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Established by SPARC and partners in the student community in 2008, International Open Access Week is an opportunity to take action in making openness the default for research—to raise the visibility of scholarship, accelerate research, and turn breakthroughs into better lives.

Open Access Week 2016 happened 24-30 October, with the theme 'Open in Action'.  The Office of Scholarly Communication marked the occasion with several events, including the launch of the newly-upgraded repository, Apollo. In addition the popular blog post series on Open Access issues returned. Our blog post series was again very popular with 1630 reads of the blog during OA Week 2016, and in addition to those people physically attending the live events we have had over 450 views of the live stream/recordings of the events.

OAWk blogs

Monday

Hybrid open access - an analysis looks at the origin of hybrid, the changing funder requirements and the uptake of hybrid in the UK versus the rest of the world
Who is paying for hybrid? analyses whether funds allow payment for hybrid open access

Tuesday

Walking the talk - reflections on working 'openly' is a discussion of the lessons learnt when one of the OSC staff members managed a small research project in a completely open manner

Wednesday

Theses - releasing an untapped resource is written by Dr Matthias Ammon and discusses the sharing of born digital theses and the issues and projects around digitising and sharing older print-only versions of PhDs

Thursday

"Are academic librarians getting the training they need?" is written by Claire Sewell who discusses the issue of changing skill requirements for librarians in an academic context and the apparent lack of recognition of this in traditional library training.

Friday

"How open is Cambridge?" is an analysis by Dr Arthur Smith of how much Cambridge research is openly accessible.

OAWk anouncements

Monday

In response to issues with compliance we have written an open letter to Blood journal to request they amend their advice to authors funded by RCUK and COAF and offer a compliant option. You can see the letter here and if you wish to add your name to the signatures, please email info@osc.cam.ac.uk

Tuesday

The Office of Scholarly Communication is excited to be announcing that we will be working together with the Wellcome Trust on a project to experiment with opening up research. Details will be released shortly but from January 2017 we will be hoping to work with a small number of Cambridge research groups on the project. Sign up for our monthly newsletter not to miss the announcement.



Today we launch our much awaited Copyright help pages which have been developed in response to the many queries members of our library staff have received from our researchers and students over the past few years. We hope they are useful.

Wednesday

The Office of Scholarly Communication is pleased to able to announce that from late November we will be running a pilot for the electronic submission of PhD theses for the academic year 2016/17. In cooperation with several departments from across the University we will be requesting that PhD students in these departments who are submitting their thesis this year also upload a copy to Apollo. Our external developers are currently putting the final touches to the upload form which will make the whole process smooth and straightforward. Authors will be encouraged to make their theses available Open Access though this is not mandatory. More information can be found here.



In order to release more of our older theses the Office of Scholarly Communication has entered into an agreement with the British Library to make a selection of 1,4000 theses the BL has on microfilm available in digital form. We have selected the titles and the digitisation is occurring now. We hope to have these uploaded into the repository towards the end of the year.

Thursday

The Office of Scholarly Communication's survey on the educational background of those working in scholarly communication has struck a chord with the community. Responses show that many of those working in this area come from outside librarianship, mainly from research and IT roles. Even those who do come from within the sector learn many of the necessary skills on the job rather than through formal education. This is opening up some interesting areas for future discussion and investigation. We decided to keep the survey open during Open Access week to give more people an opportunity to participate. The survey closed on Monday 31 October with 540 responses.

Friday

The Office of Scholarly Communication is pleased to announce that 44 Cambridge researchers and staff have successfully applied to become Data Champions; advocates for data management and sharing within their departments. The Champions are in a range of departments from Applied Mathematics through to Zoology, and include PIs, post-doctoral researchers, PhD students and support professionals. As well as advocating to their peers these Champions will be delivering discipline-specific training on research data management and sharing. 
 
The Data Champions will help meet the demand for more data management training across Cambridge, something we are currently struggling to meet, and will also create a Community of Practice of researchers who can share their expertise. In the coming weeks we will be adding information about the Data Champions to http://www.data.cam.ac.uk so researchers can find the right expert to help them. If you have any questions about this programme please email info@data.cam.ac.uk.
 
Two infographics are now available about the repository and Open Access services at Cambridge.
 

OAWk events

Monday

An introduction to Open Research for STEM PhD students - 10:00 - 12:00 J J Thomson Seminar Room, Maxwell Centre, Cavendish Laboratory, J J Thomson Avenue, Cambridge

This is part of the work we are doing around the issue of Open Research at Cambridge, given our researcher’s expressed interest in the topic we have started building some resources around Open Research on the OSC website in addition to our blog post series on the topic.

Tuesday

Preprints: biomedical science publication in the era of Twitter and Facebook

14:00 - 17:30 Lecture Room 9, 8 Mill Lane, Cambridge

Wednesday

Open Access: Grassroots movement or top-down imposition?

13:00-14:30 Darwin Room, Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge

The panel came to some interesting conclusions - not least that if something that starts as a grassroots movement is taken up by government and funders, then this is a sign of success. Also that even if the agenda for open access is 'co-opted' in the process, if the end result is the same this doesn't necessarily matter. You may have your own opinon - you can watch the recording below. One of the panellists, Matt Hodginson, Head of Research Integrity at Hindawi has written a blog about the event.

 

Thursday

The launch of the University repository, Apollo (by invitation)

17:00 - 19:00 Engineering Seminar Room, Cambridge

A story about the launch is available here.

 
 

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