Those of you who also follow my twitter account, may have noticed I’ve not been at my desk as often over the last couple of weeks (Sarah asserts that I am so rarely at my desk that it misses me). So, where have I been?
UKSG forum
This was a fabulous series of lightening talks – some really exciting new developments and ideas, with lots of innovation in academic libraries. Key highlights for me included:
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development: They issued a report that was important, open, available and had lots of media coverage. This led to minimal (<700 downloads) engagement with the full report. Highlighting the difference between mass dissemination (hearing about research) & engaged stakeholders (changing thought/actions/processes as a result). This comes back to dissemination being key for impact, but not the same as impact.
The RA21 project in its own words “hopes to resolve some of the fundamental issues that create barriers to moving to federated identity in place of IP address authentication by looking at some of the products and services available in the identity discovery space today, and determining best practice for future implementations going forward” This is an interesting project in enabling access to resources.
Alison McNab – The Game of Open Access. A friend for The Publishing Trap, The Game of Open Access is a board game developed by staff from Computing & Library Services at the University of Huddersfield. The game follows the role of Open Access through the initial idea for an article to its acceptance for publication. Openly available here!
UKeiG
An overview of the development, implementation and future of open science, from open access to open funding applications, although focussed around open access to outputs, whether that is data, articles or monographs, as well as a discussion about the value of open peer review.
Canterbury Christ Church University
I was delighted to be invited to speak at Canterbury Christ Church University with the Library team supporting researchers there. It was an interesting discussion, with lots of questions about research support within the library. For those of you that are very interested, the slides are here.
Figshare fest
One aspect of the OSC at Kent is to look at emerging technologies and the best way of engaging with them as Research Support at Kent. With this in mind, I attended Figshare fest – a chance to see both what the system can do, how other institutions are looking at research data management with a view to open data, and to discover that people do read my blog (hi!).
All in all, it has been a very interesting couple of weeks, and I’ve met some lovely people!