Open Access Week – Open in Practice

For Open Access Week this year we are going to be focusing on the practical side of Open. More than just publications, it is important that we realise that Open applies to much more.
During the week we’ve got a series of blog posts coming up looking deeper at the new UKRI policy, at Open Licensing, at the decision to open up older content and culminating in a celebration of services that support Open at UCL. We also have three events coming up this week:

• On Tuesday, our first event is all about the new UKRI policy, talking about how it affects you and the routes to remaining compliant across both articles and books.
• The second event on Wednesday is all about the new e-Textbooks project from UCL Press. Back in March, we hosted an event discussing the e-books pricing crisis and this webinar will describe the steps UCL Press is taking to address these issues, initially for our academics, and then later, for the wider community.
• Finally, we will be shifting the focus to Open Data and Open Code with a panel discussion hosted by colleagues in the eResearch domain. On Thursday there will be a discussion of Opening data & code with a focus on ‘Who is your audience?‘ featuring academics from across UCL, including Geography, Archaeology and the Energy Institute as well as internal experts on data and code management and sharing.

The practicalities behind making research open have always been second to advocacy and awareness, but we need to make sure that we share the practicalities too. In this post we are going to be collating advice from across the board and we hope that between the posts this week and our events you will get some new ideas, or have some new questions!

• The UCL Open Access team have advice on how you can get funding to make your work Open Access, what the options are if you aren’t eligible for extra funding, because there are plenty! How to use the Research Publications System (RPS), how to link it to your ORCID to make everything easier, and even a range of FAQs! And if that isn’t enough, you can always ask them about it!
• The Research Data Management (RDM) team look after UCL’s Research Data Repository. This repository is free at point of use for UCL staff and research students to share their research data, and the team can support you to select and curate the data as well as to select an appropriate repository of the many specialist ones available. The RDM team also trains and supports users at all levels with writing Data Management Plans as well as reviewing and commenting on plans before you submit. Questions, queries and plans for review can be sent to lib-researchsupport@ucl.ac.uk
• UCL Press opened in 2015 as the UK’s first fully open access university press. They publish over 50 open access books a year in addition to 14 academic journals, and support UCL’s successful student journals programme.
• All content you share, open or otherwise is subject to various copyright and licensing issues, some of which will be explored later this week, but you can get a wide range of advice and support from the Library Services Copyright Team. They provide advice for students, teaching staff, research staff and PhD students, and if you don’t find your answer on their webpages, you can always contact them.