This Open Access Week, we’re delighted to be launching a new video designed to help new UCL staff and students understand some of the key ideas in open access. With so many different open access routes, including fully OA, transformative agreements and Green, and myriad open access policies – including UKRI, Wellcome, NIHR, CRUK, Horizon Europe/ERC and REF – unfortunately open access is often more complex than we would like. We cover all the detail on our webpages, but we’re hoping that this short video, the first of a pair, will be a helpful introduction for new UCL staff and early career researchers, and a handy reference for other researchers. In just two-and-a-half minutes, it covers:

1. What open access is and why it is important
2. Green/Gold open access
3. Fully open access/hybrid journals
4. Transformative agreements

The eagle-eyed will spot a small spoiler about a second video, which will explain what UCL authors need to do about open access. We’re working on that now, and it should be available in the next few months.

Departments may like to add links to our videos to their induction materials. Here are the videos available at the moment:

• What is Open Access?
• What is RPS?, Claiming and adding publication in RPS, Uploading a manuscript to RPS

We hope you enjoy these new resources.

The team at the UCL Office for Open Science & Scholarship are pleased to be able to share two brand new resources for the 2022-23 academic year!

Open Science & Scholarship video

The first, a new video giving an overview of Open Science at UCL. Dr Paul Ayris, Pro-Vice Provost for Library, Culture, Collections & Open Science (LCCOS) opens the discussion and outlines the context, before local experts delve into each of the core areas that we support. It is accompanied by a short quiz to affirm your new understanding of each area.

This video was created with the support of grants from Research England and Horizon 2020. It was produced by Scientific Knowledge Services (SKS).

After watching the video, you can take the quiz! If you are interested in learning more about anything you heard, visit the OOSS training and support pages for this and further resources.

Guide to Open Science for PhD students

The second resource is entitled Open Science – a practical guide for PhD students. This guide has been designed especially for UCL’s community of PhD students, aiming to introduce the principles of Open Science, but linking them directly to stages of the PhD journey and showing the benefits of embracing Open from the start of their academic journey.

This guide is developed from the original which was published by the French Ministry of Higher Education and Research.

This and other resources to help and support you in your Open Science journey can be found on our website.