All Office of Scholarly Communication courses

In-person and online bookings for this annual conference from Cambridge University Libraries focusing on Open Research at Cambridge have now closed.

This day-long, hybrid conference, to be held on Friday 17 November 2023, has the theme of Open Research for Inclusion: Spotlighting Different Voices in Open Research at Cambridge.

This conference will focus on areas of Open Research in under-represented disciplines and contexts which have been at the forefront of recent discussions in Cambridge. These include Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, the GLAM sector (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums), and research from and about the Global South.

We'll be exploring these topics with individual speakers, panels and a workshop. The full programme and further information can be found on our events page.

Data Tree is a new online course that has been developed by the Institute for Environmental Analytics. It is designed for PhD students and early career researchers with all you need to know for research data management, along with ways to engage and share data with business, policymakers, media and the wider public.

In this interactive workshop, course Director Vicky Lucas will introduce Data Tree. This will be an opportunity to find out about the leading experts who have contributed to the course, its interactive quizzes, videos and real-world examples, and to delve into some of the topics covered. Attendees of the hour-long session will leave fully prepared to use this excellent free resource to build on their data management skills, solve data handling problems and communicate the results of the research to non-academic audiences.

Read more information about Data Tree

The Netherlands has been frontrunner in the transition to Open Science. The Dutch government has mandated all universities to have 100% Open Access to academic publications by 2024 and has recently broadened its scope to research data. These plans can only succeed by national cooperation of all parties involved.

The chairman of Tilburg University is one of three main negotiators with the publishers. As such, the university is expected to be leading the development of policies in Open Science and the monitoring of progress.

In this talk, Hylke Annema of Tilburg University will tell us about the current developments in the Netherlands and at Tilburg University.

Discussion among participants about best practices is highly encouraged.

This course will give you the confidence and tools to promote your research more effectively to a variety of audiences. We will explore how to reach more colleagues and increase your chances of being cited. We will also examine how to publicise your work more widely and reach the public. You will discover some tools to help you disseminate your research and track its impact. There will also be an opportunity to reflect on which solutions are the most practical and most likely to succeed in your circumstances.

Venue: DMB GS1

Join the OSC for an exciting opportunity to hear a preview of Dr Danny Kingsley's keynote for the upcoming CONUL2017 conference. Feedback on both the talk and the topic are encouraged!

Emerging from the Chrysalis - Transforming Libraries for the Future

Access to information has changed immeasurably in the past decade, bringing the traditional role of the academic library into question. Rather than a doomsday scenario, this situation offers huge potential for information professionals to situate the library at the heart of research support. 'Scholarly communication' is the umbrella term for the information exchange between research communities, research funders, the publishing industry and the general public. This talk will discuss the establishment of the Office of Scholarly Communication at Cambridge University, how it is now embedded within multiple administrative areas of the University and how it works collaboratively with the research community to identify areas that need expertise, support and services. By taking an open and transparent approach to this work, the Office of Scholarly Communication has had an impact not only within the institution, but nationally and internationally. This has not been without challenges, including working within a strict university governance system and managing unstable funding sources. However this work is now more important than ever at a time when academic publishers are investing substantially in research management and analytics businesses. Libraries that embrace the management of the unique work created within their own institution may find themselves central to the research institution of the future. The alternative could be obsolescence.

Cambridge is in a strong position to determine its own ambitious vision for a more open, accessible and inclusive approach to the sharing and use of research to help drive innovation and discovery and help address global challenges: for health, for climate, for equality and diversity. With changing societal attitudes and technological advances in communication tools, now is the time to consider which strategies we want to adopt to maximise the reach and impact of Cambridge research including through new and open forms of scholarly communication.

Libraries play a crucial role in the scholarly communication landscape, with librarians being well-placed to understand both the needs of the researchers we support and the challenges in providing access to materials. We hope you will want to take part and help shape the options for Cambridge.

These workshops are designed to create a space to think ahead, taking a long view, and explore what the future of scholarly communications will look like locally and globally. They follow on from similar workshops involving leaders in research, publishing and libraries at Cambridge earlier this year. We will have an opportunity to review and comment on some of the outputs of the previous workshops.

Helene Brinken (University of Gottingen, FOSTER) will guide you through workflows, tools and resources to help you embed open research into your research practices.

This session will take place in 1S4 Computer Room, Faculty of Education.

More information to follow.

Following the workshop, you are invited to stay for our event Reproducibility in action: improving research in the life and social sciences.

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.

At the start of this year, UKRI’s open access policy for long-form scholarship came into effect. This policy applies to monographs, edited collections and book chapters under contract from 1 January 2024 that acknowledge funding from any of the UK’s research councils. This session will introduce the policy, how to comply and the broader open access books landscape, allowing plenty of time for questions.

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.

• Do you use data in your research, or do you provide research support to those who do?
• Would you like to learn basic programming skills to program your own models and applications?

There is more to programming than simply writing lines of code. This free workshop will provide you with a basic set of skills to make the coding process more effective, less error prone and more maintainable.

This workshop is intended for those looking to obtain a basic understanding of the approach to be taken when designing a program as well as actually writing small programs to solve specific problems. It is designed for those with no prior experience of programming.

It is organised by the Office of Scholarly Communication and The Betty and Gordon Moore Library, and delivered by Peter Smyth (Research Associate) and Chris Park (Data Scientist) from the UK Data Service.

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.

Some learned societies are increasingly dependent on publishing revenues, yet as open access becomes the new normal, researchers and librarians alike are questioning expensive subscription and publishing deals.

The Office of Scholarly Communication presents a panel debate for Open Access Week 2018 and Cambridge Festival of Ideas 2018. Join representatives from learned societies in the arts and sciences, including the Royal Society, the Royal Society of Chemistry and the Royal Historical Society, in conversation with their members within the University of Cambridge to ask ‘what is a learned society in the 21st century?’ How can the societies sustain their place in the academic landscape and answer the challenges created by open access requirements?

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

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.

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.

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 

Join us for the fourth in our series exploring resources to help with the process of publishing your research in STEM disciplines - from recording observations to editing to peer review.

This session offers the chance to learn about available tools and options in publishing and reviewing, and ask questions of the experts.

Featuring contributions from:

• independent and not-for-profit media outlet The Conversation (Miriam Frankel)
• local solutions with Cambridge University Press (Chris Harrison)
• Aperta and changing the way we publish with PLOS (Nicola Stead)
• Open Access with Scholastica (Brian Cody)

and more!

Morning refreshments and lunch will be provided, during which time you can speak to providers for information and user support.

We will be recording and sharing these presentations for all those who are unable to attend on the day.

You can find a programme for this event here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1j07XgHK5MOfLcvVZiIf3xnoGI0EcgJr1hRWIaO0AUDI/edit?usp=sharing

Thanks to PLOS for their sponsorship of this event.

With open access now a mainstay of culture in most disciplines, we look at what lays beyond. What challenges remain and how can they be addressed? How can scholarly communication evolve to best serve the needs of researchers in a variety of disciplines? There will be four sessions through the day, looking at..

Further than privileged institutions. Many OA conversations are centred on research institutions in Europe and North America, where there is abundant funding for both reading and publishing and significant power to influence. Institutions like Cambridge risk favouring solutions that disadvantage less privileged researchers. We want to hear the voices of researchers who work outside this framework to make sure we move towards solutions that truly serve everyone.

Further than the Article/Book processing charge. The APC model is coming to dominate the OA landscape, but is it helping us to fulfil the benefits promised by open access? Are BPCs sustainable and inclusive? Are there better ways of financing open access publishing?

Further than publish or perish. Many researchers are dissatisfied with a culture that rewards publications above all else and sets up perverse incentives. What alternatives are there, and can we make them work in practice? How should Cambridge approach the hiring and promotion of researchers?

Further than traditional publishing. The article format evolved at a time when journals circulated as print copies. In the digital era, can we do better? If we could design the ideal format for research publications, what would it look like? What models have been proposed so far, and how are they working?

For the full programme of sessions and accessibility information, please see our events page: https://osc.cam.ac.uk/open-access-where-next

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.

The principles of Plan S are set to change what funders require from researchers, placing a much greater emphasis on immediate Open Access and other open practices. While we've been busy preparing here in the UK, our colleagues in the US have not been idle.

Micah Vandegrift is the Open Knowledge Librarian at NC State University Libraries, where he works on community-building and advocating for Open Research. He will be sharing his perspective on the likely impact of Plan S on libraries, publishers, researchers and repositories.

Format: 20-30 minutes talk, followed by an opportunity to discuss these issues with others in the room.

Refreshments will be available from 11:30. Join us for an informal chat before the talk.

Resources: if you would like to refresh your knowledge of Plan S before the seminar, check out our Plan S Factsheet (https://osc.cam.ac.uk/files/copy_of_plan_s.pdf) and webinar (https://osc.cam.ac.uk/training/supporting-researchers-21st-century-programme/wednesday-webinars).

The University’s one-year Rights Retention pilot has taught the library a great deal about the practicalities of supporting self-archiving through rights retention. In a meeting in November 2022, the Research Policy Committee considered the findings from the pilot so far and endorsed the development of a self-archiving policy for researchers. We would like to invite you to attend a briefing session to gather your feedback.

Many researchers consider publishing a book, often in the form of a monograph, and the process can be daunting the first time around. You will get the starter-kit to get your idea off the ground, with a collection of tips and tools to make your life easier. By the end of the session, you'll have the basic knowledge -and more importantly the confidence- to take your publishing project further.

Have your say to help us negotiate the best possible read and publish agreement with Springer Nature.

UK Universities are negotiating with Springer Nature with the aim to reach a sustainable and affordable read and publish deal. Read more.

Experts from Jisc will facilitate discussions with small groups of Cambridge researchers about your experience with the publishing process and how you get access to the materials you read. By taking part, you will help to shape the approach to negotiations and communications over the next few months. This will also be an opportunity to deepen your understanding of how the negotiations are conducted, the issues involved in academic publishing, and the way colleagues in different disciplines approach these questions.

Open research not only furthers the global reach of your work, it accelerates the pursuit of knowledge and fosters truly international collaboration. The University of Cambridge promotes and supports open research, so how do you embed open research into your working practices?

The Office of Scholarly Communication invites you to learn more about exciting initiatives in the life and social sciences that are already changing research culture by enabling collaboration, improving access to knowledge, and putting transparency and reproducibility at the forefront of research.

• Professor Chris Chambers (University of Cardiff) will introduce Registered Reports, a format of preregistered empirical publication in which peer review happens prior to data collection and analysis. Registered Reports aim to eradicate a variety of questionable research practices, including low statistical power, selective reporting of results, and publication bias, while allowing complete flexibility to report serendipitous findings. The initiative has been taken up by over 190 journals, including Cortex, outlets in the Nature group, generalist journals including Royal Society Open Science, and emerging clinical trial formats. Professor Chambers will discuss early evidence of impacts on the field and emerging Registered Report funding models in which journals and funders simultaneously assess proposed protocols.

• Professor Benedict Jones (University of Glasgow) leads the first Psychological Science Accelerator project, a globally distributed network of psychological science laboratories (currently over 400), representing over 50 countries on all six populated continents, that coordinates data collection for democratically selected studies. Discover how this diverse and inclusive project is accelerating the accumulation of reliable and generalizable evidence in psychological science, reducing the distance between truth about human behavior and mental processes and our current understanding.

Our speakers will also explore a range of allied initiatives, including the newly established UK Reproducibility Network. We will invite you to share your own experiences, questions and ideas.

Join us at 3pm for afternoon tea and a chance to network with our speakers and open advocates from the University community. Talks will begin at 3.30pm.

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.