It’s time. For the third year in a row, we have a wonderful Advent Calendar of Research Support for you to enjoy!

We will be sharing a link each day on our Bluesky account, as well as our Linkedin account, but don’t worry if you’re not on Bluesky or Linkedin – the interactive calendar is embedded below for you to access at your own pace, or you can access it directly on your browser. We will also update this blog post throughout the month with an accessible version of the content.

We hope you find something here that will interest, inform and inspire you during this month of advent.

1 December: Unwrap timeless ideas this festive season with Bentham’s open access Essays on Logic, Ethics and Universal Grammar, which publishes today. These thought-provoking essays explore reasoning, morality, and language- perfect for cosy winter reflections and sparking deep conversations by the fire!

 

 

 

 

 

2 December: Nothing says Season’s Greetings like writing and sharing your data management plan!

 

 

 

3 December: Father Christmas has been collecting data again this year…But is his list protected by copyright? Take our online copyright Christmas quiz.

 

 

 

 

 

4 December: End the year with a powerful read.

Publishing today, The Chronopolitics of Life is the final book of the year from UCL Press. This open access work explores how time shapes life, politics and power, offering fresh insights for reflective winter reading and inspiring conversations as the year comes to a close.

 

 

5 December: Read about the gift of rights retention, which is now included in UCL’s updated Publications Policy, and the actions for UCL authors.

 

 

 

6 December: Retraction Watch is a searchable database of retracted, corrected, or concern articles with 40k+ entries. Search by author, title, or affiliation to ensure your research is based on trustworthy sources.

 

 

7 December: Looking to start or grow your Citizen Science project? UCL’s Resources Hub offers training, tools & support to help you succeed. Explore what’s available today!

 

 

 

8 December: Join UCL’s Copyright Literacy community channel for a virtual mince pie and the latest copyright news!

 

 

 

 

 

9 December: Refresh your Research Integrity training with the recently updated course which now includes guidance on Research Security and updates from the revised Concordat to Support Research Integrity.

 

 

 

10 December: Jingle all the way…to gaining ethical approval! The Research Ethics Team can help – book a drop-in session with one of the team.

 

 

11 December: Christmas is a time for relaxation, celebration…and careful study of official documents. There are 4,000 government documents in Overton from 80 different countries on the topic of Christmas.

 

 

 

12 December: Keep your rights, and wave goodbye to embargoes – next year, UCL’s updated Publications Policy will help staff use and share their own articles as soon as they’re published.

 

 

13 December: Grey literature, published by non-academic institutions, provides insights from real-world practitioners. It often addresses current, pressing issues & offers data or case studies not found in academic journals. Take a look at the UCL library guide all about grey literature.

 

 

14 December: Dashing through the snow… to the new UCL data management plan template!

 

 

 

15 December: Join the UCL Citizen Science Community! Connect, share ideas, and grow your network with your peers at UCL. Staff & students welcome – let’s make research inclusive together!

 

 

16 December: When philosopher Jeremy Bentham died, he bequeathed over 100,000 manuscript pages to UCL. But what do these pages contain, and how does UCL’s Bentham Project make sense of them? In the final release from UCL Press Play this year, Professor Philip Schofield explains more.

 

 

 

17 December: The gift that keeps on giving – but sometimes it doesn’t give quite what we want it to. Have a look at our libguide on using generative AI for searching.

 

 

18 December: Creative Commons licences reflect the giving spirit of the season. But are you as generous as a Creative Commons licence? Complete our fun personality quiz to find out!

 

 

 

 

 

19 December: Are you a parent or carer toilet training a child? We need your help! Join the Big Toilet Project – the world’s largest toilet training study. Participate in this UCL citizen science project & help reduce plastic pollution from nappy waste.

 

20 December: Take some time to reflect on Research Transparency with UCL’s online training course on transparency and reproducibility in research.

 

 

 

21 December: Make this season brighter with UCL Press Play! Explore podcasts and documentaries where brilliant minds reveal bold ideas on queer histories, neurodiversity, climate justice and more. Listen now and celebrate knowledge!

 

 

22 December: Great news for UCL staff publishing articles in subscription journals next year. Even if there’s no transformative agreement with your publisher, UCL can still make your manuscript open access immediately.

 

 

23 December: Make an ethical start to the new year! Plan your ethics applications for 2026 and check out our high-risk application deadlines.

 

 

To mark this year’s Open Access Week (20-26 October), the UCL Office for Open Science and Scholarship hosted a webinar exploring this year’s theme: Who Owns Our Knowledge?

Facilitated by Bibliometrics Support Officer Andrew Gray, a panel of four speakers from different areas of UCL offered their time and expertise to consider this complex question.

• Lauren Cantos is the Research Integrity and Assurance Officer in the Compliance and Assurance team. Previously she worked in the Research Ethics team at UCL, and her background is as a Humanities and English researcher.
• Christine Daoutis is the UCL copyright support officer, based in the library. Her background is in open access, open science and copyright, particularly the ways copyright interacts with open practices.
• Catherine Sharp is Head of Open Access Services in Library Services [or LCCOS]. She manages the Open Access Team, which delivers Gold open access, including transformative agreements, and Green open access through UCL’s repository, UCL Discovery, for UCL staff and students.
• Muki Haklay is a Professor of Geographic Information Science at UCL department of Geography. He founded and co-direct the UCL Extreme Citizen Science group. He is an expert in citizen science and contributed to the US Association for Advancing Participatory Science (formerly the Citizen Science Association), and the European Citizen Science Association (ECSA).

The webinar began with a short reflection on the theme from each of the panellists, followed by a discussion structured around these questions:

1. What does “ownership” mean for research – for outputs and for data? And when we define what “ownership” means, how do we decide who the owners are – or who they should be?
2. We often think of ownership as linked to “authorship”. A wide range of people contribute to research – including many outside academia – but not all become named as authors. How do we recognise them?
3. What happens when copyright (or other IP rights) conflict with academic expectations around ownership and authorship?
4. How is the production and the dissemination of research influenced by commercial considerations around ownership and access?

It was a thought-provoking discussion in which the panellists touched on a wide range of subjects, including considerations of attribution beginning at the outset of a project, recognising contribution from individuals outside of academic structures, understanding copyright concerns when having work published and how UCL’s updated Publications Policy can help with this. As well as answering questions, the session raised other questions and, as is often the case, the complexity of these questions didn’t allow for straightforward answers. As Andrew aptly put it towards the end of the webinar – ‘sometimes saying the question is complicated is an answer in itself’. This particularly resonated with regard to the issue of AI tools failing to attribute authors, and also the matter of widening participation within the production of knowledge.

If this has piqued your interest, or you attended the webinar and would like a recap, you can watch the full recording now:

 

Access the full recording on MediaCentral

Useful Links

A selection of useful resources were shared in the webinar chat:

• The Authorship Integrity Toolkit from UK Research Integrity Office
• UCL’s updated Publications Policy
• ‘Who Owns Our Knowledge? Understanding how copyright can shape the discourse around open scholarship’ – blog post by Christine Daoutis
• Managing intellectual property rights in Citizen Science by Teresa Scassa and Haewon Chung
• Typology of Citizen Science projects from an intellectual property perspective by Teresa Scassa and Haewon Chung
• ‘Who Owns Our Knowledge? Retaining author’s rights through UCL’s updated Publications Policy’ – blog post by Catherine Sharp
• EIFL Rights Retention and Secondary Publication Rights
• Introducing CC Signals: A New Social Contract for the Age of AI – Creative Commons
• Open Science at the generative AI turn: An exploratory analysis of challenges and opportunities | Quantitative Science Studies | MIT Press
• Copyright considerations in text and data mining: sharing and adopting best practice – UCL Library Skills training session
• “Wait, not like that”: Free and open access in the age of generative AI
• Join UCL Copyright Literacy Community on MS Teams

We are very grateful to the speakers who contributed a lot of insight and provided much to reflect on from this webinar. We hope the conversation around these questions will continue and answers will develop as we navigate the complexities.

The UCL Office for Open Science and Scholarship invites you to contribute to the open science and scholarship movement. Stay connected for updates, events, and opportunities.

Follow us on Bluesky, LinkedIn, and join our mailing list to be part of the conversation!

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Guest post by Catherine Sharp, Head of Open Access Services at UCL

“Who Owns Our Knowledge?”, the theme of this year’s International Open Access Week, asks how “communities can reassert control over the knowledge they produce”. With commercial publishers continuing to monetise academic content through ever-increasing subscription and open access fees – the costs of so-called “transformative” agreements to UK HEIs is around £140m – and to report substantial and growing profit margins, while at the same time attempting to restrict authors’ rights in their own work, this remains a challenge for all HEIs. Against this background, the UK’s rights retention movement is a vital tool in the effort to free academic research and empower authors to use and share their knowledge.

UCL’s Intellectual Property (IP) Policy has long enshrined the principle that UCL staff own the copyright in their own scholarly materials, and that UCL has the right to use them for academic and research purposes. This year, with the introduction of an updated Publications Policy, UCL has joined a number of other universities, including Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial and Manchester, in taking action to assert this right. This is known as rights retention.

In practical terms, this means that from 2026, having notified publishers of UCL’s pre-existing licence, UCL will make the accepted manuscripts of scholarly articles by UCL staff open access without an embargo in UCL Discovery, UCL’s open access repository, under the Creative Commons Attribution licence (CC BY) (unless an alternative licence or exemption is requested). The CC BY licence allows widespread re-use and sharing, and is the licence that research funders, including Wellcome, UKRI, NIHR and EC funders, require.

While UCL will continue to provide opportunities for authors to publish Gold open access through transformative agreements and in fully open access journals, articles that are not Gold open access will also benefit from immediate open access, on publication, in UCL Discovery. This will allow all UCL authors to meet their funders’ (including REF) open access requirements while continuing to publish in their journals of choice, and to benefit from open access through higher impact, increased citations and more collaborations.

The policy also benefits co-authors, and UCL authors are encouraged to let their co-authors know about it and to take advantage of it. Aside from that, authors do not need to take any action other than to upload their accepted manuscripts to RPS, on publication.

We are looking forward to seeing the practical effects of the policy as more UCL research is made available, more freely, than ever before.

 

The UCL Office for Open Science and Scholarship invites you to contribute to the open science and scholarship movement. Stay connected for updates, events, and opportunities.

Follow us on Bluesky, LinkedIn, and join our mailing list to be part of the conversation!

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The theme for this year’s Open Access Week is ‘Who Owns Our Knowledge?’ – a fundamental question in the world of Open Access. Here at the UCL Office for Open Science & Scholarship, we will be joining the global conversation around this question with blog posts from the perspectives of Copyright, Rights Retention, and Citizen Science, as well as a webinar with a panel discussion between four experts.

The Open Access Week website unpacks the theme by first asking ‘how communities can reassert control over the knowledge they produce’. Increasingly, knowledge is being used without the permission or even awareness of those who produce it, through AI scraping, politicisation of research, and lack of attribution. What can be done to prevent this? The temptation may be to retreat from Open Access, as a means of protecting knowledge from inappropriate and indiscriminate use, however this is not the solution.

Knowledge is a human right.

Michelle Bachelet, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, gave this statement in 2020, ‘Worldwide people need States, international bodies, science and medical institutions and practitioners to ensure the broadest possible sharing of scientific knowledge, and the broadest possible access to the benefits of scientific knowledge. This is key to any effective public health policy. It is essential to the combat against climate change. And it is a fundamental matter of human rights.’

With this in mind, we should consider knowledge not owned solely by its producers, but by humanity collectively, to be accessed, used, and built upon.

At the same time, the considerable amount of effort that individuals and groups dedicate to producing knowledge needs to be appropriately recognised. A very pressing concern is that this is not something that AI tools are currently doing, with considerable discussion in the media covering concerns about materials being ingested into large language models and then regurgitated, often inaccurately, without attribution to the original authors.

In response to this, Creative Commons are working on ‘CC Signals’ – a project still very much in its early stages, which hopes to improve author attribution from AI. This topic, and Copyright in general, are complex areas within knowledge ownership. To explore further, we will have a dedicated blog post later this week from our Copyright Support Officer, Christine Daouti.

Ultimately, most researchers want their knowledge to be used for the greatest benefit – to enhance people’s lives, improve how things are done, and find solutions to our biggest problems. Reasserting control to ensure this can happen, by making knowledge open and accessible, is crucial.

Therefore, whilst publishers might want to monopolise knowledge to maximise profits, authors are increasingly retaining control over their knowledge thanks to Rights Retention policies. At UCL, the Publications Policy has been updated this year to include a Rights Retention statement, and our Head of Open Access services, Catherine Sharp, will be explaining this in more detail in another blog post this week.

It’s also important to consider who has ownership over the production of knowledge. If knowledge should be for the widest possible audience, then the production of this knowledge should involve the widest possible community. This is where Citizen Science and Co-Production come in. These initiatives open the doors of knowledge production to include people with a broad range of backgrounds and experiences, who might otherwise have been excluded from the process. To unpack this topic in more depth, our Citizen Science Coordinator, Sheetal Saujani, will be contributing a blog post later this week.

We are looking forward to the conversations and insights which this Open Access Week will generate, and we hope you end the week with a desire to delve even deeper into the complex question of ‘Who Owns Our Knowledge?’

Read along with our upcoming blog posts and join the conversation on social media!

The UCL Office for Open Science and Scholarship invites you to contribute to the open science and scholarship movement. Stay connected for updates, events, and opportunities.

Follow us on Bluesky, LinkedIn, and join our mailing list to be part of the conversation!

Share this post on Bluesky