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Research Data Management: A year in review

By Rafael, on 12 February 2024

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.

Graph to show items published in the UCL Research Repository in 2023.

 

We had over 120,000 downloads and over 240,000 viewsOver 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 thismaking your research discoverable to others for potential reuse can help to maximise research opportunities

And so the research data lifecycle begins again!

Get involved!

alt=""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!

‘Challenges of Equity in Authorship’ co-production workshop initial discussions

By Harry, on 4 August 2023

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…”

 

 

UCL Research Data Repository: Publishing research outputs for staff and PhD students across in 2022

By Harry, on 17 February 2023

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

What is a Data Management Plan (DMP)?

By Harry, on 15 February 2023

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!

 

Welcome to Love Data Week 2023 at UCL

By Harry, on 13 February 2023

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.

 

The open-access subject gap

By Harry, on 25 November 2022

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.

UCL Open Science Conference 2022 – Day 1 Recordings

By Kirsty, on 11 April 2022

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.

Open Access Week 2021 – your ideas wanted!

By Kirsty, on 12 July 2021

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.

Ebooks: Scandal or Market Economics – the Q&A special

By Kirsty, on 22 March 2021

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!

Ebooks: Scandal or Market Economics webinar – summary and links

By Kirsty, on 17 March 2021

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.

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

Take action

The recording is available below or also on UCL MediaCentral.