Latest research and knowledge exchange news at Bournemouth University
Bournemouth University’s Shaun Osborne video recordings to celebrate Open Access Week (21-26 Oct. 2014). Open Access publishing makes academic papers freely available to all across the globe!
See six BU clips here highlighting Open Access papers!
Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen
CMMPH
Then say hello to the SPARC Author Addendum – http://www.sparc.arl.org/resources/authors/addendum
SPARC is The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, an international alliance of academic and research libraries working to create a more open system of scholarly communication.
Your article has been accepted for publication in a journal and, like your colleagues, you want it to have the widest possible distribution and impact in the scholarly community. In the past, this required print publication. Today you have other options, like online archiving, but the publication agreement you’ll likely encounter will actually prevent broad distribution of your work.
It is unlikely that you would knowingly keep your research from a readership that could benefit from it, but signing a restrictive publication agreement limits your scholarly universe and lessens your impact as an author.
Why? According to the traditional publication agreement, all rights —including copyright — go to the journal. You probably want to include sections of your article in later works. You might want to give copies to your class or distribute it among colleagues. And you are likely to want to place it on your staff profile page and in BU’s institutional repository (BURO, especially as this is now a requirement for the next REF exercise – see this post for further information). These are all ways to give your research wide exposure and fulfill your goals as a scholar, but they are inhibited by the traditional agreement. If you sign on the publisher’s dotted line, is there any way to retain these critical rights?
Yes. The SPARC Author Addendum is a legal instrument that modifies the publisher’s agreement and allows you to keep key rights to your articles. The Author Addendum is a free resource developed by SPARC in partnership with Creative Commons and Science Commons, established non-profit organizations that offer a range of copyright options for many different creative endeavors.
Visit the SPARC website for further information – http://www.sparc.arl.org/resources/authors/addendum
Have you got any experience of using this to negotiate your rights as an author with publishers? Share your experiences by contributing to the Research Blog!
CMMPH would like to take this opportunity to congratulate the newly established Journal of Asian Midwives on publishing its first issue. Journal of Asian Midwives (JAM) is the first regional online midwifery journal launched by the South Asian Midwifery Alliance (SAMA). Prof. Rafat Jan based in Pakistan at Aga Khan University’s School of Nursing and Midwifery is the lead editor. JAM aims to give a voice to midwives, nurses-midwives, women’s health clinicians, and reproductive health professionals as well as social scientists.
CMMPH proudly announces that one of our Bournemouth University PhD students, Ms. Sheetal Sharma, is on the new journal’s Associate Board. Sheetal’s research is on maternity care in Nepal.
The journal is Open Access and free. JAM does not charge subscription fees so it is free for readers nor does it charge a submission fee so it is also free for authors! The journal can be found at: http://ecommons.aku.edu/jam/
Edwin van Teijlingen & Vanora Hundley
CMMPH
Don’t delete your drafts! You will hear this A LOT over the next couple of years as the open access movement gathers even more momentum and the role of green open access and institutional repositories is moved to the fore of the next REF (likely to be REF 2020). HEFCE have confirmed that all journal papers and conference proceedings submitted to the next REF will have to be made freely available in an institutional or subject repository (such as BURO) upon acceptance (subject to publisher’s embargo periods).
Therefore:
It is excellent to see the Funding Councils promoting the open access agenda and embedding it within the REF. Making outputs freely available increases their visibility and is likely to increase their impact, not only within the academic community but in the public sphere too. It ensures research is easily accessible to our students, politicians and policy-makers, charities and businesses and industry, as well as to potential collaborators in other countries which can help with building networks and the internationalisation of research.
Talking to academic colleagues around the University it is apparent that the normal practice is to delete previous drafts, including the final accepted version, as soon as a paper is approved for publication. This needs to change! Many publisher’s will already allow you to add the final accepted version of your paper to BURO (just not the version with the publisher’s header, logo, etc) and this is set to increase in light of the HEFCE consultation. Rather than deleting the final version, add it to BRIAN so it will be freely available to everyone in the institutional repository, BURO.
We need to get into the habit now of doing this now. BRIAN is linked to the Sherpa-Romeo database of journals so you can easily check the archiving policy of the journal. All you need to do is:
1. Log into your BRIAN account and find the paper.
2. One of the tabs is named ‘full text’.
3. If you click into this tab you will see a link near the Sherpa-Romeo logo to check your ‘publisher’s policy’.
4. Click on this and you will see the archiving policy for this particular journal, clearly stating which version of the paper can be uploaded. Ideally you are looking for your journal to be a green journal which allows the accepted version or (even better but quite rare, unless you have paid extra to make it freely available) the publisher’s version/PDF. See the screen shot.
5. Click ‘back’ and then click on the ‘full text’ tab again and you will see a link (in a blue box) to ‘upload new file for this publication’.
6. Upload the file and follow the onscreen instructions.
7. Your full text will then automatically feed through to BURO and be available open access in the next few days.
In point 4 I mentioned about paying extra to the publisher at the point of acceptance to make it freely available upon publication. This is often referred to as the gold route to open access publishing and at BU we have a central dedicated budget for paying these fees. You can find out about the GOLD route to open access publishing here: Gold route
So the overriding message is:
LOVE YOUR DRAFTS – DON’T DELETE THEM – ADD THEM TO BRIAN!
If you haven’t noticed by now, there is a giant bubble outside of Kimmeridge House this week in celebration of the International Open Access week. The Open Access Bubble will be set up outside of Kimmeridge House (weather permits) and you can visit us between 10am to 3pm, until this Friday.
If you think that the Open Access Bubble looks cool from the outside, check out the inside
There is a Bubble talk every day from 10am to 11am, covering important topics like ‘The Benefits of Open Access’, ‘Open Access and the Philosophy of Openness’ and ‘Public Engagement Opportunities for Academics and Open Access’. Not only that, we also offer free doughnuts to visitors of the dome. You also get to laze on the bean bags while you watch some interesting video abstracts featuring some of our open access publications; and videos on the importance of open access.
So please take this opportunity, visit the Open Access Bubble and get involved! For information on other events that are taking place, please visit www.bournemouth.ac.uk/open-access
NB: If the weather does not permit the setting up of the Open Access Bubble, the Open Access Room will be set up at CG02, Christchurch House.
(article originally published on http://www.eff.org), 2 October 2014)
Now in its eighth year, Open Access Week is an international event that celebrates the wide-ranging benefits of enabling open access to information and research–as well as the dangerous costs of keeping knowledge locked behind publisher paywalls.
From October 20 to 26, academics, researchers, and curious minds everywhere will be encouraged to learn about the various hurdles to open knowledge and share stories of positive advancements in the effort to make open access the norm in scholarship and research.
Whether you’re looking to learn more, to champion open access policies, or to raise awareness in your community, there are plenty of ways to get involved in Open Access Week. Read on to find out why we fight for open access to knowledge and how to take part in Open Access Week activities.
When we say “open access” we are referring to the practice of making scholarly research available online for free upon publication (or soon after). Open access policies should aim to remove barriers and encourage scholarly and educational reuse of research. Copyright restrictions sometimes undermine scientific ideals of openness and collaboration; good open access rules help to bypass traditional copyright limits by encouraging full use of open licensing systems that enable sharing.
Reasons for supporting open access policies abound. From maximizing taxpayer funded research to increasing the exposure and use of publications, facilitating interdisciplinary collaboration, and enhancing the overall advancement of scholarship, the need for open access is more important now than ever. As tuition prices continue to rise and Internet adoption is at an all time high, trapping knowledge behind prohibitively expensive paywalls is a disservice to scientists and problem solvers across the world. Progress is stifled.
Research institutions, academics, and the intellectually curious are increasingly embracing the open access model for research worldwide. Open Access Week is about keeping the dream of easy-to-access knowledge alive. And we have a chance to connect this global momentum toward open sharing with the advancement of constructive policy changes on the local level.
This year’s theme is Generation Open. We’ll be focusing on the importance of students and early career researchers embracing open access, and exploring how changes in scholarly publishing affect academics and researchers at different stages of their careers.
There are all kinds of ways to get involved. We invite you and your community to join us for this exciting week of action. Here’s how:
Join the movement and stay connected! Together with the Right to Research Coalition, Creative Commons, Open Access Button, Fundación Karisma, and others, we created a platform for everyone to add their support for the open access movement. Sign here and share far and wide.
Write a blog post or place an op-ed in your local newspaper or on-campus publication. Find out if your campus has an open access policy and tell your story about why open access is important to you. Let us know if you write something.
Share on social media: simply spreading the word is important … and easy! Post your thoughts about open access and share articles and media that EFF will be posting throughout the week. Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.
Host a screening and discussion about the film The Internet’s Own Boy, a powerful documentary that tells the story of activist and innovator Aaron Swartz, who also was a passionate and outspoken advocate for open access. Here is our guide to help you organize a screening of this important film. Be in touch if you decide to organize a viewing.
Print and share handy guides to help people in your community get up to speed on why we demand open access to research. There’s one on Diego Gomez’s case and one on the open access movement more broadly.
EFF has long been a leader in the open access movement. The Internet should be a place where we can share ideas and get educated, unimpeded by unfair paywalls. We are thrilled to join forces with dozens of organizations across the world for this year’s Open Access Week to spread message loud and clear: research should be free, available, and open for everyone’s benefit. Generation Open, here we come.
WHAT IS IT? Open access is free, unrestricted access to peer-reviewed scholarly research literature and data.
WHY DO IT? Publicly-funded research should be made freely available to the community who support it
BENEFITS
To the members of public
To the academics
Please visit the links below to hear from our academics about some of the Open Access research that is available to you:
Get involved. Participating in Open Access Week can be as simple or involved as you like. It can also be a chance to let your imagination have full rein and come up with something more ambitious, wacky, fun.
Celebrate Open Access at BU and join us in these exciting events. No need to register, just turn up.
For more information about
Please get in touch with Pengpeng Hatch (pphatch@bournemouth.ac.uk, tel: 01202 963154).
All logo and colour scheme attributed to : www.openaccessweek.org
Jisc has introduced a new, secure method of data sharing using its JANET research and education network, to support leading universities undertaking three new initiatives.
“Rather than each of the research programmes and organisations developing one-off solutions to manage collaborative secure communication and user authentication between partners, Jisc is securing the networks across the organisations so that approved researchers working in one partner organisation can gain access to the data they need wherever it is stored.”
The initiatives are:
• Farr Institute of Informatics Research– a UK virtual organisation working with 10 funders on safe use of patient and research data for medical research
• Medical Bioinformatics, funded by the Medical Research Council, to research the safe use and analysis of biological and patient data for medical research across all diseases.
• The Administrative Data Research Network which aims to allow access to anonymised data collected by government and public sector institutions.
John Ainsworth, e-infrastructure lead for the Farr Institute, says: “The network is changing the way we do data analysis. It will provide a secure infrastructure for collaboration and the sharing of resources for data science. This will enable researchers to concentrate on what they do best – discovering new knowledge
Book the 
Bubble Dome
As part of International Open Access Week, events will be taking place in ‘BU’s Bubble Dome’ on Talbot Campus in the Courtyard. The dome can also be booked for team meetings and if you’d like to book this alternative space for your meeting please email Barry Squires.
The dome is available on the following dates and times:
Fitting a maximum of 15 people, the Bubble Dome accommodates soft bean bag seating only and a laptop and flat screen TV is available for use. It is a fully enclosed weather proof installation, but will be unavailable in severe wind or rain.
Open Access: not every new journal is rogue!
Open Access publishing is the hot topic in academic publishing. It comes from the idea that publicly funded research used to end up in expensive journals which are difficult to access and which are expensive to users. It also made for real ivory tower research and it did not give the general public, often the funder of research through taxation or charity access to the studies which they ‘paid’ for in the first instance. The success shows in (a) the rising Impact Factors of online Open Access journals, such as, for example BMC Pregnancy & Childbirth; (b) the requirement for the UK funding bodies that all research its funds needs to be published as Open Access by 2016; and (c) the growing number of traditional academic journals that now offer authors the option to pay for online Open Access in addition to the traditional paper-based journal publication, for example Midwifery. Two further signs of success are: (d) the growing popularity of Open Access Week, this month (20-26 Oct.) we celebrate for the 7th time Open Access Week ( http://www.openaccessweek.org/); and (e) the growing number of rogue journals trying to cash in on the Open Access trend.
The latter is the ugly face of capitalism whereby opportunists, i.e. unscrupulous publishers jump on the bandwagon cashing in on a successful service. BU librarian Jean Harris recently shared an interesting article about Predatory Publishers (see: www.cilip.org.uk/cilip/blog/are-we-doing-enough-warn-users-about-predatory-journals?utm_source=Communicator_membership_list&utm_medium=Email&utm_content=Untitled21&utm_campaign=Weekly+News+from+CILIP%2c+18+Sept+2014). Predatory publishers create a convincing looking scientific journal on the web, often borrowing details from other journals. They then email academics and researchers for both manuscripts and the offer to sit on the journal’s editorial board. Submissions are then “peer reviewed” and an invoice for Open Access publishing emailed by return. No submission is rejected! Many of us will have received such spam emails.
The message is not the fall for the scam. Prospective authors should check the webpages of the journal (although some fake ones can be convincing). Talk to more experienced colleagues in your field or your librarian to find out what they know about the ‘new’ journal, do they know someone on the editorial board. Is the journal listed in reputable electronic databases such as SCOPUS? Please, do not rely on information from Google on the journal you are trying to suss out!
Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen
CMMPH
We use IR Stats software to analyse your research outputs in BURO (Bournemouth University’s institutional repository) and produce the statistics below. A dashboard of statistics on individual outputs is freely available to all – simply access each of your items in BURO and scroll down the web page.
Buhalis, D. and Law, R., 2008. Progress in information technology and tourism management: 20 years on and 10 years after the Internet—The state of eTourism research. Tourism Management, 29 (4), pp. 609-623.
*by current staff
This article is a green open access post print i.e. the author accepted version. Always remember to retain this final peer-reviewed version of all your research papers. Most articles in BURO are author accepted versions. You can check publisher copyright policies for archiving in BURO on the Sherpa Romeo website.
Search engine referrals
62.31% from Google Scholar
7.17% from Google
This demonstrates how well BURO is indexed by the most high profile search engines for research.
Professor Buhalis writes,
It is always great to publish great research but for me it is all about relevance and impact on society and making sure that research is accessible and useful to as wide an audience as possible
Bate, S. and Bennetts, R., 2014. The rehabilitation of face recognition impairments: A critical review and future directions. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 8, 491 – http://eprints.bournemouth.ac.uk/21334/
PhDs consistently appear high up in the most downloaded outputs lists in repositories and BURO is no exception. In August these theses were 2nd 3rd and 4th in the list.
| Burrows, E. A., 1997. Stress in qualified nursing staff and its effect on student nurses. PhD Thesis (PhD). Bournemouth University. | 1069 |
| Franklin, I., 2009. Folkways and airwaves: oral history, community and vernacular radio. PhD Thesis (PhD). Bournemouth University. | 564 |
| Cramer, D. E. A.., 2009. Consumer perceptions and experiences of relationships with service organisations: financial, travel and tourism organisations. PhD Thesis (PhD). Bournemouth University. | 538 |
Burrows, E.A. August 2014 document downloads
Please do keep adding your full-text research outputs to BURO via BRIAN, both green and gold. To be eligible for submission to the next REF exercise all journal papers and conference proceedings will have to be made freely available in an institutional or subject repository (such as BURO) upon acceptance (subject to publisher’s embargo periods). See the blog post here on how to add outputs to BRIAN.
Any queries please contact the BURO team: BURO@bournemouth.ac.uk
In June Research Professional reported that Prof Adam Tickell, successor to Dame Janet Finch, will be holding a series of salons to discuss Open Access.
Open Access salons! What a great idea.
A hairdressing salon. A row of women sit under hard hat dryers along the back wall, flicking through out of date copies of Grazia magazine. At the front a stylist fusses around a client in front of a large mirror.The bell on the door tinkles as a woman enters. Everyone turns to look at her.
STYLIST: Can I help you, love?
WOMAN (nervously): Yes, I was wanting a quick trim..?
STYLIST: Open Access, is it?
WOMAN: Pardon?
STYLIST: Do you want your haircut to be Open Access?
WOMAN: I don’t really understand…
STYLIST: Do you want your hair to be freely viewed by members of the public? Or do you want to wear this over your head?
She holds up a paper bag.
You’ll only be allowed to take it off if people pay to view it, or have bought a general subscription to my salon. Could get quite complicated.
WOMAN: But that’s crazy!
STYLIST: I’m just allowing others to benefit from this salon whilst protecting my business. It’s a tough world out there. It’s not as easy to make money out of hairdressing these days, you know.
WOMAN (patting her hair, and looking at the women at the back): Well, I guess I don’t really have a choice, do I? If I want others to see my hair.
STYLIST: You’ve made the right choice, love. Right then: if you want it to be Open Access, you’ll have to pay me a Hair Processing Charge, in addition to any other money I might get from you.
WOMAN: How much is that?
STYLIST: It varies. Averages about a thousand pounds.
WOMAN: A thousand pounds! But that’s outrageous!
STYLIST: It’s actually very good value. There’s a huge amount of unseen work involved in haircutting. Of course, we do offer a discount for pre-payment. If you buy 10 haircuts up front, we’ll give you a 20% reduction.
WOMAN: But still that’s £800!
STYLIST: Take it or leave it. You could go for the green option, of course.
WOMAN: What’s that?
STYLIST: You submit your hair to your local wig shop. However, it can’t be the final version. It might include bits I’ve missed, and won’t include any final changes we might make.
WOMAN: So my option is to have an incomplete haircut and put it on display in a wig shop, or pay a grand so that other people can look at it?
STYLIST: Essentially yes. Alternatively you could opt not to go Open Access. But then you will have to wear the paper bag.
WOMAN: But…but…
STYLIST: Look, love, it’s for your benefit! We need to protect your reputation and uphold the esteem and profile of this salon. And think what Open Access hair will do for you: More people will see your hairstyle, and will mention it to others. And people from the poor parts of town will be able to freely look at your hair.
WOMAN: And…and what if the people who see my hair decide they don’t like it? What if they disagree with my choices?
STYLIST: Well, if they make a good case we might have to retract it.
WOMAN: Retract it?
STYLIST: Yes. We might say we no longer agree with the hair and the underlying decisions which informed it. We might even decide to glue back any hair we’ve removed to restore the cut to its previous state. And I’ll put an apology note in the window.
WOMAN: This is ridiculous! I’ve changed my mind. I don’t want a trim any more.
She storms out of the salon.
STYLIST: I don’t know. No pleasing some people. (She returns to the client in the chair). So what style do you want, my love? A David Sweeney, you say? Right you are.
Written by Phil Ward, Deputy Director, Research Services, University of Kent.
Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that enables the sharing and use of creativity and knowledge through free legal tools.
“The free, easy-to-use copyright licenses provide a simple, standardized way to give the public permission to share and use your creative work — on conditions of your choice. CC licenses let you easily change your copyright terms from the default of ‘all rights reserved’ to ‘some rights reserved’.
Creative Commons licenses are not an alternative to copyright. They work alongside copyright and enable you to modify your copyright terms to best suit your needs.
Creative Commons offers licenses and tools to the public free of charge and does not require that creators or other rights holders register with CC in order to apply a CC license to a work. This means that CC does not have special knowledge of who uses the licenses and for what purposes, nor does CC have a way to contact creators beyond means generally available to the public. CC has no authority to grant permission on behalf of those persons, nor does CC manage those rights on behalf of others.
If you would like to obtain additional permissions to use the work beyond those granted by the license that has been applied, or if you’re not sure if your intended use is permitted by the license, you should contact the rights holder.” (Creative Commons 2014)
New ways of publishing on the internet require different licensing arrangements, so that work can be freely shared and reconfigured to advance research. Creative Commons allows this flexibility.
Source: http://foter.com/blog/files/2012/11/Foter.com_infographic_CC.jpg
Where the RCUK OA block grant is used to pay Article Processing Charges for a paper, the paper must be made Open Access immediately at the time of on-line publication, using the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence. Find out more in the RCUK OA Policy.
For all other material: Use the Creative Commons tool to choose your licence.
When you come across work that uses Creative Commons you will see the distinctive Creative Commons logo (as below) and there will be a link to the licence under which it has been released. This tells you exactly what you are allowed to do with it.
The Creative Commons website has a search engine that searches the Web for Creative Commons works, and Google (under its Advanced Search facility) has an option to search for materials that use Creative Commons. Select usage rights and from drop down menu: free to share or modify, even commercially.
Don’t delete your drafts! You will hear this A LOT over the next couple of years as the open access movement gathers even more momentum and the role of green open access and institutional repositories is moved to the fore of the next REF (likely to be REF 2020). HEFCE’s consultation on open access and the post-2014 REF closed last week and, although the results are not due out until early next year, it is highly expected that most of the proposals will go ahead. This is likely to result in significant changes to how research papers are published and the full-text is made freely available.
Key changes likely to happen are:
It is excellent to see the Funding Councils promoting the open access agenda and embedding it within the REF. Making outputs freely available increases their visibility and is likely to increase their impact, not only within the academic community but in the public sphere too. It ensures research is easily accessible to our students, politicians and policy-makers, charities and businesses and industry, as well as to potential collaborators in other countries which can help with building networks and the internationalisation of research.
Talking to academic colleagues around the University it is apparent that the normal practice is to delete previous drafts, including the final accepted version, as soon as a paper is approved for publication. This needs to change! Many publisher’s will already allow you to add the final accepted version of your paper to BURO (just not the version with the publisher’s header, logo, etc) and this is set to increase in light of the HEFCE consultation. Rather than deleting the final version, add it to BRIAN so it will be freely available to everyone in the institutional repository, BURO.
We need to get into the habit now of doing this now. BRIAN is linked to the Sherpa-Romeo database of journals so you can easily check the archiving policy of the journal. All you need to do is:
1. Log into your BRIAN account and find the paper.
2. One of the tabs is named ‘full text’.
3. If you click into this tab you will see a link near the Sherpa-Romeo logo to check your ‘publisher’s policy’.
4. Click on this and you will see the archiving policy for this particular journal, clearly stating which version of the paper can be uploaded. Ideally you are looking for your journal to be a green journal which allows the accepted version or (even better but quite rare, unless you have paid extra to make it freely available) the publisher’s version/PDF. See the screen shot.
5. Click ‘back’ and then click on the ‘full text’ tab again and you will see a link (in a blue box) to ‘upload new file for this publication’.
6. Upload the file and follow the onscreen instructions.
7. Your full text will then automatically feed through to BURO and be available open access in the next few days.
In point 4 I mentioned about paying extra to the publisher at the point of acceptance to make it freely available upon publication. This is often referred to as the gold route to open access publishing and at BU we have a central dedicated budget for paying these fees. You can find out about the GOLD route to open access publishing here: Gold route
So the overriding message is:
LOVE YOUR DRAFTS – DON’T DELETE THEM – ADD THEM TO BRIAN!
“Everyone goes to Wikipedia, and, because most people are using it and learning from it, we need to make sure they get the right information.” (Dr Michael Peel, University of Manchester).
I remember the first time I suggested to someone that they contribute to Wikipedia. They gave a disparaging smirk and said something along the lines of: “Why? It’s poor quality and hardly suitable as an academic outlet”. I completely disagree and am a firm believer that researchers contributing to Wikipedia are improving it’s educational value and promoting their research to a global audience.
Wikipedia is the fifth most popular website in the world, reaching about half a billion readers per month. Many of the scientific articles are viewed hundreds and some even thousands of times per day. Due to its popularity and search engine optimisation, Wikipedia articles usually appear at the top of Google search results and often significantly higher than university webpages, research project websites, staff profile pages, journal articles, etc. All of the information is freely available across the world making it the ultimate in open access. Working for a university that embraces open access and public engagement, BU researchers should be regularly contributing to Wikipedia as part of the dissemination and impact of their research.
By contributing to Wikipedia researchers are helping shape the public image of their field. As Wikipedia entries are very often the top Google hits then academics contributing to these can ensure their fields are represented accurately or interestingly. It can also help increase media interest and ensure research is accurately reported. A 2011 Guardian article (Wikipedia Survey Academic Contributions) gave the example of history researchers on Project Volterra at University College London who discovered fragments of a lost Roman law code. They were so keen to ensure journalists got the story right that they penned pages on the code before they released details of the discovery to the press. “We suspected that any journalist would be likely to look at the Wikipedia pages as an initial resource,” said research fellow Simon Corcoran.
Contributing to Wikipedia is easy. Anyone can contribute and there is an editorial process that checks that contributors cite reliable sources, write accessibly and keep a neutral, factual tone. Writing for Wikipedia enables researchers to practice the art of writing for a lay audience as it requires complex ideas to be written about in an accessible and clear way. It also supports collaboration. Researchers working in a similar subject area will read about your research and you will read about theirs. They are also likely to suggest changes to your contribution, similar to copyediting in professional publishing, ensuring the end product is as good as possible.
It’s no surprise that Wikipedia-founded Jimmy Wales is advising the UK government with their plan to make all public-funded research in Britain freely available.
The UK’s first Wikipedia student society – the Wikipedians at Imperial College – aim to see Wikipedia embraced as a learning and teaching resource in the classroom. The first EduWiki Conference was held at the University of Leicester in September 2012 and brought together academics, support staff and Wikipedia contributors. One of the main findings was that Wikipedia assignments are being used in dozens of universities across the world. Wikipedia assignments involved asking students to write Wikipedia articles as part of an assignment, then assessing their contributions. They work best with final-year undergraduate or beginning-postgraduate students. These assignments can really motivate because they give a real experience of publication, unlike a dissertation that may only be read by a few people.
Wikimedia UK, the national charity which supports Wikipedia and its sister projects, has detailed advice on its web site for scientists who want to contribute.
Last month I added a post about HEFCE’s plans to launch a new project to investigate the issues regarding open access publishing of monographs and other long-form scholarly works (Open access and monographs – a new HEFCE project). HEFCE have now confirmed that this project has started and is being undertaken in partnership with the AHRC and the ESRC. It aims to identify and draw together a body of evidence concerning monographs and open access publishing and is expected to run until mid-2014.
You can read the full report here: http://www.hefce.ac.uk/news/newsarchive/2014/news85292.html
You can access all of the project documentation here: http://www.hefce.ac.uk/whatwedo/rsrch/rinfrastruct/oa/monographs/
Further updates from the group will be posted over the coming months.
I read an extremely good article this week on Strategic Approaches to Getting Published, written by Phil Ward (University of Kent) as well as a presentation by Frances Bell (University of Leicester) (Developing a Publication Strategy). Now that we’re in the assessment period for the next REF exercise (likely to be REF 2020) we need to focus on personal publication strategies. This post shares some of the key messages and advice on personal publication strategies:
Have a publication strategy and review it every year or two – Try to keep in mind the direction in which you want your research to develop, and what publications will help to build your profile. Try not to be diverted from this! Your strategy should include different media and channels. It should include information on your goals (what will you publish in the next week, year, five years, etc), uncertainties and development needs, and resources available to you (e.g. a mentor, peer review of your paper prior to submission, access to funds for open access charges, etc). You should regularly check progress against your goals.
Balanced publications portfolio – Try and develop a balanced publication portfolio. You don’t always need to be targeting top journals, and sometimes you need to balance several factors:
Choosing the right journals – the ‘right journal’ is often viewed as being one with a high impact factor however this is an archaic and somewhat controversial system, and is based on the average number of citations over a two-five year period. The system is open to abuse, and varies widely between disciplines. However, it is still seen as a rough and ready indicator of esteem.
The following video is by Karin Dumstrei, Senior Editor at EMBO Journal. It is worth 3 minutes of your time to watch and listen to the tips she gives!
Her advice for writing a journal article is to always:
High impact journals tend to have broader audiences, so you need to:
Consider the role of social media in your publication strategy – social media has been shown to dramatically increase the academic and societal impact of research (see my previous posts on the benefits of using Twitter). Social networking platforms such as Twitter are excellent for promoting and sharing your research, as are blogs either by writing your own blog, contributing posts to other blogs, or commenting on posts written by others. Your publications strategy should include social media outlets. For advice on using social media as part of your publication strategy please contact Sally Gates in the R&KEO.
Good luck!
Happy New Year to you all and welcome back to work!
Each day this week we’ll be posting a New Year’s Research Resolution to help you get back into the swing of things. Today’s resolution is to consider open access publishing via the GOLD route!
Research shows that making your research freely available dramatically increases the number of citations and leads to more people downloading the research papers, this increasing the academic and societal impact of your research.
The gold route to open access is considered at the moment to be the most sustainable method in the long term, and was recommended by the Finch report. It involves publishing in a fully open access journal or website, or in a hybrid journal (i.e. the paper appears in the traditional print journal and is freely available online). Authors usually need to pay for their work to be published via this route.
BU has operated a central dedicated budget for open access payments via the gold route since April 2011. The fund is open to all BU academics and PGRs, and you can find out how to apply here: BU Open Access Fund
BU staff can login below:
MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships 2024
Research Information Network
Upcoming opportunities for PGRs – collaborate externally
BU involved in new MRF dissemination grant
New COVID-19 publication
Horizon Europe News – December 2023