The Finch report on expanding access to research publications was released today and has been widely reported in the press. The report recommends the UK  should “embrace the transition to open access, and accelerate the process in a measured way.”.

UCL is already making efforts to ensure that its research is openly available:

UCL Discovery

UCL’s 2012 Publications Policy includes a mandate that UCL researchers must deposit their research in our institutional repository UCL Discovery, as far as copyright restrictions allow this.

Discovery is a large database of UCL research including journal articles, books chapters, theses, digital web resources and more. For further information including instructions on how to deposit your own research see http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/.

New journal publishing software

UCL has also developed its own software platform to support academic colleagues who wish to publish their own journals. This new software is being successfully tested with the Journal of Bentham Studies.

The software scheme is known as overlay journal software.  A presentation layer sits on top of UCL Discovery (where the papers are stored) and allows the academic editors of the journal to select papers and publish issues of the journal in the normal way.

There is no charge for using this service, which is offered by UCL Library Services to support research, knowledge transfer and public engagement in UCL. If you are interested, or would like a demonstration of the new software tools, please contact Paul Ayris.

Recovery of Open Access publishing costs

Academic colleagues can recover costs for Open Access publishing from research council grants. These costs can be recovered whilst the grant is still active. It should be noted that it is not possible to recover publication costs once the grant has ceased.

Special arrangements are in place for meeting the Open Access publication costs of those academic colleagues who are funded by the Wellcome Trust.

For further information on claiming open access fees please contact us.

Congratulations to Kaydene Duffus, who passed her Upgrade from MPhil to PhD status today.

image by mansikka

UCL DIS (Department of Information Studies) is gathering information about its alumni, including former students of SLAIS (School of Library, Archives, and Information Studies – we changed our name in January 2009).

If you’re one of our alumni then we’d like to know what you’re up to now. Please can you tell us if you’re working, volunteering, studying or doing something else? What organisation are you at? What do you do? Where in the world are you?

You can comment on this post if you like, with your name, email address and details, or if you’d prefer to send us an email please do at:  l.keshav@ucl.ac.uk.

Don’t worry, we’re not going to share this information with anyone without your permission, and if we use it to produce data on UCL DIS/SLAIS alumni it will not be linked to you as an individual. We may contact you again to ask if we can use you as a case study for our website but we will not do so unless you have expressly agreed to this.

Please help us spread the word and reach as many alumni as possible by passing this on to other alumni you’re in touch with, and sharing the link on Facebook and Twitter.

Many thanks!

The Day of Archaeology 2012 is a crowd-sourced archaeological blogging project, designed to show the world what archaeologists really do.  This year the project will be running on June 29th, and full details about the project can be found through the links on the poster below:

Day of Archaeology Publicity Poster