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Citizen science community at UCL – a discussion and call to contribute

By Kirsty, on 27 October 2023

Community over Commercialization was the theme for this year’s International Open Access Week. The organisers aim for this theme was to encourage a candid conversation about which approaches to openness prioritise the best interests of the public and the academic community—and which do not.

This is related to the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science, which highlights the need to prioritize community in its calls for the prevention of “inequitable extraction of profit from publicly funded scientific activities” and support for “non-commercial publishing models and collaborative publishing models with no article processing charges.” By focusing on these areas, we can achieve the original vision outlined when open access was first defined: “an old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an unprecedented public good.”

-adapted from openaccessweek.org

This week, in support of this theme we have launched our Citizen Science community for anyone at UCL that wants to get involved, staff, students, anyone! It’s the culmination of a lot of work from the team in the Office for Open Science and Scholarship and I wanted to close out the week with a discussion of how we have been approaching Citizen Science at UCL and what we are going to be doing next.

One of the core values of the Office for Open Science & Scholarship, and therefore the team behind the Citizen Science community, is to make everything we do as inclusive as possible of as many of the UCL subject areas as we can.

We use Citizen Science as a title, because it is a commonly used and recognised term, but as we want to create a broad community we have worked hard to create a unifying definition that we want to work to, and this is where this word cloud comes in! This is a work in progress where we are trying to collect as many terms for what we would consider to be a part of Citizen Science as possible and we are hoping that the new community will help us to develop this more and make it as comprehensive as possible!

So, what else have we been doing and what are we working on?

As well as the launch of the UCL Citizen Science Academy, over the past year or so, the team has been talking to a number of colleagues that have been working on citizen science projects to get insights into the projects happening at UCL (which we have added to our website), but also the skills and support that people would recommend for new starters. This will all feed into us recommending, commissioning or developing training and support for you, our community. The aim is to keep building up our existing citizen science related community and enable new, interested parties to get involved, supported by both us and the community as a whole.

We are always asking for information about new projects, feedback on how we can make our community more inclusive and looking for new words for our word cloud so please get in touch by email or by commenting below, we love to hear from you!

Open Access Week: A year in review

By Kirsty, on 25 October 2023

It has become somewhat of a tradition now for there to be a post during Open Access Week that reviews the previous year. While the middle of October may seem like a strange time to take stock, it is after all the anniversary of the Launch of the Office for Open Science & Scholarship and we like to stop and celebrate another year.

This year we celebrated another successful conference and our first back in person for us! We also had another first with a workshop taking place simultaneously online and in person on the topic of equity in authorship. This work has been fed into a UCL statement on Authorship that will be released in the coming months.

We also released a brand new page bringing together all of the training and support information across all the Open Science affiliated teams to make it easier to navigate and get your questions answered.

In the past year all of the teams that form part of the office have worked hard on developing new services and making improvements to existing ones.

The Open Access team have been working hard updating RPS and the new Profiles tool to replace IRIS. They also support both Gold and Green Open Access Activity across the university.

Over 18,500 items have been uploaded to UCL Discovery in the last 12 months, bringing the total to over 166,000! Of these, there are over 23,000 theses to be explored. They have also made 3,383 papers Gold OA, 2,700 of which were using our transformative agreements with publishers.

The Research Data Management team have been working hard behind the scenes doing an overhaul of their support materials, testing new materials for training and supporting the ever-growing Research Data Repository.

In the past 12 months we have had over 1000 new datasets from 226 users. Quite notably, we have had over 200,000 downloads which just goes to show the value of sharing your data as well as your other research outputs!

The Citizen Science support service has moved on in leaps and bounds since this time last year, creating content, liaising with colleagues across the university, collaborating to launch the UCL Citizen Science Academy and this week we were able to launch the brand new Citizen Science online community.

Hopefully that gives you a taste of what we have been up to and the numbers of the last year, scroll back through the blog for more information and to get an idea of the detail of what we have been up to. It’s been a great year and here’s to the next!

Happy Open Access Week!

Launching our new UCL Citizen Science Community on MS Teams!

By Kirsty, on 24 October 2023

Are you interested in citizen science?

Would you like to connect with others to share your stories about citizen science?

Are you wondering whether a citizen science approach might work for your project?

Would you like to collaborate with colleagues across UCL and exchange ideas or work together on participatory projects under a joint mission?

Do you want to hear about citizen science as an approach or would you just like to expand your network?

If so, please join our informal UCL citizen science community and get involved! Whether you are new to citizen science or whether you have run projects before, this is your community. We are bringing everyone together to share their knowledge, discuss good practices and talk about their experiences of citizen science.  The community is strictly for UCL members only but is open to all staff and students at all levels.

You might call it participatory research, community action, crowdsourcing, public engagement, or something else. UCL supports a broad approach to “citizen science”, recognising that there are different applications and functions of this approach in research, whether they are community-driven research projects or global investigations.

Through this community, we would really like to hear your feedback on what you would like to see from a potential citizen science support service at UCL including any ideas you might have for events, training, resources or anything else. Join here or search “UCL Citizen Science Community” on Teams.

We also have brand new and improved Citizen Science web pages on the UCL’s Office for Open Science and Scholarship website which includes an introduction to citizen science at UCL including definitions, history, types and levels, and information about the UCL Citizen Science Certificate, you can browse through the various types of citizen science projects at UCL and learn about what your colleagues are doing in this exciting area!

On our new citizen science support and training page, you will find links to relevant training courses currently delivered by different UCL teams both online and in person, a variety of useful resources about citizen science, links to interesting blogs/news and citizen science platforms and projects outside UCL. We will be improving and expanding this content within the coming months.

 If you have any questions, would like further information or would like to tell us what you need, please contact us!

How Creative Commons licences support open scholarship

By Kirsty, on 23 October 2023

Happy Open Access Week 2023!

This year’s theme is ‘community over commercialisation’. It is about adopting research and education practices that place priority on the interests of the public. In the context of scholarly communications, it is about making access to scholarly knowledge open and accessible to diverse communities, in transparent and sustainable ways.

For this to be achieved, the outcomes of academic research and education – research data, preprints, published articles, monographs, educational resources – must be open to access but also open to reuse: free access to an article, an online tutorial or a dataset has great benefits, but the potential for users of these materials to share them with others, adapt, add to and improve upon them is what makes innovation and creativity possible.

Creative Commons (CC licences) support open and reusable research by offering a standardised way in which authors can grant others certain permissions to reuse their works. In this post we highlight some key points about CC licences and discuss how they benefit both creators and users of copyright-protected materials.

What is Creative Commons?

Creative Commons (CC) is “an international non-profit organisation dedicated to helping build and sustain a thriving commons of shared knowledge and culture”. The organisation is active in supporting, educating and advocating for a more open culture; but it is most known for its licences.

How do Creative Commons licences work?

If you are the author of pretty much any creative work – a journal article, an image, a music composition, a website, a book – making your work available under a CC licence helps you:

  • As the copyright owner of the work, give ‘blanket’ permission to others to copy and share your work, while requiring that they attribute you as the author.
  • Decide what further uses you give blanket permission for. Do you allow others to make adaptations(e.g. to translate your book, adapt a teaching resource for a new audience, or change your artwork)? Do you allow others to reuse for a commercial purpose?
  • Decide if you would like to ensure that future adaptations of your work (if you are allowing them) are also made available under the same licence, keeping them as ‘open’ as yours.

Image attribution: Barbara Klute und Jöran Muuß-Merholz für wb-web unter CC BY-SA 3.0. The English version is a translation and enhancement by Jöran Muuß-Merholz under the same license., CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The combination of these criteria: attribution (a requirement for all licences), allowing/not allowing derivatives, allowing/not allowing commercial reuse, and requiring/not requiring sharing under the same licence (‘share-alike) creates a set of six licences creators can choose from.

How do Creative Commons licences support open scholarship and the needs of different communities?

There are numerous examples of how CC licences help free up research and education. CC licences applied to open access articles, conference proceedings, monographs and other scholarly works make it possible for readers of these works around the world – who may include academic researchers, lecturers, students but also health practitioners, innovators, artists and the general public – to benefit from these works and potentially create something new and innovative as a result. CC licences applied to research data enables data to be shared and reused across different organisations and countries. CC licences applied to preprints, study preregistrations and theses ensure openness in research that is not yet formally published. In the same way, particularly through allowing adaptations, CC licences support the development and success of Open Educational Resources (OERs).

Beyond traditional scholarship, CC licences help open up cultural collections and offer opportunities for publishers and the creative industries to adopt new business models that serve their audiences better.

How can I learn more about Creative Commons?

Image attribution: adapted from Martin Missfeldt https://www.bildersuche.org/ CC BY-SA

If you have made it so far in this post, you may have further questions including how to apply a CC licence, how to discover and reuse CC materials, how CC licences work alongside copyright and how they can support commercially sensitive works. Here are a few things you can do:

  • Drop-in any time between 12 pm and 2 pm on Teams on Tuesday 24 October, to hear more, ask questions and tell us about your experiences with CC licences. You can join for just a few minutes to ask a question or stay for longer to become a CC expert. Register for the CC licences drop-in session.
  • Take our 5-question fun personality quiz to discover which licence you are. You may not learn anything new about yourself, but you will hopefully get even more familiar with how the range of CC licences can be applied in different situations. Your responses will be anonymous.

Open Access Week activities

By Kirsty, on 13 October 2023

Open Access Week is almost upon us!

Keep your eyes open for a series of blog posts on Creative Commons, citizen science, the recent activities of UCL Press and an exciting review of a year in open access.

This year’s theme is Community over Commercialisation. Creative Commons licences sit at the heart of this discussion. To this end, we invite you to a drop-in session on Tuesday the 24th of October to address questions around creating and using Creative Commons materials. The session is on Teams and you can join at any time. Bring along your questions or just join to discuss how CC supports equitable access to a wide range of works, from scholarly publications to open and FAIR data to images and music.

We have already announced our wonderful winners of the Open Science and Scholarship awards. UCL colleagues can also join us on Wednesday to celebrate and network with the winners, tickets are still available!

We will be posting and tweeting regularly throughout the week about the services and support available to researchers and I hope that we can get some good discussions going!

See you there!

Announcing: UCL Open Science & Scholarship Award winners!!

By Kirsty, on 11 October 2023

On behalf of the UCL Office for Open Science and the UKRN local leads we would like to thank everyone that engaged with the nominations and showed us how amazing the research community at UCL is. We were overwhelmed with the support for this process and the judging panel had a really hard job in selecting just a few winners from the over 50 applications and nominations that we received!

We will be presenting the awards in a small ceremony during Open Access week: 2-3.30pm, Wednesday 25th October. A selection of winners and honourable mentions will be presenting their work, and there will be a small drinks reception afterwards sponsored by UCL Press.

We have limited tickets available because it is a small venue but tickets are available on Eventbrite for UCL staff and students.

Full information about all of these projects will be available the day of the awards so watch this space!

Category: Academic Staff Activities

Winner: Gesche Huebner and Mike Fell, BSEER, Built Environment

Honourable mentions:

  • Smita Salunke, School of Pharmacy
  • Henrik Singmann, Brain Sciences

Category: Student Activities

Winner: Seán Kavanagh, Chemistry

Honourable mentions:

  • Yukun Zhou, Centre for Medical Image Computing
  • Maxime Beau, Division of Medicine
  • Julie Fabre, Department of Neuromuscular Diseases

Category: Professional Services Staff Activities

Winner: Miguel Xochicale, Advanced Research Computing Centre (ARC) and Wellcome / EPSRC Centre for Interventional and Surgical Sciences (WEISS).

Honourable mention: Marcus Pedersen, PHS

Category: Open resources, publishing, and textbooks

Winner: Talia Isaacs, IOE, UCL’s Faculty of Education and Society

Honourable mentions:

  • Talya Greene, Brain Sciences
  • Prof Michael Heinrich & Dr Banaz Jalil, School of Pharmacy

Announcing: the inaugural UCL Open Science & Scholarship Awards!

By Kirsty, on 17 July 2023

Red and gold fireworks, captured against a black skyUCL Office for Open Science and Scholarship and the local chapter of the UK Reproducibility Network are excited to announce the first Open Science and Scholarship Awards at UCL. UCL has been a pioneer in promoting open science practices, which include Open Access Publishing, Open Data and Software, Transparency, Reproducibility and other Open Methodologies, as well as the creation and use of Open Educational Resources, Citizen Science, Public Involvement, Co-production and Communication.

With these awards, we want to recognise and celebrate all UCL students and staff who embrace, advance, and promote open science.

Who is eligible?

All UCL students (undergraduate, postgraduate taught, and postgraduate research) and staff from any department/discipline, including professional services staff, can apply or be nominated.

Application and Nomination

You can apply or nominate someone else for the award by completing this form. We have kept the form as simple as possible to encourage as many applications as possible. You will be asked to (i) briefly describe the activity (max 200 words) and (ii) explain how the activity has promoted open science (max 300 words) for example by implementing open science practices, enhancing their adoption or impact, using open access resources in research and teaching, or any improvements to open practices.

Examples of activities include (but are not limited to):

  • applying open science practices in research
  • organising open science training/workshops locally or for a wider audience
  • building and coordinating a community around open research practices
  • supporting researchers with data management to promote reproducibility
  • developing open software and analytical tools
  • leading or supporting citizen science initiatives
  • authoring or co-authoring open research guidelines, standards, and policies
  • designing templates to enable open research practices
  • developing open datasets or databases that are used by other researchers
  • revise a module’s reading list to rely predominantly on open access resources/textbooks

Award categories

  • Use of open access resources, including textbooks
  • Activities by students
  • Activities by academic staff
  • Activities by professional services staff

Prizes

  • Winners in each category will be awarded 100GBP as a cash prize as well as a certificate. All winners will be invited to briefly present their research at the Awards ceremony.
  • Each category will also name up to two Honourable Mentions that will receive a certificate.

Timeline

Application deadline: Sunday 27 August 2023

Results communicated: Friday 29 September 2023

An award ceremony will take place during the Open Access Week in the third week of October 2023.

Open peer review: what is it and what is UCL Press doing?

By Kirsty, on 28 October 2022

Guest post from Ian Caswell, UCL Press Journals Manager.

When discussing peer review, generally, I find it helpful to remind myself of some of the values as to perhaps why researchers publish in scholarly journals. In essence, it usually comes down to these 4 headings.

  1. Knowledge and discovery
  2. Evaluation and validation
  3. Credit
  4. Access to research

Within this environment, peer review is arguably the fundamental gold standard aspect of scholarly and academic publishing and is, at least in its most fundamental use of it, the facilitator for publishers to sell journals and its content.

So then, what is the role for peer review precisely, and what does it serve to accomplish?

An easy question to answer, right? In the book Editorial peer review: It’s strengths and weaknesses, the author writes the role of what peer review serves is, as ‘the goal of the process is to ensure that the valid article is accepted, the messy article cleaned up, and the invalid article rejected,’ thereby ensuring that the article made available to the reader is quality controlled.

In another book titled Peer review: A critical inquiry, the author here writes that the process of peer review also benefits the author, as they are later certified by the process if published proceeding peer review: “Careers are often made or destroyed by the process.”

In scholarly publishing, peer review acts to validate and assess work and is the current system used to assess the quality of a manuscript before it is published. Other experts in the relevant field assesses the research or article for things like fact, validity, and significance, that aid the assessors (i.e. Editors) to determine whether the manuscript should be published in the journal or not. I think it is pertinent to remember here that journals do play a vital role in the scientific and scholarly process, by refining research through peer review and disseminating it to appropriate communities by publication, and it is this role of review by peers that has been a part of scholarly communication since the appearance of the first journal in the 17th Century (see the brilliant book by Professor Aileen Fyfe et al, A History of Scientific Journals: Publishing at the Royal Society, 1665-2015.)

Challenges in peer-review

There has been a lot of discussion around the challenges peer review present, stemming from bias and prejudices towards authors, fraudulent behaviour, non-expertise reviews, and so on. In the article Peer review in a changing world: An international study measuring the attitudes of researchers by Mulligan et al in 2012, notes that:

“Although alternative forms of peer review have evolved to tackle issues of bias, it is less clear what effect, if any, they will have upon fraud. High‐profile cases of fraud and plagiarism have brought the debate about the efficacy of peer review to a wider audience, attracting greater public attention. Such incidences include [certain individuals], tipped to be a Nobel Prize winner, who published a series of fraudulent papers that were withdrawn from NatureSciencePhysical Review, and Applied Physics Letters.”

Journals typically tackle these types of concerns by anonymising authors and reviewers from each other to ‘enable a fairer and just review system’. In this article Mulligan et al surveyed around 40,000 published researchers that were randomly selected from the Web of Science (then known as the Thomson Reuters ISI list) and concluded that the majority of respondents were happy with the current system, but noted the system is imperfect and more can be done to ensure a higher level of efficacy and efficiency.

Now, being led by open science principles, it is largely seen that being more open and transparent with research publication and assessment can we increase scholarly rigor, accountability and trust.

What is open peer-review?

There is a growing evidence base of the challenges and flaws in the current anonymised peer review system (albeit, mainly within the biomedical and clinical sciences), and major publishers and journals are already testing open peer review processes (or have already implemented a practice of it already).

In April 2017, a systematic review of what open peer review is was published online in F1000Research (itself an innovative model of open peer review). It concluded: “Open peer review has neither a standardized definition, nor an agreed schema of its features and implementations. The literature reflects this, with a myriad of overlapping and often contradictory definitions.”

What this review very accurately depicts, is that there are a number of definitions of open peer review that can be collated together into themes and it purports there are 7 open traits to what open peer review concerns itself with, and that open peer review can take either a single aspect, or a multitude or mix of any of these traits, to operate as an open peer review model. Briefly, these are:

  1. Open identities, where authors and reviewers are aware of each other’s identity.
  2. Open reports, where the review reports are published alongside the relevant article
  3. Open participation, where the wider community are able to contribute to the review process
  4. Open interaction, where direct reciprocal discussion between author(s) and reviewers, and between the reviewers themselves, is allowed and encouraged
  5. Open pre-review manuscripts, essentially, a pre-print server, where manuscripts are made immediately available (e.g., BiorXiv) in advance of any formal peer review procedures
  6. Open final-version commenting, where the review or commenting on the final “version of record” is published
  7. Open platforms (or “decoupled review”), where review is facilitated by a different organizational entity than the venue of publication

What is UCL Press doing?

At UCL Press, we launched our very own open peer review and open science journal called UCL Open Environment: a fully non-commercial, Open Science journal, publishing high impact, multi-disciplinary research, on real world environmental issues, with the overall aim of benefitting humanity. The journal is for any researcher or professional at knowledge-based universities, institutions, and organisations (including Non-Government Organisations, Think Tanks, Inter-Government Organisations, and the United Nations) and submissions are invited from those at all career stages, including early career researchers, mid-career professionals, and senior scholars. There are also no barriers to the Open Peer Review Process (whereby the identity of the reviewer and the report are made publicly visibly at all times); engagement from all will advance the greatest leaps and discoveries.

Reviewers are firstly asked to sign in to the system using their ORCID account and when they submit their review report, the report is posted up online in the preprint server alongside the article, under the CC-BY licence and assigned a unique DOI. You can find out more information about this at https://ucl-about.scienceopen.com/for-reviewers/peer-review-process.

Reviewers can therefore attain credit of their report and readers are able to follow the process openly online. We hope this will also aid the development for others (especially earlier career researchers and students) with examples on how a review is written and how an article is revised accordingly, aiming to improve the way we should engage critically and beneficially with research.

Readers of this blog can see for themselves how the journal works (you can see here the list of the latest submissions and open peer reviews, as well as here for publications accepted after peer review). It is my hope that readers will be encouraged to provide more open peer reviews or open comments, adding to the corpus of open debate around research, and consider contributing to UCL Open Environment, as we believe that by removing barriers and innovatively working openly and together will we accelerate finding solutions to the world’s most significant challenges.

Indigenous knowledge and Citizen Science: enabling paths for Climate Justice

By Kirsty, on 27 October 2022

Post by Harry Ortiz, Office for Open Science & Scholarship Support Officer

This year’s Open Access theme, Climate Justice, allows us to explore how research openness can promote diverse paths to achieve it. In this particular occasion, we will focus on how citizen science can work as a bridge to connect the so-called modern societies with rich indigenous environmental knowledge to confront the climate emergency and learn from their day-to-day practices.

According to the United Nations (UN), climate justice refers to a paradigm shift that focuses on the impacts of global warming on the most vulnerable people rather than just discussions on gas emissions. Expanding the discourses based on natural resources and biodiversity depletion to more ethical and political spheres under the human rights framework and civil movements from those communities who are, and will be, the most affected by those changes (Unite Nations, 2019).

CC-BY-NC Picture by Joe Brusky https://flic.kr/p/pkVrKZ

Paradoxically, indigenous communities, who have been the protectors of the land through sacred ties with nature, are one of the most affected groups confronting climate change hazards. Receiving special attention due to their leader’s climate justice activism based on their traditional knowledge, demanding urgent policy transformations and more comprehensive mitigation plans (United Nations, 2021). The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recognise the crucial role of indigenous peoples’ knowledge in those plans, especially regarding ecosystem and biodiversity conservation as key to ensuring sustainable development and climate resilience (IPCC, 2022).

As climate justice movements note, the effects of the planetary phenomena affect vulnerable communities worst and faster. Not only about social and economic extents but their ‘abilities to produce, disseminate, and use knowledge around the climate crisis’ (International Science Council, 2022). This a critical reality for indigenous and local knowledge reproduction, which might contain the answers to new forms of human existence in symbiosis with all forms of life on earth.

Openness can help to share that traditional knowledge and inform novel paths to generate resilient modern societies. However, it is first necessary to understand and capture the indigenous and local expertise, where citizen science practice, one of the eight pillars of open science, takes enormous relevance for climate justice.

But how can scientific methodologies and indigenous/local knowledge coexist when they belong to completely different epistemologies? How do we avoid new ways of colonisation against indigenous peoples in the name of science and climate justice?

Citizen science offers a solution, a link between the two distant worlds. With ethical considerations carefully implemented, it can deliver new knowledge collaborations and approaches to solve local and global sustainability issues. Citizen science aloud reciprocally valuable knowledge systems to coexist, open discussions about power dynamics in the academic world, promote diversity, participation in decision making and address historical inequalities (Tengö, M. et al. 2021).

The International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs (IGWIA), answering the IPCC 2022 report on mitigation, indicate the need for ‘a new paradigm of climate partnership with Indigenous Peoples that harnesses the benefits of different knowledge systems and ways of knowing is needed. Although the inclusion of Indigenous Peoples and their knowledge holders in research is increasing, more significant efforts are needed to support community-based and Indigenous-led research.’ (IGWIA, 2022). Addressing the need to respect indigenous peoples’ rights in the knowledge co-production development and their participation in all levels of climate mitigation decisions in ethical and equitable processes.

The UCL press book’ Geographic Citizen Science Design – No one left behind’ shows good examples of citizen science with indigenous communities who take into account cultural factors, participant-centre design and the local contexts from holistic perspectives. We encourage you to visit their third chapter, where the authors build from an anthropological and human-computer design perspective providing several case studies regarding geographic citizen science with indigenous communities and their knowledge. You can download the Open Access PDF for free!

Despite diverse opinions and perspectives, citizen science practices can hybridise two knowledge traditions that seemed to run in parallel paths. Sharing those findings in open and accessible ways beyond academia can promote more fair, equitable and sustainable societies.

Can you imagine new ways to co-existence with all the living world informed by indigenous knowledge and practices? Following Tyson Yunkaporta’s ideas in his book Sand Talk, what if indigenous knowledge can save the world? For some, the idea might sound romantic or taken out of science fiction movies. But what if finding an encounter point between the modern and the indigenous world is the most effective path towards climate justice?


International Science Council, 2022. 2022 International Open Access Week will focus on ‘Open for Climate Justice’. [online] Available from: https://council.science/current/news/2022-international-open-access-week-will-focus-on-open-for-climate-justice/ [Accessed 06 October 2022]

IGWIA, 2022. A new paradigm of climate partnership with Indigenous Peoples. An analysis of the recognition of Indigenous Peoples in the IPCC report on mitigation. IGWIA Briefing Paper. Available from: https://iwgia.org/en/resources/publications/4845-iwgia-briefing-analysing-a-new-paradigm-of-climate-partnership-with-indigenous-peoples-ipcc-report.html

IPCC, 2022. Climate Change 2022: Mitigation of Climate Change. Working Group III Contribution to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Summary for Policymakers. WMO – UNEP. Available from: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg3/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6_WGIII_SPM.pdf

Tengö, M., Austin, B.J., Danielsen, F., Fernández-Llamazares, A. 2021. Creating Synergies between Citizen Science and Indigenous and Local Knowledge. BioScience, 2021; biab023, https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biab023

United Nations, 31 May 2019. Climate Justice. Goal 13: Climate Action. [online] Available from: https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/blog/2019/05/climate-justice/ [Accessed 04 October 2022]

United Nations, 09 August 2021. How indigenous knowledge can help prevent environmental crises. Environmental Rights and Governance. [online] Available from: https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/how-indigenous-knowledge-can-help-prevent-environmental-crises [Accessed 04 October 2022]

What is Open Access?: new video for UCL researchers

By Kirsty, on 26 October 2022

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.