This year we are pleased to share our Advent Calendar of Research Support with you!

We will be posting links every day on our Bluesky account. If you’re not on Bluesky yet, don’t worry — we’ve shared the calendar below for you to view at your own time. We will also keep this post updated throughout the month with an accessible version of the content.

1 December: On the first day of advent, improve the visibility of your research by updating your UCL public profile, recently revamped with key fields in RPS, including the new UN Sustainable Development Goals section, to align your research with global initiatives.
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/library/open-science-research-support/ucl-profiles/getting-started-your-public-profile

• UCL front quad, looking towards Cruciform, an elegant red brick building. It is dark and the picture is lined with trees with purple and blue lights.

2 December: Countdown to Christmas with Citizen Science…Join UCL’s first Citizen Science community event on 9 December! Let’s discover, share and network this season. Don’t forget to join our online network too! https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/open-access/2024/11/13/get-involved-ucls-first-citizen-science-community-event-on-9-december-join-our-online-network/

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

3 December: Is Santa’s Christmas naughty or nice list copyrighted? Think of it as research data…Take our Christmas copyright quiz to learn more! https://ucl-global.libwizard.com/f/copyright_Christmas_quiz Image created using Copilot on 22 November

• Image: cartoon of a copyright symbol with a white beard and Christmas hat.

 

4 December: Today we are celebrating the 10 years since the IOE’s merger with UCL. Check out the action on the UCL Press channels.

• Image from UCL Press. A perspective shot of the IOE looking up, looks like a stack of big concrete blocks.

 

5 December: Learn how to connect your ORCID to UCL’s Research Publications Service (RPS) for up-to-date records and easier #OpenAccess compliance. More info: https://buff.ly/3WALW3s

• 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.

 

6 December: Tis the season…for data management planning!
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/library/open-science-research-support/research-data-management/policies/managing-data-across-research

• 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.

7 December: Ever wondered if your publications are being cited in policy documents, and where? With policy and grey literature databases like Overton, you can discover who is citing your work and how it’s influencing decision-making documents. https://library-guides.ucl.ac.uk/research-metrics/overton

• 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.

8 December: Explore this year’s Open Science Conference collections available on UCL’s Media Central and Research Data Repository! Access talks, posters, and insights from UCL researchers advancing open science, and share in the wealth of knowledge supporting our open research community.
https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/open-access/2024/07/11/from-policy-to-practice-ucl-open-science-conference-2024/

• 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.

9 December: Early Christmas Present?.. Yes please! Learn more about archiving your research outputs using the UCL Research Data Repository: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/library/open-science-research-support/research-data-management/ucl-research-data-repository

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

 

10 December: What did the copyright support team bring you this year? Read our Christmas blog!
https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/copyright/2024/12/02/the-twelve-gifts-of-copyright/

• 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.

11 December: It’s UK Disability History Month (14 Nov – 20 Dec)! Take this opportunity to learn about the UCL Digital Accessibility team’s work to make research and resources more inclusive. Catch up on our profile with Ben Watson, leading the way on digital accessibility at UCL!
https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/open-access/2024/07/08/spotlight-on-ben-watson-champion-of-digital-accessibility-at-ucl/

 

12 December: Preprints as a way to share your initial findings to influence decision-makers: https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/open-access/2020/11/06/case-study-disseminating-early-research-findings-to-influnce-decision-makers/

• 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.

13 December: Want to learn how UCL Press is committed to providing free, high-quality educational resources to support students and educators globally? Read Dhara Snowden’s blog on how #OpenAccess textbooks are reshaping the future of learning and education! https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/open-access/2024/10/23/oa-textbooks-ucl-press-perspective/

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

 14 December: This holiday season, we’re celebrating meaningful partnerships between researchers and the public with the Principles for Citizen Science at UCL. The principles ensure that projects involving citizen scientists are inclusive, ethical, and impactful – a perfect recipe for success!

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/library/open-science-research-support/open-science/citizen-science/principles-citizen-science

• 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.

15 December: An RDM film recommendation – Coded Bias (Netflix)- When MIT Media Lab researcher Joy Buolamwini discovers that many facial recognition technologies misclassify women and darker-skinned faces, she delves into an investigation of widespread bias in algorithms. https://youtu.be/_84k600_6bg?feature=shared

• 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.

16 December: Creative Commons licences embrace the spirit of Christmas. Learn how they work: https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/open-access/2023/10/23/how-creative-commons-licences-support-open-scholarship/

• 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.

17 December: Earlier this year, we introduced the UCL Statement on Principles of Authorship, created through community consultation and co-creation. This document is designed to promote more equitable and transparent authorship practices across UCL. Learn more: https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/open-access/2024/10/25/announcing-ucl-statement-on-principles-of-authorship/

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

18 December: Have you ever questioned which university ranks highest for collaboration or open access? Explore the Leiden University Rankings, based exclusively on publication data, to find the answer. https://www.leidenranking.com/ranking/2024/list

• 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.

19 December: UCL Press Play: Check out the new podcast series from @uclpress.bsky.social hosted by Philip Schofield (UCL’s Bentham Project). Join UCL experts as they explore Jeremy Bentham’s legacy, covering utilitarianism, queer aesthetics, historical views on non-binary diversity, and more.  Listen now: shorturl.at/Nvqzl

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

20 December: 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 Mary Hinkley on UCL imagestore. A mixed group of people around a table working at laptops.

 

21 December: An RDM stocking filler – Research Data MANTRA training – up your RDM skills with this external online course: https://mantra.ed.ac.uk/

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

 

22 December: UCL staff and students: join our new Copyright Literacy Community on Teams!

• 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.

 

23 December: Interested in discovering which UCL department or faculty collaborates most with yours, or identifying the most common research theme in your department? Explore the My Organisation data in InCites to uncover trends for your department or faculty. https://library-guides.ucl.ac.uk/web-of-science/incites

• 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.

24 December: From all the team here at the UCL Office for Open Science & Scholarship we want to thank you all for your collaboration and interaction this year, and wish you all a great break! We’ll be back after 6th January!

• UCL portico in the background lit up in white at twilight. In the foreground and to either side trees are lit in a variety of rainbow colours.

As we conclude International Open Access Week, we have been inspired by a wealth of discussions and events across UCL! This week, we have explored balancing collaboration and commercialisation, highlighted the work of Citizen Science initiatives, discussed the role of open access textbooks in education, and addressed key copyright challenges in the age of AI to ensure free and open access to knowledge.

Today, we are excited to introduce the UCL Statement of Principles of Authorship. This new document, shaped through a co-creation workshop and community consultation, provides guidance on equitable authorship practices and aims to foster more inclusive and transparent research collaboration across UCL.

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The team at the UCL Office for Open Science & Scholarship is pleased to launch the UCL Statement of Principles of Authorship. These principles have been built up from a co-creation workshop and developed in consultation with our academic community and are now available for wider use, linked from our website.

In August 2023, the OOSS Team posted a discussion about the challenges of equity in authorship and the co-production workshop held during that year’s Open Science & Scholarship Conference. We outlined some preliminary considerations that led to the workshop, summarised the discussion and emerging themes, including the need to more widely acknowledge contributions to research outputs, the power dynamics involved in authorship decisions, and ways to make academic language and terminology accessible for contributors outside the academic ‘bubble’.

The outcomes of the workshop were then used as the basis for developing the new Statement of Principles of Authorship. This document provides general advice, recommendations and requirements for authors, designed to complement the UCL Code of Conduct for Research and align with existing published frameworks, such as the Technicians Commitment or CRediT. The document outlines four core principles and a variety of applications for their use across the broad range of subject areas and output types that are produced across the institution. It also proposes standards for affiliations and equitable representation of contributors.

While it is true that academic publishing is a complex and changing environment, these principles are intended as a touchstone for discussions around authorship rather than explicit expectations or policy. They can guide decision making, help understand how affiliations should be presented for best consistency and traceability in the long term, and empower people to request inclusion or make plans to include citizen scientists or other types of collaborators to their work.

We look forward to hearing the many ways that these principles can be used by the community!

For a full overview of our #OAWeek 2024 posts, visit our blog series page. To learn more about the Principles of Authorship and stay updated on open science initiatives across UCL, sign up for our mailing list.

 

Guest Post by Dominic Allington-Smith (Open Access Publications Manager)

UCL Publications Board and the Open Access Team are delighted to announce that on Monday 24 June, UCL’s institutional repository, UCL Discovery, reached the milestone of 50 million downloads! UCL Discovery is UCL’s open access repository, showcasing and providing access to UCL research outputs from all UCL disciplines. UCL authors currently deposit around 1,675 outputs in the repository every month (average figure for the current academic year).

The 50 millionth download was of the paper ‘Replenishing IRAK-M expression in retinal pigment epithelium attenuates outer retinal degeneration’ originally published in Science Translational Medicine by a team of researchers including UCL co-lead author Professor Andrew Dick.  This paper found that increasing the levels of a key protein in the cells at the back of the eye could help protect against the age-related macular degeneration, the leading cause of vision loss among older adults.

UCL Discovery hosts over 178,500 open access publications at the time of writing, comprising mostly self-archived copies of research outputs published elsewhere to bypass publisher paywalls, but also including doctoral and research master’s theses (contemporary submissions and historic digitisations), and books published by UCL Press.  This variety of resources is displayed when viewing the highest-downloaded publication within the UCL hierarchy:

• Faculty of Arts and Humanities: A Connected Curriculum for Higher Education (UCL Press book, 2017)
• Faculty of Laws: Confessions, illegally/improperly obtained evidence and entrapment under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984: changing judicial and public attitudes to the police and criminal investigations (thesis, 1999)
• School of Slavonic and Eastern European Studies: The Gesta Hungarorum of Anonymus, the Anonymous Notary of King Béla: A Translation (journal article, 2009)
• Faculty of Social and Historical Sciences: How the World Changed Social Media (UCL Press book, 2016)
• Faculty of the Built Environment (Bartlett): Why are most buildings rectangular? (journal article, 2006)
• Faculty of Engineering Sciences: Semi-structured qualitative studies (book chapter, 2013)
• Faculty of Maths and Physical Sciences: The Traditional Four Steps Transportation Modeling Using a Simplified Transport Network: A Case Study of Dhaka City, Bangladesh (journal article, 2012)
• Faculty of Brain Sciences: What is mentalization? The concept and its foundations in developmental research (book chapter, 2012)
• Faculty of Life Sciences: Evaluation of the scale, causes and costs of waste medicines. Report of DH funded national project (report, 2010)
• Faculty of Medical Sciences: Textbook of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery (UCL Press book, 2016)
• Faculty of Population Health Sciences: Food, Nutrition, Physical Activity, and the Prevention of Cancer: a Global Perspective (report, 2006)
• Institute of Education: Teaching at a distance in a digital age: perspectives from the Philippines (thesis, 2013)

This amazing milestone shows the scope and reach that sharing research through UCL Discovery has. There are a number of ways you can share your research at UCL, and we encourage you to continue sharing your research publications via UCL RPS and Profiles. Additionally, consider sharing other types of outputs such as data, code and software to further enhance the visibility and reproducibility of your work. The Research Data Management team maintain a guide on best practice for software sustainability, preservation and sharing, and can give further support to UCL researchers as required.

Congratulations to everyone involved in reaching this incredible milestone, and let’s continue to push the boundaries of open access and research sharing at UCL!

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!

 

 

 

 

Date and Time: Thursday, June 20, 2024, 1:00 PM – 6:30 PM GMT+1.

Location: IAS Common Ground, G11, South Wing, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT

We invite you to participate in an afternoon of discussions and presentations centred around Open Science and Scholarship at the UCL Open Science Conference 2024! Join us on Thursday, June 20, 2024, at the UCL Institute of Advanced Studies, IAS Common Ground (Room G11), South Wing, UCL Wilkins building.

Discover pioneering practices and innovative research and initiatives at UCL that embody the principles of Open Science and Scholarship. This internally focused event aims to showcase the dynamic landscape of Open Science at UCL and explore its practical applications across scholarship and research domains, including Open Access Publishing, Open Data and Software, Transparency, Reproducibility, Open Educational Resources, Citizen Science, Co-Production, Public Engagement, and other open practices and methodologies.

Open to all UCL staff and students, our annual conference will feature various thematic sessions, followed by a poster session and networking opportunities in the evening for all attendees. Whether you’re an academic, researcher, student, or member of staff – or simply interested in Open Science/Open Research – this conference is the perfect place to learn, connect, and exchange ideas with colleagues. Early career researchers and PhD students from all disciplines are particularly encouraged to participate.

Our conference will adopt a hybrid format, offering both in-person and online participation options, with a preference for in-person attendance. Session recordings will be available for viewing after the conference.

Please book your free tickets using the Eventbrite link. 

We look forward to welcoming you to the UCL Open Science Conference 2024!

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 Dr Christiana McMahon, Research Data Support Officer, in celebration of International Love Data Week 2024.

From that spark of an idea through to publishing research findings, the Research Data Management team have once again been on-hand to support staff and students.

What’s been happening?

A new version of the Research Data Repository is now available simplifying the process of archiving and preserving research outputs here at UCL for the longer-term.

In 2023 we published 200 items 151 of which were datasets.

 

Over the past year…

• The most downloaded record was: Griffiths, David; Boehm, Jan (2019). SynthCity Dataset – Area 1. University College London. Dataset.
• The most viewed record was: Heenan, Thomas; Jnawali, Anmol; Kok, Matt; Tranter, Thomas; Tan, Chun; Dimitrijevic, Alexander; et al. (2020). Lithium-ion Battery INR18650 MJ1 Data: 400 Electrochemical Cycles (EIL-015). University College London. Dataset.
• The most cited record was: Manescu, Petru; Shaw, Mike; Elmi, Muna; Zajiczek, Lydia; Claveau, Remy; Pawar, Vijay; et al. (2020). Giemsa Stained Thick Blood Films for Clinical Microscopy Malaria Diagnosis with Deep Neural Networks Dataset. University College London. Dataset.

More information is available about the UCL Research Data Repository.  Alternatively, check our FAQs.

Data Management Plan Reviews

The RDM team can review data management plans providing researchers with feedback in-line with UCL’s expectations and funding agency requirements where these apply. In 2023, we reviewed 32 data management plans covering over 10 different funding agencies. More information is available in our website.

Mini-tutorial: Research data lifecycle

The RDM team often refer to the research data lifecycle, but what is it? Essentially, these are the different stages of the research process from planning and preparation through to archiving your research outputs, making them discoverable to the wider research community and members of the public.

The four stages:

1: Get ready – You’ve had an idea for a research study so it’s time to start making plans and getting prepared. Have you considered writing a data management plan?

• Remember, if you are in receipt of external funding, there may be data management requirements to consider.
• Feel free to reach out to Open Science and Research Support to assist you.

2: Let’s go – You are now actively researching putting all those research plans into action.

• Don’t forget to revisit your data management plan and update it to reflect your latest decision making.
• It’s also useful to consider documenting your research as you progress.

3: Ta-dah – The research is complete and it’s time to archive your research outputs to preserve them for the longer-term.

• Aim to utilise subject-specific archives and repositories where possible.
• Creating a metadata record in a public facing online catalogue with links to any related publications can be useful to building online networks of linked research outputs.
• Consider making your research outputs as openly accessible as possible remembering that controlling or restricting access is fine as long as it is justified and there is a set data access protocol in place to facilitate a data access request.
• Did you know you can archive most research outputs in the UCL Research Data Repository?

4: Wow! I think I can use this – making your research discoverable to others for potential reuse can help to maximise research opportunities

• Consider having an agreement in place between parties before sharing research outputs – issues like copyright, IP, commercialisation of (subsequent) work may be discussed here.
• For secondary researchers, time to head back to the start to begin the research process.

And so the research data lifecycle begins again!

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, and join our mailing list to be part of the conversation!

Post by Kirsty Wallis, OOSS Coordinator/ Harry Ortiz Venegas, OOSS Support Officer

Those of us that actively support Open Science initiatives often recognise that there is a way to go and in some places there are big changes that may need to be made in order to succeed. Being UCL, a research-intensive university, we recognise and embrace the role of higher education institutions within this transformation and commit to facilitating the necessary dialogues inside the academic field, our student and staff body, and the wider community.

The Office for Open Science & Scholarship (OOSS) team, part of the Library, Culture, Collections and Open Science (LCCOS) department, is one of the crucial actors inside our institution in embracing Open Science values and promoting and advocating for these complex transitions to happen.

We propose that one of the changes that needs to happen is around the concept of authorship and what it means to all of the actors involved in research. We recognise that there are already a number of changes happening in this area, with initiatives like CRedIT, and rights retention for authors, but we wanted to look at it from a different angle. In the OOSS, we focus very heavily on the diversity and inclusiveness of our support services and the research we have at UCL, and so we work hard to allow the participation of diverse stakeholders in the design of open, accessible and inclusive research practices.

Resonating with the UCL Open Science Conference 2023 theme ‘Open Science and the Case for Social Justice’, the team proposed facilitating a workshop at the end of the day to discuss some of the long-standing issues concerning credit and authorship in research practice.

As the invitation to the final activity from the conference said, ‘Often, participants in research projects do not get credit for their significant contributions in the process, but what role should they have? People involved in a research project can hold a plethora of roles, from community leaders, patients, and citizen scientists outside the academy, to academics, research assistants, technicians, librarians, data stewards and coders within. How can we promote fairer practices and encompass all of these roles in our research outputs?’

With a clear idea in mind, it was necessary to design a participatory workshop that included researchers, but also the less-heard voices and collaborators who do not often figure in academic reports. In this session, two outstanding teams from UCL joined the adventure, the Co-Production Collective, a diverse and growing community of people from various backgrounds who come together to learn, connect, and champion co-production for lasting change. Providing consultancy, delivering training and presentations, and participating in the design and implementation of research projects, all with community members involved. And The Institute for Global Prosperity (IGP), part of The Bartlett, UCL Faculty for the Built Environment. Focused on redesigning prosperity for the 21st century, changing how we conceive and run our economies, and reworking our relationship with the planet. IGP’s vision is to build a prosperous, sustainable, global future, underpinned by the principles of fairness and justice, and allied to a realistic, long-term vision of humanity’s place in the world. As they both state on their web pages.

All teams circulated the invitation with their networks to ensure participation from a range of people, not only from academic backgrounds. Ending up in a hybrid event with around 60 participants. To promote the discussion, the workshop team prepared the ground with the case study ‘Co-Producing Prosperity Research in Informal Settlements in Tanzania’, an IGP project. Raising questions around how crucial it is to acknowledge all the contributions to knowledge production and language barriers in current publishing models. Followed by lived experience cases presented in first person by three members of the Co-Production Collective. Involving diverse perspectives, engagement levels, and roles in research projects.

The facilitators divided the in-person assistants around circular tables and the online people into break-out rooms to discuss ‘What challenges and opportunities need to be addressed to create equitable conditions in relation to authorship?’.

Each table were asked to summarise their conversations, sharing some of their ideas at the end of the session. People from the conference committee took notes to share with the OOSS team and report the workshop’s principal outcomes. These outcomes will be folded into the wider work being undertaken at UCL currently around preparing a statement on authorship for our community.

There were a number of themes that came out of the discussions and what was the most interesting for the facilitators was the extent of the consensus on many of the core points.

There was widespread agreement that all contributors to research should be acknowledged, and that they should be credited in any publications they take an active part in. There was also agreement that decisions about roles in the project and its outputs should be discussed and agreed at the outset of the project, with non-academic participants such as technicians, librarians, citizen scientists and other types of participants being given enough information to make an informed decision about what role they would like to take in publications and if that takes place, if and how they would like to be credited.

As we described at the outset of this post, we realise that this is not easy to unpick and the real value in these discussions will come from the challenges identified and opportunities we can pursue. It is easy to see the benefits that creating more equitable conditions in authorship can provide, allowing knowledge to be more granular and diversifying the opinions that can be represented, but the workshop also allowed us to dig into some real practical issues, some of which are presented below.

One major theme that emerged was in relation to research culture and the institutional inertia with regards to publishing. The lingering ‘publish or perish’ attitude in some subject areas leads to a very rapid turnaround on papers, and a perceived unwillingness to dilute credit with other names, especially in subject areas where positionality in the author list has value. There were also issues raised around the power dynamics associated with authorship and where control lies over this process, with the people who wrote the article, or the PI/research team leader who has ultimate control.

Another theme was more practical in nature and was related to systems and affiliations. In many cases it is very difficult to include an unaffiliated author, both in some publisher systems and even in some metadata schema. Also being able to give access to institutional systems and tools is also often associated with an affiliated email address. Lastly, in many cases, it is assumed all authors of a paper are able to take equal responsibility for it (CReDiT is changing this, by allowing people to be associated with the role they played, but it is early days), but in the case of a controversial topic, an unaffiliated author may be at risk as they are unable to access the support that the university will provide for its community, such as access to legal support or a press office.

The final significant theme was around language, style and terminology. Some groups pointed out that some of the understanding inherent to academia has very little meaning outside of the bubble of the university, and while external team members associated with a project will be trained to work to the integrity and ethical standards of the project, they may not be able to commit to the academic language, theoretical structures or terminology required to be involved in publications.

The good news is that all of these themes (and a lot of the other points we weren’t able to cover here) can be turned into opportunities. The first theme around research culture I think we are already addressing by starting this conversation and committing to including these findings in UCL statements and associated guidance on authorship. We will be consulting widely among the academic community and beyond throughout the process and hopefully this will allow us to challenge some of the issues raised about power dynamics and point out where people can and should be opening up their author lists to new individuals.

Another opportunity that came up in the sessions was around other types of publication. The discussion was framed around the traditional article/book, but the point was raised that there are a wide range of outputs that can come out of a project that can acknowledge different individuals, from the technical such as data, software or code, to presentations and posters, giving new individuals the chance to represent the research they have done in a new environment, and even media such as videos or exhibitions. There are definitely opportunities outside the traditional and this needs to be reflected and tied into the wider Open Science movement where we are shifting the focus onto new forms of output. It is also important that in this, space is given to the participants and citizen scientists to express what would be the most effective way of communicating the research results back to the community they effect.

This is just a very short summary of what was an intense and very nuanced conversation across around ten separate breakout groups and we were immensely grateful to the whole community for engaging with the workshop and being so open and honest about their experiences to allow us such insight to take forward into our explorations of authorship in the OOSS. The Co-Production Collective shared some interesting reflections about the workshop discussions on their webpage, exposing how participants contributing from the live-experience field are commonly left out in credits, authorship and contribution acknowledgements.

The April 24th conference resonated among members of their collective to take take a step forward, telling, one of them commented that “it made me pluck up the courage to ask to be an author on a project I set up and did the initial work on, and the professor received it really well and said well done for getting in touch and rightfully asking as these things can be daunting and missed…”

 

 

Dr Christiana McMahon & Christine Buckley – Research Data Support Officers

At UCL, we have a dedicated Research Data Repository. This can be used by staff and research students to archive and preserve research outputs. This can be anything from your datasets to a poster you presented at a conference.

What have we published?

In total, we published 162 items!

Total number of views in 2022: 172059

Total number of downloads in 2022: 117830

Dr Christiana McMahon & Christine Buckley – Research Data Support Officers

A Data Management Plan or DMP is an essential part of research data management and is usually completed in the first stage of any research project. It can help you think clearly about what data you will collect and how to store, curate, back up, archive and share this data.

You’ll find that many funders include a DMP as part of their grant applications, and we are more than happy to help review these.

You can check our recently updated webpage to learn how to create your DMP. 

How do I get support?

Just email us a copy of your plan to lib-researchsupport@ucl.ac.uk, or you can create your plan in DMPonline and request feedback.

How many DMPs have we reviewed?

Over the course of 2022, we reviewed a total of 39 plans, most of which supported grant applications submitted by researchers here at UCL.

The most popular months for sharing plans for feedback with the Research Data Management team were… April, June and October!

 

Post by Dr. Christiana McMahon & Christine Buckley – Research Data Support Officers

For those of you who have never experienced Love Data Week before, let me introduce it to you.

This is an international celebration of data. Organisations across the globe host a whole range of events intended for speakers to highlight their own data or to showcase best practices in research data management.

You can learn more about what is happening internationally by visiting the Love Data Week website.

As with every year, there is a theme. For this year and the theme is Data: Agent of Change.

“The theme this year is Data: Agent of Change. Love Data Week is about inspiring your community to use data to bring about changes that matter. Policy change, environmental change, social change… we can move mountains with the right data guiding our decisions.”- Love Data Week website

How are we celebrating this week?

This week we will be keeping active on our blog posts and Twitter account. We have been reviewing our activities over the last year and have found some great stuff.

• We will be talking about Data Management Plans and how to get support with this.
• We will be showcasing the training available to our community all year round.
• We will be looking at interesting statistics from our Research Data Repository.
• Finally, we will be showcasing some of the work from our community.

We’d love to showcase more, so please feel free to comment below for a shoutout.

 

Post by Dominic Allington-Smith & Damian Kalinowski, UCL Library, Culture, Collections & Open Science

A common criticism of the Open Science movement is that it is geared towards the needs of researchers in of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), to the detriment of researchers in arts, humanities and social sciences (AHSS).  Not only does the phrase “Open Science” itself have connotations of a subject-based preference in English, hence UCL’s decision to specify “Open Science and Scholarship“, but funder and institutional requirements to make research outputs open access also prioritise certain publication types over others, leading to a potential inequality between disciplines.

For STEM subjects, as a general rule, journal articles and conference papers are the most important form of research output.  The two routes to achieving open access: Gold – whereby the publisher makes the content freely available to read and reuse, usually in exchange for a fee – and Green – whereby a copy of the output is made openly available in the researcher’s institutional repository (in UCL’s case, this is UCL Discovery) – are most available to these two publication types: almost all major, international publishers of academic publishers have well-established mechanisms for the payment of Article Processing Charges to facilitate the Gold route, and standard policies for author self-archiving of content that can be followed to achieve the Green route.

Furthermore, funder and institutional open access requirements are also framed with these two types of output in mind: journal articles and conference papers submitted to the 2021 Research Excellence Framework (REF) from 1 April 2016 onwards had to be made open access in order to be eligible; this requirement also continues for the post-2021 REF until further notice.  In terms of funders, the current UKRI and Wellcome open access policies also have mandatory open access requirements for funded journal articles and journal articles.

In contrast, AHSS researchers are likely to consider books a comparatively more important class of research output, whether a monograph or a chapter contributed to an edited collection.  The open access landscape for books is considerably less mature than for journal articles and conference papers: publishers are less likely to have mechanisms in place for the provision of Gold open access, and may have more restrictive policies (or no policies at all) that allow authors to pursue Green open access through self-archive.  Elsevier, for example, do not permit book or chapter content to be made available in UCL Discovery at all.

This is reflected in the above-mentioned funder and institutional open access requirements as well: books and chapters are currently not subject to any open access requirements for the post-2021 REF, and the UKRI open access policy for this content does not come into effect until 1 January 2024; Wellcome is the only one of the three to currently mandate open access for funded books and chapters in some form.  The disparity even extends to journal articles by extension: as books are important in AHSS fields, so in turn are the reviews of these books published in journals, but these may not be considered to be “original research” by funders and therefore may not be eligible for Gold open access funding, or not considered necessary to be made open access via the Green route in UCL Discovery.

With all this theoretical inequality in mind, the question to answer is: how is this reflected in the proportion of UCL research outputs that have been made open access across the different subjects represented by our schools and departments?  We can attempt to answer this with some data from two example departments.

Two UCL departments, at the same level within the overall hierarchy, have been selected to typify the worlds of STEM and AHSS: the School of Pharmacy and the History department, respectively.  The publications recorded in RPS from the period 2016-2020 (i.e. the period for which there was an open access requirement for the submission of journal articles and conference papers to REF 2021) are analysed:

UCL Department	Total outputs (2016-2020)	Journal articles and conference papers	Books and chapters
School of Pharmacy	2348	1756 (74.79%)	94 (4.00%)
Dept of History	534	249 (46.63%)	219 (41.01%)

 

The proportions are strikingly different: the School of Pharmacy’s research outputs are dominated by journal articles and conference papers, constituting almost three-quarters of the total recorded outputs, whereas books and chapters form a paltry four percent.  In contrast, the two groups of publication have an almost equal share of the total within History.

The next step is to analyse the proportion of these outputs for which the author has uploaded the full text to make it open access in UCL Discovery, bearing in mind the fact that books and chapters from this period were not subject to any REF or funder requirements in this regard:

UCL Department	Journal articles and conference papers		Books and chapters
	Total	Uploaded	Total	Uploaded
School of Pharmacy	1756	1411 (80.35%)	94	12 (12.77%)
Dept of History	249	145 (58.23%)	219	105 (47.95%)

 

Unsurprisingly, the combination of books and chapters not having to be made open access for REF or funder requirements, and journal articles and conference papers being more significant in disciplinary terms for the School of Pharmacy than for History, results in a markedly higher upload proportion for the former: across all four publication types, the overall upload proportion is 76.92% for the School of Pharmacy and 53.42% for History.

The final consideration is the proportion of uploaded publications that have actually been made open access in UCL Discovery, bearing in mind publisher limitations being more prevalent when it comes to books and chapters.  A further analysis of the uploaded publications produces the following results:

UCL Department	Journal articles and conference papers		Books and chapters
	Uploaded	Open access	Uploaded	Open access
School of Pharmacy	1411	1405 (99.58%)	12	5 (41.67%)
Dept of History	145	142 (97.93%)	105	72 (68.57%)

 

This indicates that if a journal article or conference paper was uploaded in RPS, it was almost always made open access in UCL Discovery, whereas the equivalent proportion for books and chapters was lower once again, even a minority in the case of the School of Pharmacy.

The incentives to make journal articles and conference papers open access, and the barriers against achieving open access for books and chapters, therefore result in a stark difference between not only the publication types, but also the departments.  Only 24.60% of all books and chapters recorded in RPS during this period by both departments have been made open access, compared with a far more favourable 77.16% for journal articles and conference papers.  The History department’s comparative focus on the former two types means that only 45.73% of recorded outputs have been made open access.  If only the publications for which the full text was uploaded in RPS are counted, there is still a figure of just under 15% that could not be made open access due to publisher-imposed restrictions.  In contrast, the typical STEM experience represented by the School of Pharmacy has resulted in 76.22% of all recorded publications of these types being made open access.  Perhaps most stark is the fact that fewer than 1% of uploaded publications could not be made open access, illustrating that the vast majority of academic publishers in this field permit open access via self-archiving in an institutional repository.

It is to be hoped that the extension of funder open-access mandates to books and chapters, which may well also be reflected in revised open-access requirements for the post-2021 REF in due course, will help to close this discrepancy in outcome between publication types, and by extension, departments by subject area within UCL and other UK Higher Education Institutions.