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:

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:

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:

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.

Thank you to everyone that attended the UCL Open Science conference last week. We had a great time and hope you did too. We have sent all of the left over questions to our speakers but we wanted to share the recordings right away!

Day 2 recordings are also available!

What does Open Science mean to me?

Host: Christiana McMahon
Panellists: James Hetherington, Aida Sanchez, Sasha Roseneil, Steven Gray.

Kickstart your research: Open Data and Code

Host: James Houghton
Panellists: Anastasis Georgoulas, Ralitsa Madsen, Oliver Duke-Williams

How does Citizen Science change us?

Host: Hannah Sender, Alex Albert, Saffron Woodcraft

Don’t forget, you can get full details of all of the speakers in the programme.

Last year for Open Access Week 2020 we ran a number of sessions and launched the Office for Open Science and Scholarship in style!

This year we want to try and celebrate all of the ways that the principles of Open can be applied across the board so we are currently working on planning sessions for Open Access Week 2021 with the theme Open in Practice. We want to take a broad look at the principles of Open and look at how they apply beyond articles and books, to other types of output like data, software, code or practice research and even the principles of FAIR, and other pillars of Open Science – everything is up for grabs!

We would like to invite ideas from across the UCL community for sessions we could run, guest blog posts, case studies or proposals for events that could be a part of our week.

Please send any comments or ideas to us by emailing the Office for Open Science & Scholarship by 30 July.

After last week’s webinar, there was so much interest in the recording that we hurried to get the post out, leaving us with some of the leftover questions to answer!

As promised, we put some of the unanswered questions to our panellists and here are the answers you have been waiting for!

A couple of simple ones to start off with:

• Does Ben know if the Dutch library service has done anything since the court judgement to develop a lending service based on digitising their physical stock and avoiding overcharges for e-books?

No, the Dutch Library Association did not utilise the ruling in any way I can see – they simply continued to license eBooks from publishers to my knowledge.

• Will the #ebooksos google spreadsheet be updated as publishers change their policies/books become available, so the info is always up to date?

The #ebooksos spreadsheet is a resource to collect evidence rather than a record of current practices of the different publishers. Changes to publisher practices and other updates on the campaign activity will be shared on the campaign’s website: https://academicebookinvestigation.org/

There was a really interesting question about existing university presses:

• (Some) existing University presses follow the same practices as commercial publishers, how easily can these be reformed / transformed? How do we prevent other university presses from following suit and being tempted to commercialise once it becomes successful?

Paul responded – Open Science represents a profound culture change in the way research, teaching and learning are delivered. This is clear from the LERU (League of European Research Universities) paper on Open Science and cultural change at https://www.leru.org/publications/open-science-and-its-role-in-universities-a-roadmap-for-cultural-change. The issue, therefore, is to embed Open Science as part of the ‘new normal’ going forwards. That in itself is a process, not a simple event. But, as progress is made, then current practices will change and embrace Open Science approaches.

And one about authors and copyright:

• How difficult is it for authors to retain copyright of what is being published or to insist their titles are made available Open Access?

Paul responded – For UCL, our position is that staff and students retain copyright in the works they create. And funders are increasingly asking for Rights Retention by funded authors, which would trump any signing away of copyright in the published version to a publisher. This is Open Science in practice.

Charles Oppenheim also commented in the session – retention of copyright and instead granting the publisher a licence is all down to the author negotiating with the publisher. The author should also seek equivalent royalties to print sales for ebook sales. Insisting that the book be made OA is again down to the author negotiating with the publisher. The key point is that the author should be prepared to walk away if the publisher won’t play ball. I think there is a role for librarians and scholarly communications folk to advise and encourage academics.

Finally, you had a number of questions for Paul about UCL Press & eTextbook publishing:

• Paul, now UCL Press is five years old, what would you say are the pros and cons so far?

Pros: Huge impact of UCL research across the world as a result of OA availability; the availability of high quality research to the general public, free at point of use; the ability of the published outputs disseminated as OA to influence strategy and policy decisions by decision makers across the world.

Challenge: Winning support from more authors to publish OA monographs and textbooks; establishing a viable financial model.

• What impact has publishing an OA textbook vs an OA monograph had on staffing? Are you able to achieve this with the existing team – or will you take on additional staff to oversee this activity? Do the two different types of publishing co-exist or are they likely to remain separate?

UCL Press will need to increase its staffing complement in order to build a textbook list. All UCL teaching is based in our research insights. In that sense, research feeds teaching. However, in terms of publishing outputs, the routes are different.

• Given the costs of producing a higher-end textbook with a courseware platform can be in the region of $0.5-3m, where would we as a sector prioritise development? Which disciplines, which titles to replace, and would it be as open textbooks, or as OERs?

The position taken by the Press is that we will start by identifying e-textbooks currently in use in the university and commission academics to write their own, which the Press will publish as OA. AS to format, we are looking at a range of options, and these will be informed by our interactions with academics.

• What is the size of the problem? If we took for example a community (i.e. scaled up from UCL) based OER based route how many textbooks would we need to produce? How much would that cost? Are there particular priority areas we should concentrate on? Indeed do we even need ‘textbooks’ but rather appropriate e content

Each university will wish to teach individual subjects in their own way, built around the insights and expertise of their academic body. It is certainly not the case that ‘one size fits all’. A consortial publishing model would need to be flexible enough to accommodate this multi-layered approach in identifying titles to publish. And yes, outputs do not need to be simply textbooks. We will consider a range of outputs as our insights in the Press grow.

So I hope that answered some of the most pressing questions you had!

On Monday 15th March, the UCL Office for Open Science & Scholarship hosted a webinar in conjunction with Copyright4Knowledge that aimed to examine the acute difficulties for higher education and public libraries caused by publishers’ pricing and licensing practices and discuss some possible solutions.

For the session we had over 600 attendees from countries across the globe including UK, Switzerland, Canada, South Africa, Norway, Ireland, Germany, Spain, USA, and the Netherlands. This level of interest highlights the way in which the COVID-19 pandemic has brought to a head issues surrounding the online provision of learning resources, not just in the UK, but globally.

In the session we played host to three expert speakers who have written up their experiences for a new article on the LSE Impact blog. Below you can access the individual slide decks for each speaker, and at the bottom of this brief discussion you can access a list of cited resources and a few shared in the chat, plus the full recording of the session.

• Johanna Anderson, @hohojanna, Subject Librarian from the University of Gloucestershire and founder of the #eBookSoS campaign: Johanna Anderson’s slides
• Dr. Paul Ayris, @ucylpay, Pro-Vice-Provost (UCL Library Services & UCL Office for Open Science and Scholarship): Paul Ayris’s slides
• Ben White, Chair of the Copyright and Legal Working Group of the European Research Library Association (LIBER): Ben White’s slides

The discussion in the chat was very active, with attendees sharing their own experiences and comments in support of the points that the speakers were making. The audience shared their own experiences of troubles caused by ebooks, with issues such as only half of the books in a key series being available in an ebook format, multiple examples of academics needing to rewrite module reading lists either to use books that the library already had or give several options for librarians to try locate since many were not easily available. In one instance an academic was told that she couldn’t use her own book in a course because it wasn’t available to buy as an ebook!

There were also a number of examples where the ebook version was not up to the same standards of a paper book, with chapters missing, or being presented as one long file that takes up to 5 minutes to download which would be particularly detrimental to students with poor internet or studying abroad in countries with less effective internet infrastructure. It was also noted several times that DRM on ebooks actually decreases accessibility of some content by preventing screenreaders from working properly.

One of the most commonly asked questions from the audience was what individuals or different groups could do to support the campaign. There are links below to resources, the open letter and a template letter to your MP, all of which were mentioned by Johanna but the biggest message was to talk about the issues and raise awareness of the issues that exist in the ebooks market as many people are still unaware there is a problem. Paul added that the environment now is similar to before the big push on Open Access journals and articles over the last 10/15 years, and hopefully we will see similar progress on this issue.

Another big question was on whether other bodies such as SCONUL, JISC and RLUK should contribute and start to develop their own OA book platforms, and this was something that was unanimously supported by the panel, with one notable addition – that one size may not fit all. Paul Ayris encouraged that a number of consortia working on the problem may be beneficial with the phrase ‘let 1000 flowers bloom’ and learn which models work.

To round off the discussion there were questions about what challenges the anticipated change to UKRI policy to include OA books will bring for academics and institutions, large and small. The concern among the panel was that the UK doesn’t have the infrastructure to deliver OA monographs and that until we have had enough time for the 1000 flowers to bloom, there isn’t really a path to take! Johanna also raised the issue of the mounting cost that has been seen in association with OA articles and noted that we need to be careful the same issue is avoided when it comes to OA books.

Resources

• Campaign to investigate the academic ebook market
• Coverage in  The Guardian, BBC, Times Higher, WonkHE , IFLA
• Response to BBC news article by Anthony Sinnott
• UCL Press and their first e-textbook
• Jisc “Transitioning textbooks to open, lessons and insights“
• Jenkins, J.J., Sánchez, L.A., Schraedley, M.A.K., Hannans, J., Navick, N. and Young, J., 2020. Textbook Broke: Textbook Affordability as a Social Justice Issue. Journal of Interactive Media in Education, 2020(1), p.3. DOI: http://doi.org/10.5334/jime.549
• Cox, G., Masuku, B. and Willmers, M., 2020. Open Textbooks and Social Justice: Open Educational Practices to Address Economic, Cultural and Political Injustice at the University of Cape Town. Journal of Interactive Media in Education, 2020(1), p.2. DOI: http://doi.org/10.5334/jime.556
• Library Futures (USA)
• SPARC Open (USA)
• Lumpkin, L. (2020) ‘Textbooks are pricey. So students are getting creative’. Washinton Post. 17 Jan. Available at:   https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/textbooks-keep-getting-pricier-so-students-are-getting-creative/2020/01/17/4e1306b8-30b9-11ea-91fd-82d4e04a3fac_story.html ​​(USA)
• ​​Carrns, A. (2020) ‘That Digital Textbook? Your College Has Billed You for It’. The New York Times. 28th Feb. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/28/your-money/college-digital-textbooks.html (USA)​​

Take action

• Template letter for contacting your MP (Google doc)
• Add  your examples to the crowd-sourced evidence (Google doc)
• Join the discussion on Twitter using #ebooksos!

The recording is available below or also on UCL MediaCentral.

Booking is now open for training on RPS and the REF open access policy in February and March. Last term’s training sessions were very popular, and feedback received was extremely positive: all respondents found sessions very useful (65%) and useful (35%).

All UCL authors are required to maintain a list of their publications in UCL’s Research Publication Service (RPS). To comply with the REF open access policy, they must also upload the final accepted manuscript version of their research articles and conference proceedings to RPS. This needs to be done no later than three months after first online publication. The Open Access Team review the manuscript and make it open access through UCL Discovery, UCL’s open access repository.

Our training sessions will explain the REF open access policy and what to do to comply with its requirements. They will also show you how to, in RPS:

• set up name-based search settings
• use all the advantages of RPS’s automated claiming tool (including linking RPS to your ORCID ID)
• record a publication
• upload a file

The sessions will be a good opportunity to ask questions about RPS and the REF open access policy, and they are open to all UCL staff and interested research students. New members of staff, and anyone who is unsure about any of the features mentioned above, are strongly encouraged to attend. Regular reports on compliance with the REF open access policy, and on academics’ use of RPS, are sent to Faculty Deans and Heads of Department. 

Upcoming sessions

Thursday, 14^th February, 11:00 – 12:00
Foster Court, room 235

Thursday, 14^th March, 11:00 – 12:00
Engineering Front Building, room 104

To book, and if you have any questions, please email: open-access@ucl.ac.uk
Also let us know if you would like to organise group training or drop-in sessions in your department.