The Director’s View: UCL Open Science Platform

Open Science

Summer 2016 will see the creation of a new Working Group of Library Committee – the UCL Open Science Platform.

Open Science (perhaps more accurately called Open Scholarship) is a global movement looking at ‘open’ approaches to making the processes of research and education and their outputs more open and available for legal sharing and re-use.

Open Science is a term which embraces a large number of issues in the ‘open’ agenda, spanning the horizon as far as the eye can see – a concept which also influenced John Wastell, the last and perhaps most brilliant master mason who worked on King’s College Chapel in Cambridge, and who took charge in 1508. He is the architect of the beautiful fan vaulting – ‘the noblest stone ceiling in existence‘ – which was built in just three years between 1512 and 1515 and is the largest fan vault in the world. The supporters of Open Science have similar aspirations for their agenda too.

Open Science encompasses movements such as Open Access to publications, well-founded research data management, and open data. These are the best known features of the movement, but there are other activities too – metrics (how do we measure success in open approaches to scholarship?), reward and recognition systems (payment, promotion), Citizen Science and public engagement. And, of course, funding streams have to be identified/re-directed to fund investment in resources, services and developments.

It is planned that the UCL Open Science Platform will meet three times a year, chaired by the Vice-Provost (Research), and act as a co-ordinator and advocate for Open Science to UCL’s Schools, Faculties, Departments, Committees and Working Groups. It will also act as a beacon of good practice to international groupings, such as LERU (League of European Research Universities).

UCL Library Services is well-placed to influence the development of the Open Science Platform. The Library runs UCL Discovery and has established UCL Press as the first fully Open Access University Press in the UK. We are the Principal Investigator in the LEARN project on research data managament, which includes a strand of thinking on open data. And we have amongst us UCL’s Research Data Advocacy Officer, Myriam Fellous-Sigrist. The Library also makes a major contribution via the UCL Publications Board (which oversees UCL’s work on Open Access) and the Bibliometrics Working Group.

UCL Library Services is thus re-defining the role of library services in the twenty-first century, offering a lead which places it at the forefront of such developments across Europe.

Paul Ayris

Director of UCL Library Services