-215. http://nepjol.info/index.php/NJE/article/view/7093
Simkhada, P., van Teijlingen, E., Hundley, V. (2013) Writing an academic paper for publication, Health Renaissance 11 (1): 1-5. www.healthrenaissance.org.np/uploads/Pp_1_5_Guest_Editorial.pdf

eBU: Online Journal

Fusion, PG research, Publishing, Research themes

Following on from my last post ‘Developing a Working Paper at BU’ in January of this year, we are now within sight of having an exciting new online journal at BU. eBU will provide both an internal and external forum for the development of research papers by undergraduate to Professor around the eight BU research themes:

 

–          Creative & Digital Economies

–          Culture & Society

–          Entrepreneurship & Economic Growth

–          Environmental Change & Biodiversity

–          Green Economy & Sustainability  

–          Health, Wellbeing & Ageing 

–          Leisure & Recreation

–          Technology & Design

Submissions will be open to immediate publication (in a safe internal environment) and open peer review by 2 appropriate BU academics. Authors will be encouraged to act upon these reviews by either reworking papers for submission to an external journal or by opting for publication on the external eBU site.

For BU academics this is a great opportunity to get critical appraisal on your research papers or ideas from colleagues. For academics it also an opportunity to encourage the submission of high quality student output, and possibly to facilitate the co-creation and co-production of publishable material to an external journal or to publish externally with eBU. For students, this is a fantastic opportunity to turn high quality essays or dissertations into scholarly outputs, which will be attractive to employers across many sectors and industries.

It is anticipated that author guidelines will be circulated in the coming weeks, and staff and students alike should begin to think about how they could submit to eBU.

If you have any questions or would like to become involved in this exciting venture, please get in touch with me via email aharding@bournemouth.ac.uk or by telephone 01202 963025

An Introduction to the BRAD Framework and Development Sessions

Publishing, Training

Calling all BU Researcher Staff,

We invite you to: An Introduction to the BRAD Framework and Development Sessions– Wednesday the 18th of September 2-3.30pm (location to be confirmed).

The University has created Bournemouth Researcher/Academic Development-BRAD. BRAD is a tailor designed research development framework with supporting development sessions, for BU’s Research/Academic staff. The aims and objectives of BRAD are aligned to the Universities Strategic Plan 2012-2018, our Visions & Values-BU 2018, and Vitae’s researcher development framework. BU is providing professional and personal development sessions and online courses throughout the next academic year 2013-2014, which are all free to attend. The development sessions will cover a range of topics, from statistics, NVivo, personal effectiveness, research management and publishing in journals and books.

 

Please email Bridie at: bapplebygunnill@bournemouth.ac.uk to confirm your attendance to the Introduction to BRAD Session

BRIAN – Depositing Full Text Articles

Guidance, Publishing

Full Text Articles should be uploaded through BRIAN to comply with Bournemouth University Academic Publications Policy on Open Access.

As most publishers allow the Accepted Version of journal articles to be made available this is the version we recommend authors deposit via BRIAN. The Accepted Version is the author-created final version that incorporates referee comments and is accepted for publication. It should not have the publisher’s typesetting or logo applied.

Supplementary files of various file formats can also be deposited as files or as zipped folders.  A listing of publishers, their journals and policy on archiving in BURO is provided by theSHERPA/RoMEO project; see http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo.php.  BURO staff will liaise with the copyright holder regarding the inclusion of full text for other publication types.

Depositing files step by step

When in BRIAN, click on ‘my publications’ to see your full list of publications.  Each record will show a summary screen and below the title of each record you will see a set of six tabs. Click on the ‘Full text’ tab (the second tab from the right).

  

Click on the link ‘Manage full text’ where it says ‘Manage full text for this publication’.  The File management box will open. Browse and select the file(s) you wish to deposit. Click on Upload’. As indicated above, please include your final version in the first instance.

Books are rarely allowed, although some publishers will permit the use of a sample chapter.  BURO staff can liaise with the publishers on your behalf to check permissions.

Click on ‘Grant’   to confirm you are depositing the file(s) for possible dissemination via BURO. This process does not transfer copyright to BURO.  When you have deposited the files you wish to transfer to BURO click on ‘Home’ in the top left hand corner of the screen to return to your BRIAN profile home page.

If you have any queries about BRIAN, please contact BRIAN@bournemouth.ac.uk/.  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.

MERJ / HEA Researchers’ Retreat

Publishing

I’m pleased to share with you more details about a forthcoming  ‘researchers’ retreat’ at Birmingham City University on May 17th: http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/events/detail/2013/17_May_MERJ
The free event is hosted by the Media Education Research Journal (co-edited by myself and Richard Berger) at BCU, and funded by the Higher Education Academy. The purpose of the retreat is to bring together ‘would be’ media education researchers / writers for networking, support and feedback on ideas. MERJ editorial board members will be attending to share their experiences.

House of Lords & Open Access

News from the PVC, Publishing

Derek Ager wrote an absolutely lovely book called the Nature of the Stratigraphic Record which has become a seminal work within the field of earth history.  He alike n’s the stratigraphic record to the life of a solider in the trenches; long periods when not much happens punctuated by periods of blind terror!  At times I sometimes think this resembles the life of a Pro Vice Chancellor and yesterday was one of the those days of terror.  I gave evidence in front of the House of Lords Science & Technology Committee with respect to Open Access publishing.

They are currently investigating the implementation of the Open Access policy which was endorsed by Government and RCUK funding bodies following publication of the Finch report.  Of particular interest are the issues around article processing charges referred to by the acronym APC’s.  You may recall if you are an avid reader of the blog that the UK has endorsed following the Finch Report so-called Gold Open Access in which the author pays an upfront fee so that the reader can have unrestricted open access on publication.  The exact opposite from the current subscription based model.  The so-called Green Open Access model based on the use of institutional and subject based repositories is favoured by many within the academic community but not directly by government policy.  The cost estimate of the shift to Gold Open Access is variously placed at between £30 and £50 million and imposes an increased burden on already stretched research funds.  In theory in the long term subscript charges should fall but given that the UK contributes just 6% of global published output it is unlikely to happen quickly.  In September 2012 the Government arbitrarily gave £10 million to support 30 research intensive institutions and in November announced interim measures to come into force from April 2013.  Rather than simply support all RCUK grant holders the government adopted a complex algorithm which favours research intensives.  The algorithm calculates ‘direct labour costs’ in RCUK funded projects as a proxy for ‘staff effort’ and uses this to calculate an APC value.  The more ‘effort’ within a grant the more APC’s one apparently requires to publish that work.  So if you have lots of RCUK grants, with lots of staff costs within them you get more cash, irrespective of the quality or nature of that research.  Despite the fact that approximately 20% of BU’s research is RCUK funded and is outstanding we don’t exceed the £10k threshold and therefore will not receive any APC funding.

The obvious result of such a policy is off course to favour research intensive institutions and is yet another unintended driver towards research concentration in the UK.  One of the most useful things that the University Alliance, the mission group to which BU belongs, has ever done is the report it published in June 2011 on the perils concentrating research funding.  This is a beautiful and influential piece of work that demonstrates comprehensively that there is no link between research quality and the size of a research group; quality shines out wherever it is within the sector.  Quality can drive growth, but size does not necessarily drive quality.

So sandwiched between the PVC’s for Oxford and Imperial I felt somewhat out of place but was able to hold my own, and make the points that I wished to make drawing attention to the challenge that institutions like our own, that don’t currently receive APC support, face and to draw attention to issues of research concentration.  So where does that leave our own staff?  It is worth noting that we launched our own APC or Open Access fund two years ago and that demand has grown by 32% over that time and we are committed as an institution to ensuring that our researchers can publish in the most appropriate place for them to be read and cited irrespective of whether it is open access or not.  It is likely that we will double our Open Access Fund again this year and are committed to finding the funds to do so.

UK specialists welcome launch of ORCID as tool to identify researchers

Guidance, Publishing

Jisc joins organisations from across the UK higher education network to welcome the launch of the Open Researcher and Contributor Identifier (ORCID).

There are more academic articles being published than ever before and more authors working together. In order to be able to identify an author correctly a unique identifier is needed that can then link to each author’s publications. ORCID provides this link and if widely used would:

• Ensure researchers get credit for their own work • Ensure researchers and learners looking for information will be able to find academic papers more accurately • Enable better management of researcher publication records, making it easier for them to create CVs, reduce form filling and improve reporting to funders • Create a means of linking information between institutions and systems internationally • Enable researchers to keep track of their own work with funders, publishers and institutions around the world.

It also provides researchers with their own ORCID. Researchers are able to control how much information it holds about them and who that is shared with. The adoption of ORCID is a solution to the current challenges of being able to search for work accurately. By researchers volunteering to adopt its usage it could improve discoverability and accurate referencing.

Neil Jacobs, programme director, Jisc comments: “We welcome the consensus that has been achieved on this issue, which should pave the way for a better research system, less work for researchers re-keying details, and more efficient operations across the sector. We recognise that this is only the start and that work needs to be done to implement ORCID in the UK. However, we have a solid beginning and we look forward to working with our partners across the sector to build on it.”

Alongside Jisc, the organisations below are encouraging the adoption of ORCID:

• The Association of Research Managers and Administrators (ARMA) • The Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) • The Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) • Research Councils UK (RCUK) • The Universities and Colleges Information Systems Association (UCISA) • The Wellcome Trust.

Find out more about the benefits of ORCID on Jisc’s website.  <http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/di_researchmanagement/researchinformation/orcid.aspx>

Read Jisc programme director, Neil Jacobs opinion piece in Research Information <http://www.researchinformation.info/news/news_story.php?news_id=1029>

Developing a working paper at BU

Fusion, PG research, Publishing, Research themes

I would like to make you aware of an exciting development at BU.

A multi-disciplinary group of BU academics has been meeting over the last 6 months in order to design a online journal that is capable of acting as a central focus for the dissemination of the high quality research and scholarly outputs from UG and PG dissertations, post graduate researchers, early career researchers and established academic staff. The group has designed a developmental working paper online journal that will support ‘would be’ authors and their potential publications. Although particular emphasis has been given to maximising high quality outputs of UG and PG students and early career academics, this online journal will be capable of supporting the potential of all those engaged in research and scholarship at BU.

Below are a series of Q & As:

 

What’s the name of the working paper?

The provisional title is eBU: Working Papers Online

 

How is the working paper structured?

The working paper will not be limited to any one discipline or allied to any one particular methodology, but will aim to publish articles driven by the key BU Research Themes: (Creative and Digital Economies, Culture and Society, Entrepreneurship and Economic Growth, Environmental Change and Biodiversity, Green Economy and Sustainability, Health, Wellbeing and Ageing, Leisure and Recreation, Technology and Design). Apart from the build-up to launch, the working paper will have no deadlines or specific calls for papers. Instead, the working paper will work on a rolling submission process.

A set of author guidelines and details about formats are currently being considered and written. However, the guidelines are likely to accommodate a wide range of formats.

 

What are the submission processes for staff and students?

It is envisaged that staff will act as gatekeepers and encourage undergraduate and master’s students to submit high quality work into a format this is publishable. Post-graduate researchers and academic members of staff will be able to submit papers on their own accord.

After a short review from the editorial board, two designated BU academics will provide an initial quality check. The paper will then be uploaded to the internal intranet working paper site. This will allow any member of staff or student to read and offer feedback. However, within a few weeks the two designed reviewers will then provide a more comprehensive and detailed critical review. All reviews will take place in a safe, secure and INTERNAL environment. After a detailed review, students will then be encouraged to make any recommended changes and submit to external publication/or make their work available to be published on external working paper website.

This working paper is set to go live in March.

 

Further information

If anyone is interested in becoming involved in helping to create this online journal, and/or at an editorial level please get in touch with Andrew Harding (aharding@bournemouth.ac.uk), Andrew Adams (aadams@bournemouth.ac.uk) or Fiona Knight (fknight@bournemouth.ac.uk).

 

RCUK to provide some universities with a block grant for open access publishing costs

Publishing

open access logo, Public Library of ScienceWe’ve added posts to the Blog previously about the outcome of the Finch Report (Accessibility, sustainability, excellence: how to expand access to research publications) (access previous posts here) which was published on 18th June 2012 and came out of the Working Group on Expanding Access to Published Research Findings, chaired by Dame Janet Finch. On 16th July 2012 the Government announced that it has accepted the recommendations of the report. The report recommended a balanced programme of action to enable more people to read and use the publications arising from research, and to accelerate the progress towards a fully open access environment, particularly for all government-funded research.

Upon publication, the Report generated some negative reaction from Russell Group institutions concerned about the cost implications given the output of their staff and the high proportion of RCUK funding they receive. The Government has responded to this by providing funding to some institutions to support the costs of OA publishing. This approach so far has been two-fold:

1)    In September 2012 the Government announced funding of £10 million, understood to have come out of budget underspends, to support a number of research-intensive universities to kick-start the transition to OA publishing and setting up funds to meet the costs of APCs (Read the BIS announcement here: http://news.bis.gov.uk/Press-Releases/Government-invests-10-million-to-help-universities-move-to-open-access-67fac.aspx). The funding will support 30 institutions, selected on the basis of their combined QR funding and RCUK income. BU did not meet the threshold and will unfortunately not receive any funding from this initiative.

2)    In November 2012 RCUK announced block grant funding to support selected universities to support open access publishing costs from RCUK-funded grants (read the RCUK announcement here: http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/media/news/2012news/Pages/121108.aspx). Payments will be made from April 2013 to March 2015, with a mid-term review to assess the system is working. Grants have been calculated for individual universities based on the proportion of direct labour costs awarded on grants that they have received from April 2009 to March 2012. These labour costs have been used as a proxy of research effort leading to the generation of publications. Only universities that are eligible for a block grant of £10k or more will receive funding. RCUK have confirmed that unfortunately BU does not meet the threshold of £10k and will not receive any funding from this initiative.

Although BU has missed out on both block grants we are continuinging to support open access publishing, supported by a central, dedicated budget specifically set up to pay open access publication fees (BU Open Access Publication Fund). This has been live since April 2011; its use will continue to be monitored and the budget increased to cover the increasing demand from BU academics wishing to publish via open access routes.  There is no doubt that this fund will need to grow substantially over the next few years to cater for the changes in train.

Green open access publishing is of course possible using our own institutional repository BURO which is now even more accessible given the new interface provided by BRIAN which tells academics the publisher’s rules on self-archiving for each output when they log into the system; it is hoped this will increase the proportion of full-text articles available in BURO.

BU is encouraging all academics to continue to embrace open access publishing at least as part of the dissemination strategy for all current grants and to ensure that they bid for open access funds as part of future grants as this becomes possible (it is already possible with some funders, including Research Councils).

RDU Small Grant Fund Winner- Update

Post-award, Publishing

In November 2011 I (Joanne Mayoh) was the recipient of one of the first BU Research Development Fund (RDF) Small Grant Scheme prizes. This award gave me the opportunity to travel to Champaign (Illinois) in May 2012 to present a paper at the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry. The budget covered my travel to Illinois, hotel accommodation, conference fees for the five day event, and sustenance costs during this time. As an early career researcher, who has only started publishing within the last few years, this was an excellent chance for me to receive support to present internationally, and engage in essential networking and profile building.

In addition to the conference paper, this opportunity resulted in targeting networking with a number of influential methodologists, and the submission of two journal articles, and a further (accepted) conference abstract in collaboration with a newly formed contact. This new associate is one of the most experienced mixed methodologists currently publishing within my target journals, and is therefore an invaluable connection for at this stage in my career.

The process of applying for RDF funding was extremely simple and one that I would recommend my colleagues engaging with if they have any need for a small grant. I would definitely apply to this fund in the future to support conference attendance, research support or general networking.  Overall it was a wonderful experience, and I am very grateful for the support from BU and the Research Development Unit.

Make this month, your Royal Society month!

Publishing, REF Subjects, Research themes

To celebrate the ‘Open Access Week’, the Royal Society Publishing content will be free for all to access until the 29th November 2012!!

So if there is an article you have been meaning to read, now is the time to read it; if you have recently published an article in a Royal Society journal, now is the time to share that research with your peers.

The Royal Society is a Fellowship of the world’s most eminent scientists and is the oldest scientific academy in continuous existence. Apart from promoting science and its benefits, recognising excellence in science and supporting outstanding science, their other priorities include providing scientific advice for policy, fostering international and global cooperation and education and public engagement, clearly spanning their collective scope wider than just science.

The Royal Society publishes nine journals covering the broad spectrum of the life sciences, physical sciences and cross-disciplinary sciences. These journals have great impact and are becoming increasingly powerful within the sector.

So make full use of this month and get as much as you can by visiting these journals.

1. Open Biology

2. Biology Letters

3. Journal of the Royal Society Interface

4. Interface Focus

5. Notes and Records

6. Proceedings A

7. Proceedings B

8. Philosophical Transactions A

9. Philosophical Transactions B

Textbook translated into Greek

Publishing

 Just received in the post a copy of one of the textbooks for medical students I have edited, and I can’t read it.  Elsevier wrote a cover letter with the book to inform us (co-editors and I) that the third edition of our successful textbook Psychology & Sociology Applied to Medicine: An Illustrated Text has been translated into Greek (see http://onlinebooks.parisianou.gr/index.php?page=shop.browse&category_id=20&option=com_virtuemart&Itemid=17&vmcchk=1&Itemid=17).  A long time ago I did one year of Ancient Greek in High School in the Netherlands so I can recognise some of the Greek letters, but that’s all.  The original third edition (in English) was published in late 2010 (http://www.bournemouth.ac.uk/hsc/news/2010/sep/contentonly_1_5404_5404.html).  The Greek edition was apparently published late 2011.  Interestingly, since the textbook’s contributors and editors have signed over the copyright of their work to Elsevier the negotiations have been without our knowledge between the publishers Elsevier and Parisianou (Athens).  As we did not know this was happening we received a nice unexpected surprise.

What fascinates me is why a translation into Greek?  The textbook sells well in the UK and Ireland and it appears to sell well in English-speaking countries like Australia and New Zealand and in North-West Continental Europe.  Greece is some economic, political and social upheaval and the process of translation costs money and the market for a textbook in Greek is considerably smaller than for one in English.  Perhaps Greek medical students find it more difficult to study in English than other Continental students? 

 

Professor Edwin van Teijlingen

School of Health & Social Care

Prof. Hundley Associate Editor BMC Pregnancy & Childbirth

Publishing

Congratulations to BU Prof. Vanora Hundley who has been invited to become Associate Editor for BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth.  BMC Pregnancy & Childbirth is an international journal with Open Access and it has a good Impact Factor (currently 2.83) in its field.    More details of BMC Pregnancy & Childbirth can be found at http://www.biomedcentral.com/bmcpregnancychildbirth/

 

Prof. Hundley joins Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen as Associate Editor, giving Bournemouth University a very good representation on the editorial team.

More about Prof. Hundley: http://uk.linkedin.com/pub/vanora-hundley/16/b40/39b

BURO Stats – who’s downloading your open access research?

Publishing

What’s your impact?  Did you know that you can access statistics for your open access research outputs in BURO?

Simply go to BURO, browse your items by author and view a variety of statistics about your individual full text research outputs, including:-

  • Number of full text downloads (daily and monthly)
  • Top ten search terms that led people to your research
  • Number of unique visitors

To run a variety of other searches on your research outputs use the BURO IRStats Dashboard

Remember – to add your full text items to BURO you need to submit them via BRIAN.

 

 

More Fall-Out from Gold Open Access?

Publishing

Following the Finch Report, the Government’s endorsement of its recommendations and the statement of policy from RCUK, Gold Open Access (OA) and its implications are at the forefront of many minds.

To refresh memories: Green OA is where a pre- or post-print of a traditionally published article is placed in a publicly accessible institutional or subject repository, often with an embargo period of 6-12 months; Gold OA is where the author or institution pays the costs of publication (of the editorial and peer review process, etc.) of an article, known as the article processing cost (APC). Gold is now the preferred option of Government and the Research Councils.

There are currently just over 28k peer-reviewed journals; of these only 3k, or 13%, are open access; some others will of course be hybrid, combining Gold OA with subscription. But the subscription model, which has been with us for 350 years, is still dominant. If the Finch Report’s recommendations are followed, the next few years will see an upheaval in the mechanisms and funding of scholarly communication as we switch to Gold OA. The research-intensive institutions stand to pay far more, the research-light ones to save. Decision-making on where to publish will take account not only of impact factors but also of the new metric of APCs. Provided that universities can gain access to this information, publishers will increasingly be challenged on the combined metric, and not on subscription price.

It is in this context that the recent acquisition of Atira by Elsevier is of such interest. As we all know, Elsevier is one of the major scholarly publishers, which also has Scopus in its stable. It thus has a major interest in two ends of the scholarly publication chain: the citation data on which to judge a journal as a target for publication (Scopus) and the journals publishing the research outputs. The middle link of the chain is the research management system, of which Atira is one of the leading providers.

The acquisition can therefore be seen as a clever, perhaps aggressive, move by Elsevier to offset potential fall in revenue from subscription journals by controlling more of the publication chain and the information it contains, thus influencing decision-making.

Proposed Copyright Hub to Streamline Copyright Licensing

Publishing, Research Integritiy

Recommendations for the establishment of a Digital Copyright Exchange, contained in a final report into its feasibility, have just been published following a Department of Business, Innovation and Skills funded study undertaken by Richard Hooper, click here.

Given the amount of digital material available and likely to be created in the future, it is essential to streamline the process of copyright licensing. Having easier mechanisms to obtain the appropriate copyright licences will benefit rights holders and potential licensees.

The report recommends the creation of a not-for-profit industry-led, industry-funded Copyright Hub, and the establishment of a steering group to drive forward and oversee the design and implementation of the Hub.

The Copyright Hub will have five main purposes, to:

  • act as a signpost and be a navigation mechanism to the complex world of copyright
  • be the place to go for copyright education
  • be the place where any copyright owner can choose to register works, the associated rights to those works, permitted uses and licences granted
  • be the place for potential licensees to go for easy to use, transparent, low transaction cost copyright licensing
  • be one of the authoritative places where prospective users of orphan works can go to demonstrate they have done proper, reasonable and due diligence searches for the owners of those works before they digitise them

The Government’s response to these proposals is awaited.

Have you co-authored a paper with a student this year? If so we want to hear from you!

Publishing

M&C are currently working on the BU Annual Review and are looking for information on outputs that have been published in the past academic year that have been co-authored between academics and students.

If you have co-authored any papers with students or know of any BU colleagues who have then Toby Horner in M&C wants to hear from you so this can be included in the Annual Review. Contact Toby by email (hornert@bournemouth.ac.uk) or telephone on extension 61328.

Should the Finch Report have gone for green not gold?

Publishing

open access logo, Public Library of ScienceLast week Matthew added a post (Decisions, decisions: where do I publish?) about the long-awaited Finch Report into expanding access to published research findings. The Report advocates a move to Open Access publishing for all government-funded research, a view which has been embraced by the Government. Open Access publishing is something that BU fully supports and encourages academics to undertake and just over a year ago we launched a central, dedicated budget specifically for paying Open Access publication fees on behalf of our academics (BU Open Access Publication Fund). Even so I am somewhat disappointed with the decision of the Finch Report and the reason for this is because the Report isn’t green, it’s gold.

The Report supports the gold open access model of publishing – this is where authors pay publishers for the privilidge of having their work published which, upon publication, is made freely available to anyone (no need for a subscription) on the internet. The green open access model on the other hand describes the situation where articles are published in subscription based journals as now, but a peer reviewed final copy is placed in an open access repository (such as an institutional repository like BURO). Unfortunately the gold model simply redistributes the costs of publishing by charging authors publishing fees up front rather than readers on a subscription basis, and by so openly supporting gold over green the Report is clearly supporting the commercial interests of publishers over the interests of UK research, universities and the general public. It could be argued that a better outcome of the Finch Report would have been support for green open access publishing by increasing the number of UK institutions and funders with green open access mandates from 40% to 100%.

At BU we are lucky that we have the BU Open Access Publication Fund to meet the fees of open access publishing (i.e. gold model) but what about if this budget cannot keep up with demand during a fast transition to gold open access publishing? And what about authors who don’t have access to similar funds and who can’t pay? Many PGRs and ECRs in the UK might fall into the latter group and a lack of published articles could put them at a disadvantage when applying for jobs and progressing their careers.

Last week the THE ran an interesting article on the Finch Report (Staggered open-access gold run ‘won’t break bank’) reporting that the move to gold open access publishing will be a steady transition rather than an immediate change. However the speed at which the Government adopted the Report’s main recommendations and promoted the benefits of the gold model, coupled with RCUK’s publication of a final version of their new open access policy (in which researchers are required to publish in gold open access outlets or self-archive outputs within 6-12 months, depending on discipline) and news that the four funding council’s (including HEFCE) intend to consult over plans to require all papers submitted to the next REF to be published in open access journals, gives the impression that the transition may be more imminent that the THE article suggests.

Overall it can only be a good thing that the Finch Report and the sector at large is so supportive of open access publishing – however I wish the Report had been a little less biased in its outcome and hope that universities are given the time required to make the transition smoothly. Thankfully BU is ahead of the game with the BU Open Access Publication Fund and we will continue to keep up with external developments to ensure BU staff are fully supported with open access publishing. We will also continue to support colleagues with making published outputs available via the green model of open access, i.e. self-archiving on BURO. Our new system BRIAN will tell you the publisher’s rules on self-archiving when you click through to add an output to BURO (via BRIAN). This will also be checked for you by the Library prior to the output going live in BURO.

If you’ve published a paper via a gold open access outlet we’d love to hear about your experience – do you think this has increased the impact of your research and has making your findings available quicker to a larger audience made a difference?