A new exciting year is starting, and what better way to give the initial kick than celebrating the achievements and milestones of the multiple teams linked to the UCL Office for Open Science & Scholarship (OOSS). We are proud to see how the OOSS kept growing and consolidating itself inside UCL’s institutional culture, supporting academic staff, researchers and students.

One of last year’s highlights was undoubtedly the UCL Open Science Conference, reuniting people from all over the world in sessions discussing Citizen Science, Open data and code, Open and the Global South and more. You can still watch the recordings of day one and day two on our blog! And get ready to participate in the 2023 version in late April. You will hear about it soon on our pages and social media. We are working to make the event hybrid to facilitate participation across territories, do not miss your spot!

After various months of revisions and collaborative work, we published new Open Science Resources for 2022-2023. The first is the video ‘Open Science and Scholarship as part of UCL Research Culture’ and ‘Open Science – a practical guide for PhD students’.

Our office connects to several other teams inside UCL that make an exquisite blend of services, skills and expertise, and we want to celebrate their achievements and news.

The UCL Open Access team has grown their range of transformative publisher agreements and upgraded Research Publications Services (RPS). Users will notice a refreshed look and feel, differences to the Homepage layout, and a new menu structure and navigation. Check the step-by-step guide if you missed it!

UCL Press has proven the importance of open-access scholarly publishers, reaching six million downloads last May (and close to seven million now!), reaching 246 countries and territories, and publishing 272 titles since its launch in 2015.

The Bibliometrics team now is able to support Altmetric, which will be useful for anyone interested in public engagement or research impact, as well as individual researchers looking at the response to their work online. Altmetrics are “alternative metrics” – measuring the impact of research beyond scholarly literature. Helping to get a wider sense of the impact of papers that might otherwise be missed were we to focus on traditional academic citations.

Our Research and Data Management team upgraded their webpages, reviewed dozens of data management plans, and created brand new online Data Management Plan Templates with DMP online. Their services and the Bibliometrics team were both classified as excellent regarding the user’s experience of our online support service. We are proud of such a hard-working and supportive team!

During the second half of 2022, the OOSS gained two additional members: a Citizen Science Coordinator and a Support Officer. Both new team members are currently working with the Office Coordinator on ambitious projects that will see the light later this year, aiming to diversify the support and resources of our virtual office for wider audiences.

Undoubtedly, the diversity of professionals, backgrounds and interests made our small office inside Library, Culture, Collections & Open Science (LCCOS) a prosperous place to develop services, ideas and projects for wonderful audiences inside and outside our university.

Last year’s achievements were only possible due to the support of the university to embrace an open culture, thanks to the collaborative work between the teams, and always supporting each other and the office users. We will keep working together to democratise knowledge and keep UCL one of the Open Science & Scholarship leaders worldwide.

Post by Marie Dewerpe, Open Access team. Library, Culture, Collections and Open Science.

This blog post relates to personal experiences I have had with open data and open access in genealogy. Besides working as an open access assistant, I am an amateur genealogist. Therefore, I asked myself: what about open access in genealogy?

Family history is bit like a detective work in the archives. You are looking for clues and proof of where your ancestors lived and who they were. To create your family tree, you need to access records. The main records genealogists use are the birth, marriage and death (BMD) and census records collected by the government. They are usually stored by the state at the national, regional or local level.

Depending on the country, the data is archived differently by the civil services. I will be writing about accessing records that do not concern living individuals protected by blanket policies such as the Data Protection Act in the UK.

The field of genealogy has a history of collaboration and volunteering. Fellow genealogists will search on your behalf in exchange for you helping other genealogists. Transcribers, translators and online forums are on hand to provide help. This kind of free support from other genealogists is quite common. But when I started looking into open data and open access in genealogy, I realised there is little information on the topic. From my experience of navigating archives in different countries (France, Estonia and the UK) I also noticed some similarities and disparities in gaining access to genealogical resources.

In France, many genealogical resources are free to access in the public archives. They can be reused under similar terms as the Creative Commons licence. For example, the Office Français De Protection Des Réfugiés Et Apatrides (French Office for the Protection of Refugees and Stateless Persons) allows the user to reuse their public data with some restrictions, such as respecting the integrity of information. But these resources are not always easily searchable. When they are searchable you often need to use a private company’s database or a local group database. Furthermore, you must subscribe to the volunteer group or a private company in order to access the transcribed data and their searchable database.

In Estonia, documents like birth, marriage and death certificates are available freely. You can also ask the national archives to digitise their physical records for a small fee. After a while these digitised documents are shared on their website and are also freely available. As with France, it is not easy to navigate the resources when you are not literate in classification. But unlike France, some of the archival material is searchable on the National Archives website. Because France and Estonia are part of the European Union, their approach to public data is quite similar.

In the UK almost all “basic” records such as birth, marriage and death certificates are behind a pay wall. You must subscribe to private companies to access what is available freely to those based in other countries. The information includes census, birth, marriage and death records. Having to pay for these records no doubt affects who can access the genealogical resources. Local libraries facilitate access to family histories, but they also have to subscribe to databases that are originally stored by public entities like the National Archives, but are managed by private companies.

I found one initiative, FreeUKGenealogy, which supports free access to genealogy data without restrictions on its use. As explained on their website, they want to bypass pay walls and allow users to access public data.

To sum up this exploration of open data and open access in genealogy, there are differences in access levels from country to country. When in France and Estonia, the records are freely accessible, in the UK you need to subscribe to private companies. However, free access does not mean easy access. Indeed, it is difficult to use the material without proficiency in archiving. In France, you have the option to access searchable databases, but there are fees involved. These current limitations place financial and knowledgeable barriers on those who wish to consult and use the records. This is where initiatives like FreeUKGenealogy are extremely useful.

Here are some free resources on getting started in genealogy:

https://www.whodoyouthinkyouaremagazine.com/getting-started/best-free-genealogy-websites/

https://ukdataservice.ac.uk/help/other-data-providers/ready-made-statistics/genealogy/

https://www.thegenealogist.co.uk/non-conformist-records

More resources:

https://cdn.nationalarchives.gov.uk/documents/information-management/reproduction-of-birth-death-marriage-certificates.pdf

https://media.nationalarchives.gov.uk/index.php/brick-walls-and-lost-ancestors/

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/shows/the-open-source-show/using-open-data-to-build-family-trees

https://www.reclaimtherecords.org/

https://www.ra.ee/vau/index.php/en

https://www.ra.ee/en/the-national-archives-of-estonia-100/

For more information on open data in France, here is a fascinating paper:

https://doi.org/10.4000/communicationorganisation.6766

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.

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.

Another year has passed and another Open Access Week is upon us! Since the foundation of the UCL Office for Open Science & Scholarship, it has become traditional for us to start Open Access week with a review of the last year.

It has been a busy year in the Office and in all of the teams that support Open in various guises across the university. Instead of a dull report from me about facts and figures, the LCCOS communications team have created a fun, snappy video with all the highlights!

In the past year UCL Press has released numerous new books, and their e-textbooks project is coming on in leaps and bounds. The team at the office have released new resources, and the Open Access team has a huge range of new Transformative deals as well as video content in the pipeline to help simplify the complicated world of Open Access for you – one is even coming out later this week!

We hope you enjoy Open Access week – and here’s to another great year!

We’re getting excited again for the upcoming Open Access Week!

We have our usual range of blog posts lined up for you to enjoy, including an exciting roundup of the last year, our latest newsletter and a post on this year’s OA Week theme – Open for Climate Justice.

If that wasn’t enough, we have an online event for our ERC academics and a brand-new resource being released, so watch this space!

Featured event: Open Access for Horizon & ERC Researchers

Are you a UCL researcher whose publications acknowledge EU grants? Then you need to know about the new Horizon Europe and ERC open access requirements.

Register now for our online Open Access Week Horizon Briefing, on Monday 24 October, 13:00-13:50.

This session will set out the relevant open access policies, and explain where you can publish and what funding is available. We’ll also be joined by colleagues from F1000, to show you the Open Research Europe platform, which offers rapid publishing, open peer-review and compliance with the Horizon open access and open data policies.

Welcome to the sixth issue of the Open Science and Scholarship Newsletter!

This termly newsletter has updates across the 8 Pillars of Open Science, and contributions from colleagues across the university. If you would like to get involved, give feedback or write something for a future issue, please get in touch using the details at the end of the newsletter.

In this issue:

• Editorial
• Update from the Head of the Office for Open Science & Scholarship
• Community voice – Extreme Citizen Science: Analysis and
  Visualisation (ECSAnVis) project
• Special Feature – UCL Press Open Access eTextbooks project
• Deep Dive – Highlights from the Blog
• News and Events

Go to the newsletter on Sway, or view it below. If you use the version below, we recommend clicking the ‘full screen’ button to get the full experience!

When viewing a Sway, you can turn on Accessibility view. This view displays a high-contrast style for easier reading, disables any animations, and supports keyboard navigation for use with screen readers.

To turn on Accessibility view:

• If you’re using a mouse or touchscreen, on the More options menu (shown as three dots on the Sway toolbar), choose Accessibility view.
• If you’re using a screen reader, on the More options menu, when Accessibility view is selected, you hear “Displays this Sway in a high contrast design with full keyboard functionality and screen reader access to all content.”

UCL’s Open Access Team has been glad of the opportunity to give presentations on the new UKRI open access policy to nearly 2,000 staff at more than 60 department and faculty meetings this session. We were recently joined by Lara Speicher (UCL Press Publishing Manager) for two more UCL-wide briefings on the new policy that were attended by nearly 150 UKRI-funded researchers. The recording and slides from these sessions are below. We’d encourage all UKRI-funded PIs, and anyone involved in submitting UKRI-funded articles, to take a look at them so that they’re prepared for the start of the policy on 1 April.

• UCL UKRI open access briefing: recording
• UCL UKRI open access briefing: slides

We’re grateful for UCL authors’ engagement with the policy, and for the questions that we’ve been asked about particular non-compliant publishers, including Nature (for Nature portfolio journals), IEEE, American Physical Society, American Chemical Society and Wolters Kluwer/Lippincott Williams & Wilkins. Central UK negotiations are happening with all non-compliant publishers, and we are sharing your feedback with the negotiation teams. We hope to have more information about these and other publishers over the coming weeks and months, but in the meantime we will provide support for authors who wish to submit to these journals/publishers after 1 April. Please check our UKRI/Wellcome open access webpages and our What do I need to do? quick guide for more information.

New UKRI policy: key information

As well as our briefing sessions, we’ve recently contacted all UKRI and Wellcome PIs with the following key information.

UKRI-funded research articles, review articles and conference papers that are submitted from 1 April 2022 must be made open access on publication, under the CC BY licence (or, if UKRI grants an exception, CC BY-ND). A key change is that Gold open access in subscription (hybrid) journals will only be funded if the journal is in one of UCL’s transformative agreements.

What the policy means

The following types of journal comply with the policy:

1. fully open access journals and proceedings (funds are available through UCL’s Open Access Team): check the Directory of Open Access Journals
2. subscription (hybrid) journals that are in UCL’s transformative agreements: check UCL’s list of transformative agreements
3. subscription journals and proceedings that allow you to make your final accepted manuscript open access on publication under the CC BY licence (e.g. Science, Association for Computing Machinery)

If your journal is not in these categories, you may want to consider submitting elsewhere. Alternatively, you will need to retain the right to make your final accepted manuscript open access on publication under the CC BY licence, by including UKRI’s submission wording when you submit, and negotiating a compliant publishing agreement.

See our What do I need to do? quick guide.

Other information

UKRI does not support publication charges (for instance page and colour charges). Authors should ask their journal about publication charges, and request a waiver of any mandatory charges, before submission.

The UKRI open access policy for long-form outputs applies to monographs, book chapters and edited collections published from 1 January 2024. More information will be available in due course.

Welcome to the fifth issue of the Open Science and Scholarship Newsletter!

This termly newsletter has updates across the 8 Pillars of Open Science, and contributions from colleagues across the university. If you would like to get involved, give feedback or write something for a future issue, please get in touch using the details at the end of the newsletter.

In this issue:

• Editorial
• Update from the Head of the Office for Open Science & Scholarship
• Community voice – Creating a digital organism through Open Science
• Special Feature – UCL Press announce the launch of a new translation initiative
• Deep Dive – Highlights from the Blog
• News and Events

Go to the newsletter on Sway, or view it below. If you use the version below, we recommend clicking the ‘full screen’ button to get the full experience!

When viewing a Sway, you can turn on Accessibility view. This view displays a high-contrast style for easier reading, disables any animations, and supports keyboard navigation for use with screen readers.

To turn on Accessibility view:

• If you’re using a mouse or touchscreen, on the More options menu (shown as three dots on the Sway toolbar), choose Accessibility view.
• If you’re using a screen reader, on the More options menu, when Accessibility view is selected, you hear “Displays this Sway in a high contrast design with full keyboard functionality and screen reader access to all content.”

We are pleased to announce that the UCL Open Science conference 2022 will be taking place on the 6th and 7th April 2022. As last year the doors will be open to all and we ae looking forward to seeing you!

The programme design is in its final stages but across the two days we will be presenting a combination of online and in person sessions across a variety of themes:

Wednesday 6th April

Morning session (10am – 12.30pm): Online

• What does Open Science mean to me? – Panel discussion
• Kickstart your research with technology and Open Software – Series of talks to introduce technical tools for everyone!

Afternoon session (1.30 – 4pm): In Person – UCL campus

• How does Citizen Science change us?

Thursday 7th April

Morning session (10am – 12.30pm): Online

• UKRI Town Hall – Discussion hosted by David Price (UCL VP Research) and featuring Sir Duncan Wingham and Rachel Bruce
• Open in the Global South – Series of talks on the theme, featuring Sally Rumsey and Ernesto Priego

Registration will be opening soon, but please save the date and watch this space!