Ten years on, most of our readers will have heard of ORCID by now in one context or another. Many publishers now ask you to include an ORCID when you submit a journal article, and increasing numbers of funders, including Wellcome, require the use of an ORCID when applying for funding. The new UKRI funding service will also require ORCIDs for at least PIs.

In case you don’t know much about ORCID here are the facts:

• ORCID is a free, unique, persistent identifier for individuals to use as they engage in research, scholarship and innovation activities. ​
• Its core purpose is to distinguish individuals from one another, this means that people with identical names, or who have changed their name can be accurately attributed works.
• It also provides a portable and open profile which can collate and display your works including recognition for grant application review and peer review activity.
• ORCID profiles are independent of any institution and can remain with you throughout your career.
• This open profile also facilitates auto-population of manuscript submission and grant application systems, reducing duplication of effort.​
• The ORCID profile can also populate itself using in-built tools that pull data from the DOI registry and various publishers and aggregators.

The use of an ORCID can also make it easier to record your outputs in RPS. Connecting your ORCID to RPS can make the outputs identified more accurate and makes it much easier for you to comply with OA mandates including for the REF as well as keep your UCL profile up to date. It is also possible to set it up to automatically push data to your ORCID profile, so that when you record a publication in RPS, it is automatically sent to your ORCID profile.

There are two options for connecting an ORCID to RPS:

1. A ‘read’ connection means that RPS will find records that belong to you, using your ORCID iD, and claim them to your RPS record. This means that, unlike records that RPS finds using your name and institution, you don’t need to claim these records manually.
2. A ‘read and write’ connection will both claim publications that can be matched by ORCID iD and send publications to your ORCID record. This avoids duplication of effort when publications need to be recorded manually.

We recommend using the ‘read and write’ version of the connector as this will keep both your RPS record, UCL Profile and ORCID in sync. Take a look at our instructions on the website or download the PDF guide.​ Nearly 70% of UCL research staff have connected their ORCID to RPS but less than 40% are taking advantage of read and write. To take advantage of the full functionality, reconnect your ORCID to RPS today!

Get involved!

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 X, formerly Twitter, LinkedIn, and join our mailing list to be part of the conversation!

 

 

 

Guest post by Andrew Gray, UCL Bibliometrics Support Officer

The UCL Research Support team has recently launched a comprehensive new LibGuide on Research Metrics. This resource covers a range of topics, from how to use and understand bibliometrics (citation metrics and altmetrics) to guidance on specific tools and advice on handling publications data. Learn more about this guide to enhance your research impact and better understand the world of research metrics!

Bibliometrics

The core of the new guide is focusing on guidance for using and understanding research metrics, such as bibliometrics, citation metrics, and altmetrics. It explains how to access citation counts through Scopus and Web of Science, and more complex normalised metrics through InCites. It also gives guidance on how to best interpret and understand those metrics, and advice on metrics to avoid using. The guide also covers the UCL Bibliometrics Policy, which governs the use of bibliometric data for internal assessments at UCL, and sets some limits on what should be used.

Guidance for Tools

Within the LibGuide, you will also find guidance pages for how to use specialised services like InCites, Altmetric, and Overton to measure research impact. Additionally, the guide offers advice on using other tools that UCL does not subscribe to but may be beneficial for research support. This includes three freely available large bibliographic databases—Lens, Dimensions, and OpenAlex—which provide broader coverage than Web of Science and Scopus. It also outlines how to use a range of tools for citation-network based searching like Research Rabbit, Connected Papers, and Litmaps, as well as modern AI-supported search and summarising tools such as Scite, Keenious, and Consensus.

These are of course not the only tools available – especially with AI-supported tools, there are frequently tools being released – but these are ones we have been asked to investigate by students and researchers. If you would like feedback on another tool you are considering using, please get in touch.

Publications data

The LibGuide also addresses broader questions about using publications data. It outlines how to download publication and metrics datasets from Web of Science, Scopus, InCites, and Altmetric, and gives some guidance on how to link datasets from different sources together. Learn more about using publications data.

Additionally, the guide also explains how best to interpret data drawn from UCL-specific sources such as RPS, data ensuring you can make the most of the data available to you.

This new LibGuide is an important resource for anyone looking to expand their understanding of research metrics and manage their publications data. Visit the guide today to explore these tools and resources in detail.

Further support

We offer regular online or in-person training sessions as part of the Library Skills program. Please see the Library Skills calendar for dates and bookings. There are also three self-paced online sessions available through the Library Skills Moodle.

For any enquiries about bibliometrics, please contact us on bibliometrics@ucl.ac.uk 

Get involved!

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 X, formerly Twitter, LinkedIn, and join our mailing list to be part of the conversation!

 

 

Post by Andrew Gray (Bibliometrics Support Officer) and Dominic Allington Smith (Open Access Publications Manager)

Summary

UCL is a longstanding and steadfast supporter of open access publishing, organising funding and payment for gold open access, maintaining the UCL Discovery repository for green open access, and monitoring compliance with REF and research funder open access requirements.  Research data can  be made open access in the Research Data Repository, and UCL Press also publish open access books and journals.

The UCL Bibliometrics Team have recently conducted research to analyse UCL’s overall open access output, covering both total number of papers in different OA categories, and citation impact.  This blog post presents the key findings:

1. UCL’s overall open access output has risen sharply since 2011, flattened around 80% in the last few years, and is showing signs of slowly growing again – perhaps connected with the growth of transformative agreements.
2. The relative citation impact of UCL papers has had a corresponding increase, though with some year-to-year variation.
3. UCL’s open access papers are cited around twice as much, on average, as non-open-access papers.
4. UCL is consistently the second-largest producer of open access papers in the world, behind Harvard University.
5. UCL has the highest level of open access papers among a reference group of approximately 80 large universities, at around 83% over the last five years.

Overview and definitions

Publications data is taken from the InCites database.  As such, the data is primarily drawn from InCites papers attributed to UCL, filtered down to only articles, reviews, conference proceedings, and letters. It is based on published affiliations to avoid retroactive overcounting in past years: existing papers authored by new starters at UCL are excluded.

The definition of “open access” provided by InCites is all open access material – gold, green, and “bronze”, a catch-all category for material that is free-to-read but does not meet the formal definition of green or gold. This will thus tend to be a few percentage points higher than the numbers used for, for example, UCL’s REF open access compliance statistics.

Data is shown up to 2021; this avoids any complications with green open access papers which are still under an embargo period – a common restriction imposed by publishers when pursuing this route – in the most recent year.

1. UCL’s change in percentage of open access publications over time

(InCites all-OA count)

The first metric is the share of total papers recorded as open access.  This has grown steadily over time over the last decade, from under 50% in 2011 to almost 90% in 2021, with only a slight plateau around 2017-19 interrupting progress.

2. Citation impact of UCL papers over time

(InCites all-OA count, Category Normalised Citation Impact)

The second metric is the citation impact for UCL papers.  These are significantly higher than average: the most recent figure is above 2 (which means that UCL papers receive over twice as many citations as the world average; the UK university average is ~1.45) and continue a general trend of growing over time, with some occasional variation. Higher variation in recent years is to some degree expected, as it takes time for citations to accrue and stabilise.

3. Relative citation impact of UCL’s closed and Open Access papers over time

(InCites all-OA count, Category Normalised Citation Impact)

The third metric is the relative citation rates compared between open access and non-open access (“closed”) papers. Open access papers have a higher overall citation rate than closed papers: the average open access paper from 2017-21 has received around twice as many citations as the average closed paper.

4. World leading universities by number of Open Access publications

(InCites all-OA metric)

Compared to other universities, UCL produces the second-highest absolute number of open access papers in the world, climbing above 15,000 in 2021, and has consistently been the second largest publisher of open access papers since circa 2015.

The only university to publish more OA papers is Harvard. Harvard typically publishes about twice as many papers as UCL annually, but for OA papers this gap is reduced to about 1.5 times more papers than UCL.

5. World leading universities by percentage of Open Access publications

(5-year rolling average; minimum 8000 publications in 2021; InCites %all-OA metric)

UCL’s percentage of open access papers is consistently among the world’s highest.  The most recent data from InCites shows UCL as having the world’s highest level of OA papers (82.9%) among institutions with more than 8,000 papers published in 2021, having steadily risen through the global ranks in previous years.

Conclusion

The key findings of this research are very good news for UCL, indicating a strong commitment by authors and by the university to making work available openly.  Furthermore, whilst high levels of open access necessarily lead to benefits relating to REF and funder compliance, the analysis also indicates that making research outputs open access leads, on average, to a greater number citations, providing further justification for this support, as being crucial to communicating and sharing research outcomes as part of the UCL 2034 strategy.

Get involved!

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 X, formerly Twitter, LinkedIn, and join our mailing list to be part of the conversation!

 

This year we are pleased to be able to share with you our Advent Calendar of Research Support! We will be posting every day over on our Twitter/X account but for those of you that aren’t using Twitter/X we have posted it below, and you can visit it online in your own time. We will also be updating this post throughout the month with accessible version of the content.

Day 1

The Office for Open Science and Scholarship is your one stop shop for advice and support for all things openness. Find out more on our website: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/library/open-science-research-support/ucl-office-open-science-and-scholarship #ResearchSupportAdvent

Image by Alejandro Salinas Lopez “alperucho” on UCL imagestore. A Christmas tree with white lights at night in front of columns lit with colours of the rainbow.

Day 2

Profiles is UCL’s new public search and discovery tool showcasing the UCL community. Use it to find UCL academics, their activities, collaborations, industry partnerships, publications and more. Profiles replaces the previous IRIS system: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/library/open-science-research-support/ucl-profiles #ResearchSupportAdvent

Image by Mat Wright on UCL imagestore. A girl with dark hair and wire rimmed glasses wearing a yellow jumper sits at a laptop. In the background can be seen colourful book stacks.

Day 3

If you need a more controlled way of sharing your research data, check out the UK Data Service and its granular controls for accessing data. https://ukdataservice.ac.uk/learning-hub/research-data-management/data-protection/access-control/ #ResearchSupportAdvent

Image by Alejandro Walter Salinas Lopez on UCL imagestore. Six people in office attire facing a bright yellow wall covered in postit notes

Day 4

Our final UCL Profiles training session of the year will be held on 7 December at 12pm. Come along to find out how to update your profile and manage your professional and teaching activities in RPS. https://library-calendars.ucl.ac.uk/calendar/libraryskillsUCL?t=g&q=profiles&cid=6984&cal=6984&inc=0

If you can’t make the session, have a look at our Getting started with Profiles page: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/library/open-science-research-support/ucl-profiles #ResearchSupportAdvent

Image by Mary Hinkley on UCL imagestore. A mixed group of people around a table working at laptops.

Day 5

Are you interested in citizen science or participatory research? Ever wondered whether such an approach might work for your project? Whether you are new to citizen science or if you’ve run projects including participants before, come and join our informal UCL Citizen Science community to exchange ideas, ask for advice or share your stories! #ResearchSupportAdvent https://teams.microsoft.com/l/team/19%3aEU3Ia83bPWRqzrGpqQ1KkqlQ0AC5f4Ip8Y-zclJ-PHc1%40thread.tacv2/conversations?groupId=54f252f7-db72-40df-8faf-20e618d9a977&tenantId=1faf88fe-a998-4c5b-93c9-210a11d9a5c2

Image by Alejandro Salinas Lopez “alperucho” on UCL imagestore. A group of three women in warm clothing toasting with cups of coffee at night.

Day 6

Ever hit a paywall when trying to access scholarly publications? Get the popcorn ready, and be prepared to have your eyes opened by watching this documentary ‘Paywall: the Business of Scholarship’ at https://paywallthemovie.com/ #OpenAccess #ResearchSupportAdvent

Image by Alejandro Salinas Lopez “alperucho” on UCL imagestore. A plate of mince pies.

Day 7

Have you ever received an unsolicited email from a publisher inviting you to publish your research in their journal? Think, Check, before you submit. https://thinkchecksubmit.org/ #ThinkCheckSubmit #ResearchSupportAdvent

Image from ThinkCheckSubmit. Traffic lights containing the words Think, Check, Submit.

Day 8

If you’re sharing your data using the UCL Research Data Repository, reserve your DOI when you create the item. Then when you submit a paper for publication you can include it in the data access statement and readers will be able to find your data more easily once the data is published. https://www.ucl.ac.uk/library/open-science-research-support/research-data-management/ucl-research-data-repository #ResearchSupportAdvent

Image by UCL Media Services on UCL imagestore. A close up of a bright purple bauble on a tree with some blue lights.

Day 9

Are festive songs, recipes and party activities protected by copyright? How does this relate to your research? Answers in our latest copyright blog post: https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/copyright/#ResearchSupportAdvent

Image by KamranAydinov on Freepik. Blue headphones surrounded by christmas decorations, stockings, candles, tree lights and pine cones.

Day 10

UCL Press has launched the first #openaccess textbook in its new programme today. Take a look here: https://www.uclpress.co.uk/products/215121. Interested in publishing an #openaccess textbook with us? Find out more: https://www.uclpress.co.uk/pages/textbooks

Image by UCL Press. Image is a red band on a white background. On the red band, white writing reads, ‘An introduction to Waste management and circular economy. Read and download free from uclpress.co.uk/waste.

Day 11

If you’ve encountered a paywall when trying to read research online, Unpaywall (https://unpaywall.org/) and the Open Access Button (https://openaccessbutton.org/) are two free browser extensions which search the internet for copies that you can access. #ResearchSupportAdvent

Image by Mary Hinkley on UCL imagestore. A close up of a Christmas tree covered in yellow lights and small silver leaves. In the background can be seen a grey building, some leafless trees and a dark grey statue of a man.

Day 12

Do you have a namesake in the world of research? To ensure that other researchers and publishers are not confusing you with someone else, sign up for an ORCID ID at https://orcid.org/ ORCID brings all your scholarly output together in one place. Read more here: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/library/open-science-research-support/open-access/orcid-ucl-researchers #ResearcherIDs #ORCID #ResearchSupportAdvent

Image by John Moloney on UCL imagestore. A group of people in business attire socialising with drinks. Picture is taken from a distance and slightly above.

Day 13

Grey literature is produced and published by non-commercial private or public entities, including pressure groups, charities and organisations. Researchers often use grey literature in their reviews to bring in other ‘voices’ into their research. We have listed some useful sources on our guide: https://library-guides.ucl.ac.uk/planning-search/grey-literature #literaturereview #greyliterature #ResearchSupportAdvent

Image by Irrum Ali on UCL imagestore. A white table covered in books and pamphlets of various sizes.

Day 14

Are you working with personal data and need more advice on the difference between anonymisation and pseudonymisation? Check out the data protection team’s guide or get in touch with them for more advice. #ResearchSupportAdvent https://www.ucl.ac.uk/data-protection/guidance-staff-students-and-researchers/practical-data-protection-guidance-notices/anonymisation-and

Image by Mary Hinkley on UCL imagestore. Two large and several small icicles against a wintery sky.

Day 15

Historical Inquiry is an important part of the research process. A place to begin this is by understanding the etymology of words. Raymond Williams began this by collating keywords of the most used terms. However, the meanings of words change over time, depending on context. The University of Pittsburgh has continued this project: https://keywords.pitt.edu/, and we have their publication in the Library. #HistoricalInquiry #ResearchSupportAdvent

Image by Mat Wright on UCL imagestore. A student with long blonde hair studies in the foreground. Behind her are rows of wooden desks and book stacks in arches sit further back.

Day 16

Did you know the Research Data Management team can review your Data Management Plan and provide feedback, including to make sure you adhere to funder guidance on data management? Get in touch to send us a plan or find out more. https://www.ucl.ac.uk/library/open-science-research-support/research-data-management #ResearchSupportAdvent

Image by Mary Hinkley on UCL imagestore. UCL front quad at twilight. In front of the portico is a Christmas tree decorated with yellow lights. To the right of the image is a leafless tree decorated with purple and pink lights which can be seen reflecting off the white building beyond.

Day 17

From 2024, UKRI funded long-form outputs must be open access within 12 months of publication under CC BY or another Creative Commons licence. UCL’s Open Access Team has info. including funding & exceptions, and offers support: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/library/open-science-research-support/open-access/research-funders/new-wellcome-and-ukri-policies/ukri #ResearchSupportAdvent

Image by James Tye on UCL imagestore. Image shows a view through a gap in books to a woman with light brown hair holding the books open and appearing to be searching the shelf.

Day 18

To coincide with the new UKRI open access policy for monographs, UCL Library Services has new funding to support all UCL REF-eligible staff who would like to make their monographs, book chapters and edited collections Gold open access. Find out about this funding and how to contact us: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/library/open-science-research-support/open-access/open-access-funding-and-agreements/open-access-funding #ResearchSupportAdvent

Image by Alejandro Salinas Lopez “alperucho” on UCL imagestore. Image shows a Christmas garland over and arch with people walking through, slightly out of focus. The garland is threaded with yellow lights and the words Happy Holiday Season are written in pink lights.

Day 19

Interested in adding grey literature into your research? Have a look at Overton – a database of 10m+ official and policy documents http://libproxy.ucl.ac.uk/login?url=https://app.overton.io/dashboard.php#ResearchSupportAdvent

Image by Tony Slade from UCL imagestore. A top-down photograph of four students working individually at wooden desks. To the right of the image are wooden bookcases full of colourful books.

Day 20

Have time in your hands this holiday? Complete our short, fun, Jedi-friendly copyright online tutorial and be copyright-savvy before the new year begins! Access at: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/library/forms/articulate/copyright-essentials/#/ #ResearchSupportAdvent

A screenshot from the UCL Copyright Essentials module. Includes information on the topics covered, some text from the module and an image of a group of stormtroopers marching in the street. Includes image by Michael Neel via Wikimedia Commons.

Day 21

Beat the cold with #openaccess reading! UCL Press have more than 300 open access books and 15 journals for you to read and download- for free! Available from: uclpress.co.uk

Image by Tony Slade on UCL imagestore. A close-up perspective shot of a bookcase. Black books with gold writing are in the foreground and red, orange and blue volumes are further back.

Day 22

Have you made your New Year resolutions yet? Start by developing your copyright knowledge. Register for one of our 2024 workshops to learn how copyright supports your research and learning. #ResearchSupportAdvent https://library-calendars.ucl.ac.uk/calendar/libraryskillsUCL/?cid=-1&t=g&d=0000-00-00&cal=-1&ct=32648&inc=0

Image by KamranAydinov on Freepik. Top view of hand holding a pen on spiral notebook with new year writing and drawings decoration accessories on black background.

Day 23

Curious to see who’s talking about your research? You can see a dashboard for all your RPS publications in the Altmetric tool – search by “verified author”. https://www.altmetric.com/explorer/#ResearchSupportAdvent

Image by Alejandro Salinas Lopez “alperucho” on UCL imagestore. An arm and hand in profile holds up a mobile phone with the camera open. The phone shows the UCL portico and Christmas tree. The background is out of focus but appears to show Christmas lights.

Day 24

The final day of our #ResearchSupportAdvent is upon us and we want to use it to say thank you to everyone that has supported us, come to our events, training or shared with us. Also our colleagues and friends from other institutions. All of us here in the UCL Office for Open Science & Scholarship and beyond across all of the teams represented wish you a great break and look forward to 2024!

A new exciting year is starting, and what better way to give the initial kick than celebrating the achievements and milestones of the multiple teams linked to the UCL Office for Open Science & Scholarship (OOSS). We are proud to see how the OOSS kept growing and consolidating itself inside UCL’s institutional culture, supporting academic staff, researchers and students.

One of last year’s highlights was undoubtedly the UCL Open Science Conference, reuniting people from all over the world in sessions discussing Citizen Science, Open data and code, Open and the Global South and more. You can still watch the recordings of day one and day two on our blog! And get ready to participate in the 2023 version in late April. You will hear about it soon on our pages and social media. We are working to make the event hybrid to facilitate participation across territories, do not miss your spot!

After various months of revisions and collaborative work, we published new Open Science Resources for 2022-2023. The first is the video ‘Open Science and Scholarship as part of UCL Research Culture’ and ‘Open Science – a practical guide for PhD students’.

Our office connects to several other teams inside UCL that make an exquisite blend of services, skills and expertise, and we want to celebrate their achievements and news.

The UCL Open Access team has grown their range of transformative publisher agreements and upgraded Research Publications Services (RPS). Users will notice a refreshed look and feel, differences to the Homepage layout, and a new menu structure and navigation. Check the step-by-step guide if you missed it!

UCL Press has proven the importance of open-access scholarly publishers, reaching six million downloads last May (and close to seven million now!), reaching 246 countries and territories, and publishing 272 titles since its launch in 2015.

The Bibliometrics team now is able to support Altmetric, which will be useful for anyone interested in public engagement or research impact, as well as individual researchers looking at the response to their work online. Altmetrics are “alternative metrics” – measuring the impact of research beyond scholarly literature. Helping to get a wider sense of the impact of papers that might otherwise be missed were we to focus on traditional academic citations.

Our Research and Data Management team upgraded their webpages, reviewed dozens of data management plans, and created brand new online Data Management Plan Templates with DMP online. Their services and the Bibliometrics team were both classified as excellent regarding the user’s experience of our online support service. We are proud of such a hard-working and supportive team!

During the second half of 2022, the OOSS gained two additional members: a Citizen Science Coordinator and a Support Officer. Both new team members are currently working with the Office Coordinator on ambitious projects that will see the light later this year, aiming to diversify the support and resources of our virtual office for wider audiences.

Undoubtedly, the diversity of professionals, backgrounds and interests made our small office inside Library, Culture, Collections & Open Science (LCCOS) a prosperous place to develop services, ideas and projects for wonderful audiences inside and outside our university.

Last year’s achievements were only possible due to the support of the university to embrace an open culture, thanks to the collaborative work between the teams, and always supporting each other and the office users. We will keep working together to democratise knowledge and keep UCL one of the Open Science & Scholarship leaders worldwide.

UCL researchers manage their publications and upload papers in the Research Publications Service (RPS).  The uploaded papers are made available in our open-access repository, UCL Discovery, in accordance with the publishers’ copyright conditions.  The connection between these two distinct systems has recently been updated; this blog post summarises the minor differences in behaviour that RPS users may notice as a result.

The upgrade provides immediate improvements to the back-end, technical management of RPS and UCL Discovery by ISD and the provider of the RPS platform, lays the foundations for future improvements in publications management and display, and ensures the ongoing robustness of the systems as open-access policies and mandates continue to develop.

UCL Discovery as a data source

The connection between RPS and UCL Discovery previously allowed the deposit (upload of files) of publications from RPS to UCL Discovery only.  The upgrade activates the harvest of bibliographic information, or metadata, from the UCL Discovery record back to RPS.

This means that all RPS records for which the full text has been uploaded now contain a UCL Discovery data source, alongside the existing data sources that have been created manually or harvested from external databases, such as Crossref, PubMed, Scopus, and Web of Science.  As with all data sources, the UCL Discovery data source can be set as the “preferred record” in RPS in order for its metadata to display publicly in IRIS.

No file reupload possible in RPS

Every RPS publication record includes a “full text” window where the full text file, if one has been uploaded, and its status in UCL Discovery is displayed.  It was previously possible to access this area after the upload and to “remove the licence from the repository”, upload a new file, and even to delete the existing file.  However, none of these actions had a direct effect on the existing UCL Discovery record: for instance, a file deleted through RPS would still be accessible in UCL Discovery without further intervention by the Open Access Team.

A change in system behaviour as part of the upgrade has resulted in this functionality no longer being present: if a file that has been uploaded in RPS needs to be replaced or removed, for any reason, please therefore contact the Open Access Team, who will be able to carry out the necessary actions in UCL Discovery.

The Open Access Team is aware that some publication uploads consist of multiple files, for example if there is a supplementary file in addition to the file containing the main text of the research output, or if the accepted manuscript version of the output consists of figure and table files that are separate from the main text.  Uploading multiple files within a single publication record is still possible, as the screenshot below demonstrates:

Please direct questions about managing publications in RPS and UCL Discovery to the Open Access Team.

There are a number of ways that having an ORCiD can be useful:

• you can use it to distinguish yourself from other researchers, especially if you have a common name,
• you can use your ORCiD to easily find and connect to your outputs, activities, contributions and affiliations
• your ORCiD iD can also be used in place of a publications list or CV in applications to present your full list of contributions in one place
• and finally, you can connect your ORCiD to a growing number of institutions, funders, and publishers, including RPS here at UCL.

Linking your ORCiD to your account in RPS can have a number of additional benefits, key among which is to improve the accuracy of the auto-claiming of your publications. In addition to this, you can also allow RPS to send publications that you claim over to ORCID on your behalf, called ‘Read and Write’ in the table below.

School	ORCID Read & Write in RPS – Jun 21	Total ORCID in RPS – Jun 21
IOE	42%	77%
BEAMS	30%	73%
SLMS	29%	71%
SSEES	13%	76%
SLASH	22%	66%
Total	29%	71%

Back in January 22% of research staff had linked their ORCiD to RPS and were using it to send content from RPS to their ORCID record. Now, 6 months later that total has increased to 29% with IOE leading the way with an impressive 42% of research staff using this feature.

Overall, over 70% of research staff at UCL have linked their ORCID to RPS in some way, but that means that there are still some people that aren’t taking advantage of this and using their ORCiD to its best effect.

To get more information about how to add your ORCiD to RPS, take a look at the guide provided by the Open Access team, or one of our previous blog posts that outlines more information about the ways to best use your ORCiD.

Over the past year, we have written a number of blog posts talking about ORCID and giving you lots of options for how you can make the best use of your ORCID, including using it to add your research outputs to RPS, and a series of ways that you can automatically populate your ORCID and save time! While all of these posts are still relevant, and we would recommend you having a look, there are a few updates that we wanted to share with you.

ORCID have recently added Data Management Plan as a new work-type you can include in your ORCID, which is great news. In addition to this, ORCID have now made it possible to record funding peer review contributions in your ORCID record by linking your ORCID to Je-S, increasing the number of work types you can add to ORCID to 44!

ORCID have also relaunched the help and support part of their website info.orcid.org to make it easier to access updates, FAQs and blog posts. I really enjoyed this recent post in which they interviewed Dr. Romero-Olivares, assistant professor at New Mexico State University, about her experiences using ORCID throughout her career and the ways that having an ORCID has made maintaining her CV easier over the years.

After this blog was published, ORCID also announced that they have started supporting CRediT – the Contributor Roles Taxonomy. This is a great step, and so keep an eye out if you have published in a journal that uses CRediT to add this to your ORCID record soon!

Finally, ORCID have released a new video tour of the ORCID record that you can see below. In addition to their previous video in our prior posts telling you about what ORCID is and its advantages, this video aims to remind you of the key features of the interface and answering a few questions you may have about how to maintain your personal ORCID record.

A Quick Tour of the ORCID Record from ORCID.

Whether you were tucked up in bed early on New Year’s Eve 2020, or come midnight enjoyed what limited indulgences are available nowadays, there’s no doubt that many of us are keen to put 2020 firmly behind us. Here in UCL’s Office for Open Science and Scholarship (OOSS) 2021 appears bright, with lots of exciting developments in open research and open access coming up; but we wanted to spend our first post of the new year unfashionably looking back, and highlighting some of the great things that happened in open access in 2020.

Without further ado, here’s a rundown of some of UCL’s 2020 open access highlights.

• A whopping 16,204 articles and conference papers were uploaded to RPS, to be made (green) open access in UCL Discovery after publisher embargoes.
• 2,003 articles were made gold open access (immediate open access on the publisher’s website), 833 of them through UCL’s transformative agreements. Of the total, 759 were in fully open access journals.
• Transformative agreements made it possible for UCL authors to publish gold open access in more than 5,000 journals (this number will go up as new agreements are signed in the coming weeks), in addition to arrangements for funding papers in fully open access journals.
• The number of open access outputs in UCL Discovery grew by 28%, from 87,672 in January 2020 to 112,506 today.
• UCL’s tremendous contribution to COVID-19 research meant that our colleagues in UCL Press collected 1,032 publications in UCL’s COVID-19 open access collection. At the time of writing, these papers have had 23,505 views.
• 22% of REF-submitted staff started to use our new write to ORCID functionality in RPS to send publications data to their ORCID records.
• All faculties reached – and many far exceeded – 80% compliance with the REF open access policy, measured against all articles and conference proceedings in RPS. Most can report total engagement with open access, for articles and conference papers, of more than 95%.
• Last but by no means least, there were 4,955,892 downloads from UCL Discovery. The top-downloaded outputs were:
  • Mastering the game of Go without human knowledge – 15,300 downloads
  •  Fabricate 2020 – 11,007 downloads
  • The Responsibility of Intellectuals: Reflections by Noam Chomsky and others after 50 years – 10,732 downloads
  • The Cultural Evolution of Neolithic Europe. EUROEVOL Dataset – 10,352 downloads
  • The continuing 2019-nCoV epidemic threat of novel coronaviruses to global health — The latest 2019 novel coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, China – 8,906 downloads

Finally – not a number, but an achievement for the Open Access Team nonetheless – we overhauled our open access funding webpages, Wellcome and other funders webpages, and in fact most of our online guidance. Since open access continues to be rather complex, to say the least, we also added a glossary to the webpages. We’ll be making more improvements soon, but hope that you’ve found these ones useful so far.

I’d like to say a thank you to my magnificent colleagues, who’ve processed such huge numbers of papers and kept on top of the ever-growing numbers of enquiries about open access: hard to count, but probably up to a hundred questions every day, many of them very complicated. Thanks also to everyone in the UCL community who works with us to make open access happen. Look out for new transformative agreements coming soon, and very best wishes for a good 2021.

This is the first in a new series of regular posts in which we plan to celebrate the huge numbers of research outputs that UCL academics are making open access, and the impact of this worldwide.

UCL Discovery in numbers

Despite this year’s unprecedented demands on academics, UCL authors have been depositing their papers at the same impressive rate as before COVID. Our team has continued to process 1,600 papers each month, on average, making them openly available in UCL Discovery, our institutional repository. As of October, the repository holds over 105,000 outputs that are currently openly available to download – this is a significant increase from over 83,000 that were available at the same time last year, and a testament to the success of the REF open access policy.

Research outputs in UCL Discovery have just reached over 22 million lifetime downloads, of which over 3 million are downloads of open access books published by UCL Press. Our global readership spans over 250 countries; the top five countries downloading from the repository are the US, UK, India, Canada and Germany.

This year alone, the repository had over 3,300,000 downloads. The most popular item so far in 2020, with over 11,000 downloads, is a journal article originally published in Nature, Mastering the game of Go without human knowledge. Other popular items include a recent publication from UCL Press, The Responsibility of Intellectuals: Reflections by Noam Chomsky and others after 50 years, with over 8,000 downloads (interestingly, this book is particularly popular in Canada). How the World Changed Social Media is also going strong this year, and kept its position in the top 10 most downloaded items (more than 88,000 lifetime downloads). Unsurprisingly, an article on COVID-19, The continuing 2019-nCoV epidemic threat of novel coronaviruses to global health, is also one of the top downloaded items, with over 8,000 downloads so far.

RPS in numbers

We’ve written before about the new functionality that we introduced to UCL’s Research Publications Service this summer. It allows you to send publications recorded in RPS to your ORCID record automatically. 75% of research staff have added their ORCID record to RPS to enable autoclaiming. We’re very excited that 20% of those have also now given RPS permission to send publications to their ORCID record, so they don’t have to add them manually. It’s great that so many academics are linking and sharing information about research outputs in this way, and we hope that it soon becomes a time-saver for many more. You can find out more about the tool, and how easy it is to set it up, on our ORCID guide.

Doctoral theses in UCL Discovery

Of all the items that are available in UCL Discovery, over 18,000 are doctoral thesis. At UCL, the requirement to submit an electronic copy of your thesis as a condition of award has been in place since 2009. In addition to that, we have retrospectively digitised theses from earlier years, as a part of a collaborative project with ProQuest. Currently, over 8,000 retrospectively digitised thesis are available in the repository. The oldest digitised thesis dates as far back as 1933.

UCL theses are one of the most downloaded types of item in the repository, with over 7 million lifetime downloads. The most popular doctoral thesis, with over 3,600 downloads over the last twelve months, is a 1992 thesis, Fatigue and fracture mechanics analysis of threaded connections, available here.

Gold open access in numbers

So far, we’ve focused on the Green route to open access, where outputs are made available, usually as final accepted manuscripts, after the publisher’s embargo period. Plan S funders, of course, will soon require immediate open access, and Plan S’s Rights Retention Strategy will allow authors to make papers published in subscription journals open access without an embargo (option 2 in Plan S).

Many UCL academics publish via the Gold route to open access, either in fully open access journals (option 1 in Plan S), or under transformative agreements (option 3 in Plan S). This year to date UCL’s Open Access Team has arranged immediate open access for over 1,800 UCL papers.

There are more than 5,000 journals covered in UCL’s transformative agreements, including small and society publishers like Electrochemical Society, European Respiratory Journal, IWA Publishing, Microbiology Society, Portland Press Biochemical Society journals, Rockefeller University Press, Royal Society of Chemistry. This allows authors publishing in these journals to comply with their funders’ requirements and Plan S. Negotiations with other publishers are happening for 2021.

Until the end of this year, papers funded by the Wellcome Trust that are submitted to  subscription journals can still use UCL’s Wellcome funds. Papers submitted from 1 January 2021 will need to follow the requirements of the new Wellcome open access policy [link], which means that funds will only be available for open access in fully open access journals and subscription journals that are part of UCL’s transformative agreements. Other papers will need to follow the Wellcome’s second route to open access, depositing their manuscript in Europe PubMed Central, to be made open access immediately, under the Rights Retention Strategy. We expect the current arrangements for papers funded by one of the UK Research Councils to continue until a new UKRI open access policy is introduced next year.

During OA Week we have a Q&A session on open access. This event, for UCL researchers, is an opportunity to ask questions about the new open access funding arrangements, transformative agreements, Plan S, depositing your research in UCL Discovery, and more. Sign up via Eventbrite to receive a link to join the session.