Research support at University of Porto libraries

This case study describes the research support services provided by the libraries of the University of Porto (U.Porto). The university is composed of 14 teaching units (each with its faculty library), and each faculty has a wide range of research units. U.Porto has a high research activity, which compels libraries to keep pace with the evolving researcher needs, adapting and creating new services that respond to those requirements. From a global perspective, the overall mission of these libraries is to ensure and promote access to information resources made available by U.Porto to the academic and scientific community, both in physical and electronic supports. More specifically, this case will detail the services already provided in the context of research support, ranging from specialized training sessions in scientific publishing, reference management software, or search in bibliographic databases to the creation of thematic guides, support on the publication of scientific journals from within the university, and bibliometric studies. (c) 2021, IGI Global. All rights reserved

Library and faculty partnering to increase Open Access Publishing among researchers

This paper aims to describe the collaboration of FEUP’s Library with faculty in the course unit “Publishing and Scientific Writing” for third-cycle students. It contributed to U.Porto Journal of Engineering, a new open-access journal of the Faculty of Engineering, indexed in DOAJ, OpenAIRE and Scopus. This study also reports the course unit’s lifecycle from its design, development and implementation as a face-to-face format until its present evolution to an online offer. Throughout the last decades, academic libraries have reinforced their educational role as active partners in teaching, learning and research activities within their institutions. In this course, FEUP’s Library is responsible for information literacy skills, strongly focusing on open science and open access publishing. Students attending will go through writing, peer-reviewing, correcting and publishing a scientific article in Open Access, using U.Porto Journal of Engineering in the OJS platform, combining a theoretical approach with real-life hands-on. The authors analysed quantitative data collected from different sources related to participation and interest in the course. The results show that the course unit corresponds to a real need of researchers, of which the growing demand and the positive feedback are pieces of evidence. In addition, students revealed high interest in the covered topics and an evident lack of Open Access and Open Science knowledge. This training unit is a much-succeeded library and faculty partnership contributing to promoting and increasing Open Access publishing among researchers. The University of Porto recognised it with an award that granted funding to support the transformation of the course to an online format, which would help solve the scale problem that the growing demand places to the present capacity of response