United Kingdom

This session will explore how Lancaster University Library has developed and implemented it’s vision for facilitating a culture of open research, with a particular focus on Open Access Monographs. The talk will provide an overview of how the library has developed the necessary infrastructure to facilitate this vision, including developing consortia and collaborative options for Open Access Monograph Publishing with other organisations. The session will also outline how the library has partnered with academic colleagues to develop it’s Open Research Service and make Open Research possible and easy.

UKSG Annual Conference 2024

Making it possible and making it easy: Research Culture and Open Access Monographs

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.

In the wake of the global mental health crisis, exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic, the demand for mental health services has reached unprecedented levels, leaving universities grappling with the challenge of providing adequate support. Libraries have emerged as crucial allies in this endeavor, acting as knowledge hubs and offering vital resources to address the pressing mental health needs of students and researchers.

Empowering minds: libraries leading the charge in student mental health

Scottish Universities Press (SUP) is a library-led publishing initiative involving 18 institutions. SUP was formed in response to changes in the Open Access policy landscape and to harness the benefits of working collaboratively at scale. In this session we will outline the approach to establishing SUP, sharing tips and lessons learned. We will cover the practical challenges we have experienced as librarians becoming publishers and discuss how wider challenges in the OA landscape have impacted our efforts. We will also outline the opportunities of institution-led publishing as we have experienced them and explore the wider anticipated benefits as we move to scaling up SUP.

Developing Scottish Universities Press: a practical guide to library-led publishing

Its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats shape the academic library in terms of what it is and does, how it is seen, where it excels and struggles, and its potential for advancement or decline. The session will identify key factors influencing academic library status and positioning. It will analyse the overlap, interplay and occasional contradiction between the different strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, and will outline a framework of ten proposed strategic directions. The session will aim to enable attendees to advance the position of their libraries by leveraging their strengths, addressing weaknesses, taking the opportunities presented to them and mitigating significant threats they confront.

The position and prospects of academic libraries: a SWOT analysis and strategy framework

Academic researchers are becoming increasingly aware of the need to make data and software FAIR in order to support the sharing and reuse of non-publication outputs. Currently there is still a lack of concise and practical guidance on how to achieve this in the context of specific data types and disciplines. This presentation details recent and ongoing work at the University of Sheffield to bridge this gap. It will explore the development of a FAIR resource with specialist guidance for a range of data types and will examine the planned development of this project during the period 2023-25.

Practical steps towards an open research culture: Building support around FAIR data & software at the University of Sheffield

The UN SDG Publishers Compact, launched in 2020, was set up to inspire action among publishers to accelerate progress to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030, asking signatories to develop sustainable practices, act as champions and publish books and journals that will “inform, develop and inspire action in that direction”. This Lightning Talk will discuss how our new Bristol University Press Digital has been developed as part of our mission to contribute a meaningful and impactful response to this call to action as well as the global social challenges we face.

Responding to the UN SDG Publishers Compact – Bristol University Press Digital

Researchers face more pressure to share their research data than ever before. Owing to a rise in funder policies and momentum towards more openness across the research landscape. Although policies for data sharing are in place, engagement work is undertaken by librarians in order to ensure repository uptake and compliance. We will discuss a particular strategy implemented at Loughborough University that involved the application of conceptual messaging frameworks to engagement activities in order to promote and encourage use of our Figshare-powered repository. We will showcase the rationale behind the adoption of messaging frameworks for library outreach and some practical examples.

Advocating for data sharing: messaging frameworks for repository engagement strategies

This talk will outline how a completely accidental occurrence led to brand new avenues for open research advocacy and reasons for being. This advocacy has occurred within student communities such as trainee teachers, student psychologists and (especially) those soon losing access to subscription-based library content. Alongside these new forms of advocacy, these ethical example of AI use cases has begun to form a cornerstone of directly connecting the work of the library to new technology.

All Watched Over By Machines That Love Open Research

Get Full Text Research (GetFTR) launched in 2020 with the objective of streamlining discovery and access of scholarly content in the many tools that researchers use today, such as Dimensions, Semantic Scholar, Mendeley, and many others. It works equally well for open access content as it does for subscription-based content, providing researchers with recognizable buttons and indicators to get them to the most up-to-date version of content with minimal effort. Currently, around 30,000 OA articles are accessed every day via GetFTR links.

How GetFTR Supports Discovery and Access of OA Content

Is the biggest blocker to open access actually the economics of it all? Book Processing Charges don’t scale but they’re still the dominant method of funding OA monographs, despite the recent emergence of several alternatives to BPCs: collective funding models like Opening the Future, the Open Book Collective, Direct-2-Open etc. Through presentations and audience Q&A we’ll pose some provocative questions to explore this theme:
- How can these new models achieve sustainability and ‘get out from the back of the sofa’ of end-of-year leftover funds? - How can libraries prioritise these models from their budgets?
- How can the sector work together to promote and maximise these alternative models in the world of tight budgets?

Getting Out From The Back of the Sofa: Or How Can We Achieve Sustainable Funding for Open Access Books?

Although scholarly communications has become more open, problems with predatory and problematic publishers remain. There are commercial providers of lists, start-up/renegade Internet lists of good/bad and the researchers, publishers and assessors that try to understand and process what being on/off a list means to themselves, their careers and their institutions. Still, these problems persist and leaves many asking: where is the list? This plenary panel will discuss the problems of “predatory” publishing and what, if anything, publishers, our community and researchers can do to try and help minimise their abundancy/impact.

Chaired by Lorraine Estelle

Making it possible and making it easy: Research Culture and Open Access Monographs

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Making it possible and making it easy: Research Culture and Open Access Monographs

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Next from UKSG Annual Conference 2024

Empowering minds: libraries leading the charge in student mental health

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

PRESENTATIONS

CONFERENCES

COMPANY

RESOURCES

Downloads