Theme: Open Research

Paola Quattroni from Cancer Research UK coming to run a workshop on 11th May.

This is a really good opportunity to influence the Cancer Research UK data policy and give feedback to your funder about the changes you would like to see. Paola will give a short talk and then the majority of the workshop will be given over to discussions and opportunities for researchers to feedback their experiences, problems and suggested solutions to enable more data sharing. As well as discussing data sharing Paola will also bring some data management plans so researchers can find out more about what they should and should not be putting in their grant applications.

David Carr and Robert Kiley from the Wellcome Trust are coming to Cambridge to talk with researchers about the Trust’s policy on data, software and materials management and sharing, which was released in July 2017. They will give short talks about the extended requirements for sharing all research outputs and an update on how their policy on open research has been working. Afterwards you will have the opportunity to ask them any questions you might have.

This event will be held in the Gurdon Institute tea-room.

Librarians are used to dealing with data in all its forms but sometimes researchers aren't so sure. Many funders now require evidence from the researcher of how they plan to manage the data they use and collect during the research process and this often has to be tailored to specific guidelines. This presents a great opportunity for library staff to work with the research community but how do they get started?

Join the OSC to learn more about what a data management plan is, why they are necessary, the different information needed, how to complete one and how to support someone in completing theirs. This interactive train-the-trainer workshop will include a mix of presentations and activities with a chance to put your new knowledge into practice.

Have you ever wondered who can access your research? Most articles and research outputs are locked up behind paywalls inside an ivory tower. Find out how to make your practice more open to reach a broader audience, spark collaborations and, most importantly, improve the quality of your research.

You've published your research...now what should you do with it? It seems we are expected to share more and more online, which can be both daunting and exciting. In this session we will look carefully at the benefits and barriers to sharing research, giving you an opportunity to consider a strategy that will work for you.

This session explores the whys and hows of sharing research - the options, the benefits and the logistics:

• Your aims and motivations for disseminating research
• Opportunities for sharing offered by social media and traditional media
• Pitfalls when creating an online presence
• Ways to find out who has been sharing, using and citing your published research

Researchers and students can now not only make their code and data available for their academic papers, but also enable others to reproduce the results with a single-click.

Code Ocean is an easy-to-use executable repository and reproducibility platform that facilitates replication and reuse of research code. This demo will provide an overview of the Code Ocean platform and explore benefits such as:

• preservation code will work today, tomorrow, next week, next year

• advanced tech suite of tools which follow reproducibility best practices

• impact enable easy reuse of code to extend research

• collaboration code is easy to share and discover.

Lunch will be provided.

Much research claims to benefit communities globally but are research outputs really available to everyone, even if they are made open access?

Join us on a world tour to discover what is possible when researchers and governments make their research outputs available openly. What kind of impact do they have outside the academy – and outside the global north? What more can we do to make these outputs useful to innovators and to those researching outside the academic sector?

Everyone is welcome to attend this free event: visit our booking page.

The OSC is delighted to bring you a lunchtime screening of the documentary that has taken Open Access issues to the big screen.

Paywall: The Business of Scholarship is a documentary which focuses on the need for open access to research and science, questions the rationale behind the $25.2 billion a year that flows into for-profit academic publishers, examines the 35-40% profit margin associated with the top academic publisher Elsevier and looks at how that profit margin is often greater than some of the most profitable tech companies like Apple, Facebook and Google.

Bring your lunch and enjoy some popcorn!

Everyone is welcome to attend this free event: visit our booking page.

What's new in scholarly communication for 2018?

The world of scholarly communication and research support is a fast moving one. Many different external developments can influence local practices but the speed can make it hard to keep up. Join the OSC for this short and accessible webinar which outlines some of the key developments in the scholarly communication landscape over the last year including the launch of Plan S, the breakdown of negotiations with Elsevier in Europe and the current copyright lawsuits against ResearchGate.

The webinar will be delivered live and a recording will be made available. If you are unable to make the live session but would like access to the recording please register as normal.

FAIR data are those that are Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable. Sounds simple enough, but what do each of these terms mean in a practical sense and how can you tell if your own research data is FAIR?

The Research Data Team at the Office of Scholarly Communication join forces with FOSTER Open Science to offer a practical workshop to help you get to grips with the key principles and consider how you can start to make your own data FAIRer.

Once you have completed How FAIR is your research data? An online course (for researchers and postgraduate students in all disciplines) we invite you to attend this workshop session with the Research Data Team from the Office of Scholarly Communication to discuss your experiences in assessing the FAIRness of your data, including any problems you encountered. You are welcome to bring examples of your data to this session to further develop your skills, or try your hand at FAIRifying more example datasets from Apollo.

Advertised on behalf of ReproducibiliTea, the Open Science Journal Club in the Department of Psychology

The Open Science Journal Club invites anyone interested in Open Research to join this lunchtime session, where Dav Clark will introduce Gigantum, a free open source tool designed to streamline reproducible and collaborative data science. Gigantum aims to bring together complex tools, workflows and community approaches that enable exciting research collaborations and also enable others to evaluate and build on your work.

The session will introduce the Gigantum Client, an MIT licensed web application that runs locally, simplifying and automating tools like Docker, Git, and launching environments like JupyterLab. Dav will also describe paid services hosted by Gigantum that enable single-click publication and collaboration from the Client. You will learn about versioning and collaboration features, how to easily move work between local resources and the cloud, as well as new approaches to creating and managing scientific datasets. There will also be the chance to go under the hood to show how sophisticated users (e.g., Research Software Engineers, Data Librarians, etc.) can create customized data science environments that are easy to distribute, and are accessible to users with diverse skill sets.

All welcome - if you aren't a member of the Department of Psychology, please meet at the Department Reception by 12.55 and Ben Farrar will show you to the Nick Macintosh Seminar Room (a second escort will check at 1pm for latecomers!).

This session will include a hands-on demo, so please bring your laptops. You may bring your lunch if you wish, and Dav is happy to join participants for lunch afterwards.

The Office of Scholarly Communication invites you to join Naomi Penfold of ASAPbio for an hour of relaxed, small group discussions on how and why publishing is changing to become more transparent, and what this means for you.

Bring your lunch and join a 'discussion table' to explore questions such as...

• why change academic publishing?
• who and what is transparency good for?
• what should we not change?
• what are preprints and why bother?
• where does peer review fit in?

ASAPbio is a scientist-driven non-profit ensuring the voices of science and the scientist are represented in innovation to improve transparency in life science communication.

This event is open to all, although will be of particular relevance to those in biomedical and life sciences.

This course covers the practical steps you need to take in order to ensure that work submitted for publication by University of Cambridge researchers is compliant for REF2021.

We will introduce the principles of open access and open research, and guide you through the necessary steps to meet the open access requirements of REF2021. We will demonstrate key processes for uploading work to Symplectic, including choosing the right version of a work to upload. There will be plenty of time in the session to ask questions.

This course will be useful to you if you:

• administer the uploading of research outputs to Symplectic Elements to make them open access
• manage Symplectic profiles

How do you create the perfect copyright recipe?

Creative Commons licenses sit alongside existing copyright regulations as a way to help researchers use existing creations and share their own work with others. This webinar will explore the history of the Creative Commons movement, explore how the licenses can be put together and how librarians can encourage their researchers to use them to their best advantage.

A detailed programme schedule can be found further below. Alternatively you can download a copy.

Practical information regarding the event is also available. Please download a copy.

The publication of books in Open Access format has been under discussion for several years, and has attracted interest especially from researchers in Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences. Questions around the topic abound in light of developments including Plan S, changing funder policy and proposed requirements for the next REF.  

This one-day symposium is aimed primarily at researchers, postgraduate students, librarians and research support staff from the University of Cambridge, but it is also open to the public. It will explore the policies, economics and future directions of Open Monograph publishing. Attendees will have the opportunity to discuss innovations in the sector, share their enthusiasms and concerns about current developments, and learn more about the opportunities for and realities of publishing an open access book. 

IMPORTANT BOOKING INFORMATION: This event is free of charge for participants who have a Raven password and booking can be made directly from this webpage. For those who do not have a Raven password there will be a charge of £50 to attend the event. Please visit our esales form to make a booking. Please note that bookings via the esales form will close on 25 September at 11pm and bookings via UTBS (Raven password) on Tuesday 1 October noon (or earlier if we reach full capacity). Unfortunately, we cannot guarantee any dietary requirements (apart from vegetarian) for bookings made after 25 September.

Programme highlights:

Professor Martin Paul Eve (Birkbeck, University of London) will present on the economics and political-economics of open-access monograph publishing.

Professor Margot Finn (President of the Royal Historical Society) will discuss open monographs from the perspectives of the RHS.

Panel session 1: ‘Policy and practice: Moving towards Plan S and REF’. Chair: Dr Steven Hill (Director of Research, Research England). Panel: Prof Martin Paul Eve (Birkbeck, University of London), Prof Margot Finn (President of RHS), Hannah Hope (Open Research Coordinator, Wellcome Trust), Prof Roger Kain (School of Advanced Study, University of London & Chairman of the UUK OA Monographs Group) 

Panel session 2: ‘Innovations in open monograph publishing’. Chair: Patricia Killiard (Deputy Director, Academic Services, Cambridge University Libraries). Panel includes representatives from: Cambridge University Press, UCL Press, Open Book Publishers, Springer Nature and Radical Open Access