United Kingdom

With a high percentage of students with a declared disability the Open University has been working with publishers and academic teams to produce accessible course content since 2008. This has been advanced through accessibility testing, enhancements in pedagogy and the use of assistive technologies and content conversions.

The OU library recently concluded an internal research project on the student experience of library converted materials. The research sheds light on the accessibility preferences of students with a declared disability.

In this workshop we aim to guide attendees through the research findings contextualised by an overview of the various accessibility processes at the OU. With the aim of facilitating a group discussing around the following questions:

How best do we ensure the student voice is kept central to discussions about accessibility?

How best can we empower students to reach accessible content? What does accessibility best practice look like from publishers? What format should be prioritised?

UKSG Annual Conference 2025

OU Library support to help students study online

technical paper

The UKSG Annual Conference is a major event in the scholarly communications calendar which attracts delegates each year from around the world - librarians, publishers, content providers, consultants and intermediaries.

The current crisis in research integrity in scientific publishing is characterized by several interrelated issues that undermine the credibility and reliability of scientific research. Key aspects include the reproducibility crisis, peer-review failures, publication bias, data fabrication/falsification, plagiarism, predatory journals, pressure to publish, and differing cross-cultural norms around what constitutes best practice in research dissemination.

These issues collectively threaten the foundation of scientific knowledge, making it imperative for the scientific community to address and mitigate these challenges to restore trust and integrity in research. While this is a complex systems problem that implicates/touches all major stakeholders in the scientific community researchers, institutions, funders, publishers, and service providers the scholarly communication ecosystem seems to have shifted the majority of the burden for managing these recent crises to publishers.

Is this fair? Does it make sense? How realistic/sustainable is it for publishers to bear this burden/cost and what is the role for other stakeholders to ensure the credibility of the scientific record? This panel discussion – no presentations! – will feature publishers, librarians, and funders tackling the difficult question of who bears the responsibility for research integrity. Its costs are high. Are we ready to shoulder them together?

Shared responsibility (or failure)? Who should bear the burden of maintaining the integrity of the scientific record? A panel discussion
scientific record? A panel discussion

In this highly interactive, practical session, we’ll introduce the COUNTER Code of Practice for usage for usage reporting and guide you through the ins and outs of obtaining and working with your reports. You’ll come away understanding the value of normalised metrics for comparing across publishers and over time, which metrics to use and when, and of course best practice for harvesting your data using automated tools

COUNTER-intuitive: up close and personal with usage metrics

At a time when libraries across the country are looking closely at the affordability of their online subscriptions, a group of London universities is investigating whether pooling resources and sharing procurement could offer a sustainable solution. Senate House Library, Royal Holloway University of London, Central School of Speech & Drama, and King’s College London have come together, with help from Jisc, to trial joint licensing of a selection of e-resources.

We didn’t know if this would be successful but adopted a “learning by doing” approach: try it and find out. We’re tackling issues such as access and authentication, monitoring usage and negotiating fair pricing with suppliers. At time of writing we have launched three new resources, obtaining greater access, better terms and lower pricing than any institution would individually. Negotiations on a fourth resource is underway.

The project remains a small but practical example of creating a new shared service. The project could grow to include more of Senate House’s federal members institutions, acquiring access to more of the resources they want.

Phil and Nick will explore what has worked, what hasn’t, and what we have learnt through working together.

Stronger Together: creating a new regional consortium for collective licensing of e-resources

Providers of digital platforms and eBooks invest significant resources in improving accessibility and ensuring compliance with standards, but this is only part of the picture of successful resource provision for end-users. The benefits of these investments can be undermined if the users – and those in libraries and universities who support them – are unaware of how to translate technical improvements into user satisfaction.

Users have to navigate multiple layers to get at the content: discovery services, VLEs, reading list systems, publisher and aggregator platforms, varieties of file formats, university-provided software and software on their own computers and mobile devices. And even when all these layers are optimised for accessibility, users may not be aware of the features available to them.

This panel draws on a triple perspective – the content provider, accessibility consultant and accessibility librarian – and will answer questions such as:

What should librarians expect from their content suppliers?
How do their accessibility statements help you?
What does an accessible library service look like?
How are students supported in developing their digital skills?
What workarounds exist when accessibility barriers are found?
How does a university reduce their own accessibility risks under the accessibility regulations?

End-to-end accessibility: joining the dots between publisher practice and user experience between publisher practice and user experience

This breakout session will cover how the game “What about Open Science?”, was created with our UKSG Innovation Award, and the speakers approach to game development and education on Open Science. This competitive Open Educational Resource ‘game’ was designed to create discussion around common open science concepts and ideas that everyone should understand but do not always fully grasp. The game has been tested by OSCAIL in Dublin, Ireland; by SURF in The Netherlands; and at the 19th Munin Conference in Tromsø, Norway. The game will be published online as an OER during UKSG 2025. 

The breakout session will include a presentation on game development – from inception to fruition. We will discuss highs and lows, the many pivots, and our experience with Open Peer Review of the game. In addition, we will discuss some of the game ‘remixes’ and key feedback from the launch. There will be time for questions and answers with the speakers.

What about Open Science?

Discovery, a complex network ecosystem that encompasses offerings from libraries, content and technology providers, is a crucial part of the knowledge-acquiring process. Its effectiveness is dependent on collaboration between all these stakeholders: users, librarians, content providers, and technology companies.

This presentation will delve into the current state of digital content discovery and explore the potential role of AI in this process. We will address pressing questions such as the persistence of metadata issues and the future readiness of our workflows. How will libraries, content providers, and discovery technology providers rise to the challenge of supporting effective digital content discovery pathways?

The status of Discovery: present and future of a story that will never end

This breakout session will explore how Libraries and Learning Resources at the University of Birmingham is supporting the research community’s use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) following the emergence of Narrow and Generative AI technologies. It will explore how a collaboration between the Research Skills Team and Copyright and Licensing Team developed an evaluative framework to empower researchers to self-evaluate an AI Tool, and how this framework became central to a new training session for the 23/24 academic year. We will also discuss the influence this has had on broader institutional activity guiding the use of AI in research.

AI Tools in Academic Research: empowering AI literacy in the research community with an evaluative framework

Books have long lived in the shade of journal articles when it comes to institutional strategies and funder policies for open access. However, books are essential scholarly formats across many disciplines, so there is a demand to develop institutional strategies. Libraries are at the heart of such developments. But where should librarians begin, how should they advance, and what should they consider if they want to develop such strategies?

Libraries worldwide are updating their collection development policies to evaluate and invest in open access programs. They are also leading campus conversations to help faculty book authors realise the advantages of open access dissemination and align with any national or private funder mandates. This session brings together perspectives from institutions, libraries, and research funders on open access policies for books to share their observations and experiences. The emphasis is on practical recommendations to ensure that books don’t get “left behind” in a global move towards open research.

The session will particularly highlight the evidence-based work of the PALOMERA project (https://operas-eu.org/projects/palomera/), which has researched policies and strategies for open access books in 39 countries in the European Research Area. Based on an extensive open data collection and deep systematic analysis of the data, the project has developed actionable recommendations for eight stakeholder groups, including libraries and research funders.

Open Access for Books: The Role of Libraries in a Changing Policy Landscape

Our goal is to discuss how a form of publishing which emerged in the analogue C20th is now being challenged by the digital C21st. Journals are no longer the only platform for trusted research. Preprint servers, reports on open websites, blogposts, podcasts and videos are all options for today’s researcher. Yet many funders and most universities still rely on game-able journals and their indexes for funding awards and career advancement. Covid showed that journals are too slow and too rigid for a digital-first environment, something that research institutions outside the academy, like IGOs, NGOs and think tanks, have understood. Today, they self-publish their research findings, rapidly, cheaply and openly on their websites without the need for journals and in so doing capture valuable reputational kudos – so why not universities too? Yet there are downsides to these C21st, informal, publication choices: poor metadata and unstable websites makes this content hard to discover and preserve. In this session, you’re invited to join our expert panellists in discussing the pros and cons of different publishing options in today’s digital-first environment.

This house believes journals are no longer the only publishing option

Do your Library teams struggle to stay in touch with each other? Do your staff sometimes not know the function of other teams within your Libraries, and who to turn to with a problem?

The University of Nottingham Libraries Training and Development team saw just that, and wanted an engaging way to combat it. Thus our Libraries Job Shadowing scheme was born.

Job Shadowing is a way for staff to spend time with another team, learning what they do and providing the lightbulb moments when the pieces of the Library jigsaw fall into place. The scheme upskills staff and improves staff engagement, but also promotes cross team collaboration

OU Library support to help students study online

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OU Library support to help students study online

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Next from UKSG Annual Conference 2025

Shared responsibility (or failure)? Who should bear the burden of maintaining the integrity of the scientific record? A panel discussion scientific record? A panel discussion

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

PRESENTATIONS

CONFERENCES

COMPANY

RESOURCES

Downloads