{"id":410,"date":"2018-04-20T08:55:01","date_gmt":"2018-04-20T07:55:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/osc\/?p=410"},"modified":"2023-04-26T16:27:54","modified_gmt":"2023-04-26T15:27:54","slug":"410","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/osc\/2018\/04\/20\/410\/","title":{"rendered":"Tasting our own medicine"},"content":{"rendered":"

It was a wintery day in late 2017, when into my inbox drops another email… so far, so uninspiring \u2013 this happens as a fairly(!) regular occurrence. It was a call for papers for a Special Issue “Open Access and the Library” of Publications with a topic of interest highlighted as \u201cNew staff roles, skills and training\u201d. Now, new staff roles related to open access is something that we at Kent know a little about, so with a brief spurt of enthusiasm I sent this to Roz with an accompanying suggestion that we might consider doing something about it. As it is now published (you can read it here<\/a>), we thought we\u2019d share some of our reflections on the experience.<\/p>\n

Writing the article we set out to write<\/h3>\n

This sounds straightforward, write about new staff roles supporting open access. Easy, right? Except, while this is clearly what was asked for, and something we both know, one way or another, quite a lot about, we kept straying off topic \u2013 we went into research support (which is much more exciting), innovations in supporting scholarly communication (VERY much more exciting) and new forms of open scholarship (I\u2019m running the risk of hyperbole). We both found staying on topic difficult as we were both keen to write about areas that excited us more.<\/p>\n

Formatting<\/h3>\n

I\u2019m just going to leave this as a heading by itself. And applaud Roz.<\/p>\n

Peer Review<\/h3>\n

We knew theoretically about peer review, and we had some wonderful reviewers whose feedback helped turn the article into a much more coherent output, but nothing prepared us for how we felt when our work was not instantly accepted as the best thing ever to be written, even though we were well aware that this wasn\u2019t the case.<\/p>\n

Timing<\/h3>\n

We had planned and blocked out time for writing but hadn\u2019t quite appreciated that we would have no control over the timing of subsequent requests from reviewers and editors. So we had to squeeze in hasty \u201ccan you do this and I\u2019ll do that\u201d email conversations with each other. We were given a tight deadline for reworking the article and with other commitments, it seemed unlikely that we would get the changes done. We considered not making them, not resubmitting the article and letting it die quietly then \u2013 but decided on a slightly less dramatic action. We contacted the publisher and asking to extend the deadline (which they did, by return email, by longer than we asked for and were generally very helpful). Similarly when the article was published Roz hadn\u2019t thought about the fact that this might happen when she was busy with other things and hadn\u2019t got time or brain space to dedicate to sharing.<\/p>\n

Assumptions<\/h3>\n

One of the best feedback points from the external reviewers was in questioning the assumptions we had made about the base level of understanding of our readers \u2013 terms that we use daily had to be explained, the context of open access in the UK elaborated. Looking back this seems obvious \u2013 what were the external factors that influenced the need for change?<\/p>\n

Final… doesn\u2019t quite mean final.<\/h3>\n

We did it! We submitted our final version and it was accepted \u2013 we did a happy dance. Then we had a couple of clarification questions… no problem! New final version! Happy dance Mark II! Then we had to confirm the response to our clarification questions.. no problem… new final version… somewhat subdued happy dance Mark III while we waited to find out what happened next. What happened next was that it was published (phew!).<\/p>\n

KAR<\/h3>\n

Head of the Office for Scholarly Communication, Faculty Liaison Librarian (Sciences & Research)… we love KAR. We use it a lot, and are very supportive of it and are among its biggest advocates (Except perhaps for Sue Duffy, who deserves an honourable mention here as the backbone of KAR support for a Very Long Time), so we deposited the Author Accepted Manuscript within 3 months (days!) of acceptance, then updated it when it was published \u2013 which definitely gave me a clearer understanding of why REF assisted deposit<\/a> is so appreciated and how something I regarded in my previous role (KLS research support) as a fairly straightforward and easy request from researchers is so appreciated by people who have just been dealing with all the Final Versions of papers.<\/p>\n

KUDOS & Sharing<\/h3>\n

Then came the time to share \u2013 we had published fully open access, so the paper was ready and available \u2013 but the assigned DOI wasn\u2019t yet resolving…Dilemma! What to do? To share now (while we\u2019re still enthusiastic) or to hang on and share through KUDOS? Safe to say I got over excited and shared first (there is a justification… we were interested in how the link click\/stats changed, I can be geeky like that). And Roz had \u201cthis all feels a bit like showing off and I was brought up not to\u201d feeling to reconcile with the desire to do things properly and make sure people knew about the article, as we would advise Kent academics to do. We then added it to KUDOS,\u00a0<\/a>which was truly fantastic and easy to work through \u2013 until it got to the section on why the research was important. This was a key challenge for me \u2013 it seems arrogant to say that other people might find this helpful and although we do our best, we\u2019re not perfect… you can see how I resolved it here.<\/a><\/p>\n

Ending thoughts<\/h3>\n

We\u2019re very pleased with the article, and are glad that it is published \u2013 but the journey that we have been though in preparing it has perhaps been a much more useful insight than we ever imagined that it would be. I don\u2019t think we realised quite what we were letting ourselves in for when we started out and so we are very grateful for everyone that cheered us on our way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It was a wintery day in late 2017, when into my inbox drops another email… so far, so uninspiring \u2013 this happens as a fairly(!) … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":211,"featured_media":411,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[9663,278468],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/osc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/410"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/osc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/osc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/osc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/211"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/osc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=410"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/osc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/410\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":413,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/osc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/410\/revisions\/413"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/osc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/411"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/osc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=410"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/osc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=410"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/osc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=410"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}