Tagged / BORDaR

International Open Access Week: Library support for open access

It’s Day 4 of International Open Access Week! Today we are focusing on how Library and Learning Services (LLS) supports Open Access at BU.

LLS plays a key part in promoting open access across the University, managing journal funding deals and making research outputs available via Bournemouth University Research Online (BURO) and the Bournemouth Online Research Data Repository (BORDaR).

Our Open Access guide helps with understanding OA and promoting our funding deals, enabling BU academics to publish Gold Open Access for free (or in some cases for the cost of VAT) in over 10,000 journals.

Gold open access publications will be made available via publisher web pages, and BURO, but it is the work of the BURO and BORDaR Teams that allow your Green open access work to be made publicly available, such as this paper on tourism or this dataset on cyber security.

Populating BURO involves

  • Scanning alerting services weekly for BU research outputs to ensure BRIAN is comprehensively populated with records
  • Ensuring full text is uploaded to BURO via BRIAN where it is missing (around 20% of all BRIAN records are resolved by LLS)
  • Processing all records uploaded by academics and ensuring the correct version is made available and copyright compliant

In the past 12 months 1400+ records were reviewed and processed by the BURO Team. Amongst the 10 most popular downloads over the last 12 months include this Green open access paper from 2019 on social media (4000+ downloads), this BU doctoral thesis from 2015, also on social media.

Join in the conversation around open access week on social media using  #OAweek, or contact us at research@bournemouth.ac.uk if you’d like to share your thoughts via the research blog.

Find out more about Open Access at BU on the RKE Sharepoint site

Memories of Nursing – dataset available on BORDaR

The transcripts and audio recordings from the Memories of Nursing oral history project have been added to BORDaR (BU’s research data repository), opening up a rich source of material for future research! We asked the research team to share a bit more about the project and the data collected:

What’s most exciting about the research?

As nurses, we have the privilege of engaging with many aspects of life and make connections with people and their families, in a wide variety of contexts. This project draws on the rich narratives of nurses who retired to Dorset from a number of areas around the UK and who practiced throughout the world. Through the interviews, we can share their experiences of change, innovation, heartache and laughter. The interviews with 18 participants offer a window into challenges and practices of the past and therefore offer insights to inform the future of nursing.

What do you see as the benefits of making your data available?

This rich data set comprises interviews undertaken with 18 retired nurses totalling several hours and offers feminist researchers, social historians, oral history researchers and, of course, nurses access to a unique archive collection.

The variety of topics covered can be viewed as a whole or provide insights into specific aspects of nursing practice that can by examined across participants and across time. A number of participants practiced during the second world war and through the inception of the NHS, offering insights into care at a time of crucial change in the UK. These stories offer a unique insight into the life of nurses in the second the part of the twentieth century.

Links

Transcripts and audio recordings on BORDaR: https://doi.org/10.18746/bmth.data.00000184

The Memories of Nursing website: https://memoriesofnursing.uk/

Research data management library guide: https://libguides.bournemouth.ac.uk/research-data-management

 

Research data: new dataset available in BORDaR

Prof. Amanda Korstjens recently published her research data on BORDaR, BU’s research data repository, for her paper: Environmental factors are stronger predictors of primate species’ distributions than basic biological traits.  

Many funders and journals require the data supporting research publications to be deposited for long-term preservation because of its value to future research. Here’s what Prof. Korstjens had to say:   

Q – What’s most exciting about your research?  

A – As environments are changing across the globe, we expect many animals to struggle to survive under the new conditions, but to predict how different species will cope with the new situation, we need to understand which biological traits of that animal explain their association with particular environments. If we understand the relationship between the biological traits needed for coping with particular environments, especially the kind of environments that will become more common in future, then we can develop more effective mitigation strategies to preserve these animals. For example, in theory we would expect a clear relationship between warm dry environments and primates that travel on the ground. This study looks at the environmental variables that influence the distribution of primates across the African continent and investigates for the first time which biological traits of different primate species are associated with which environmental variables.  

Q – What do you see as being the benefits of making your data available? 

A – Most researchers would like to access datasets to use them for future comparative studies and to check for themselves how they agree or disagree with the findings of the study. Providing data open access improves traceability and accountability. Most journals also request open access data publication , where possible. 

Q – Any advice you would give to anyone about managing their data effectively for successful deposit? 

 A – Making sure your data is well organized and referenced. 

Q – Anything else you want to say about your data or the process? 

A – The process was relatively straightforward. You can ask questions about anything you don’t understand or are not sure about because you are safe in the knowledge that the library team will check your entry for you. This also makes it easier to feel confident that you are not releasing data that are sensitive or not allowed to be open access for other reasons. The library team was fantastic in guiding me through the process and checking what I uploaded, even when I was rushed and trying to do things last minute. 

The data can be accessed openly here: https://doi.org/10.18746/bmth.data.00000142 

 What support is available for researchers? 

The library offers guidance and support for data management from bid preparation (Data Management Plans) to deposit in BORDaR, BU’s research data repository. Visit our research data management guide or email us at: bordar@bournemouth.ac.uk

Benefits of depositing your data

Depositing your data is a key activity when a research project is concluded. Key benefits to doing so are:

Long-term preservation

When archiving/ depositing your data, you are taking the first step in maintaining your data for the long-term. Data repositories will store and preserve your research data securely and that means you do not have to think about the prospect of losing your data in the foreseeable future. Repository staff are then responsible for the curation, discoverability, and accessibility of your data.

Get published, get cited

Depositing your data does not replace the process of publishing a research article. It enhances it. In fact, funders increasingly require data publication when they are providing a grant, and journals are aligning themselves with this process by asking the data to be published alongside with your article.

Citations are important to demonstrate impact and depositing your data can have a positive impact to your research profile through citations of your research data when re-used by other researchers. Sharing your data can also lead to further collaborations.

An image that describes 4 benefits of depositing research data. The benefits are, one) Improve your research profile two) better research impact three) tackling the reproduceability crisis and four) Meet funder and journal requirements

Image 1: Benefits of depositing research data

Enable further research

Datasets can complement other research efforts and generate new results when examined in new contexts. Moreover, when depositing your data, you are enabling the research community to benefit from your data, ensuring research efforts of your peers are directed into new areas. Finally, sharing your data transparently contributes to tackling the wider re-produceability crisis, whereby publishing your data you are allowing other researchers to test and verify the validity of your results.

 Where to deposit

Ideally, when your research project has been finalised, you will deposit your data to a repository that is related to your discipline.  You can identify suitable services using the Registry of Research Data Repositories (re3data). Note that there are charges associated with some repositories.

Alternatively, you can deposit your data with BU’s own data repository (BORDaR). There is no charge, and a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) will be generated which you can pass on to publishers to link any outputs to the original data.

It is helpful to consider where to deposit your data at the start of a research project, and to plan for any resources needed to prepare your data for publication. To this end, a Data Management Plan (DMP) should be completed at the start of every research project.

Further guidance can be found in the Library’s Research Data Management guide. If you have any specific questions, you can also email us at: bordar@bournemouth.ac.uk.