The Director’s View: LERU Doctoral Summer School

LERU Doctoral Summer School

On 15 July, I gave a keynote address to the LERU Doctoral Summer School in Leiden, The Netherlands; every year LERU organises a high profile Summer School for PhD students from LERU institutions.

This year, the theme of the meeting was Data Curation – addressing how early career researchers should tackle the need to collect, store, describe, use/re-use and archive the research data they are collecting. My task was to set the concept of data curation in the more general context of Open Science – or Open Research, as it is better described, since it covers all academic disciplnes from Art to Zoology.

I explained to the students, amongst whom were 2 UCL PhD students, that the two main building blocks of Open Science were (1) Open Access to publications and (2) proper management of research data.

I started my talk with a review of Open Access developments in Europe. Here UCL is one of the leading universities and we are proud to note that it is UCL Library Services which leads on Open Access for the University. I was able to point out that Europe has got itself into a bit of a lather about Open Access policies – there are 461 of them, more than in the rest of the world put together. I explained how the current model of publishing goes against the Open agenda – authors assign their copyright to publishers, universities offer (free) peer review and Editorial Board services. Universities pay academics to do research, which is then handed over to publishers for free and we have to buy it back through subscriptions and purchases – a publishing system which is not intuitive. The students got very engaged on this subject and we had a great session with frank exchanges of views.

After publications, I talked about the role of research data in the Open agenda, and demonstrated how the projected European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) could help create a level playing field for all European researchers to re-use resources and services which were meant for sharing. There are clear academic advantages in working like this, since sharing will speed the discovery of new cures/solutions to global societal challenges such as ill health, poverty, drought, global warming. There is also an economic advantage to sharing, since this enables new tools, services, and drugs to come to market sooner, creating new jobs and industries in the process.

The Summer School ended with an hour’s feedback session from the students, where they commented on what worked for them, and what did not. It is clear that they want to continue to be involved in Open Science discussions now they have returned to their Universities. A follow-up seminar is already being planned where the speakers and students from Leiden can look in more detail at some of the questions raised in the Summer School this year.

Open Science is a really important agenda for research, and it is equally important that research-led libraries such as UCL’s have a cogent offering to make.

Paul Ayris

Director of UCL Library Services

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