Roles and jobs in the open research scholarly communications environment: analysing job descriptions to predict future trends

During the past two-decades academic libraries updated current staff job responsibilities or created brand new roles. This allowed them to adapt to scholarly communication developments and consequently enabled them to offer efficient services to their users. The global calls for openly accessible research results has shifted the institutional, national and international focus and their constant evolvement has required the creation of new research positions in academic libraries. This study reports on the findings of an analysis of job descriptions in the open research services as advertised by UK academic libraries. METHOD: From March 2015 to March 2017, job advertisements relating to open access, repositories and research data management were collected. RESULTS: The analysis of the data showed that the primary responsibilities of the open research support staff were: to ensure and facilitate compliance with funders’ open access policies, maintain the tools that enable compliance, create reports and collect statistics that measure compliance rates and commit to continuous liaising activities with research stakeholders. DISCUSSION: It is clear that the open research services is a complex environment, requiring a variety of general and subject specific skill sets, while often a role may involve more than one area of expertise. CONCLUSION: The results of this study could benefit prospective employees and universities that wish to embed open research skills in their curriculum

Open Access: What’s in it for me as an early career researcher?

When entering the research world, Early Career Researchers (ECRs) may encounter difficulties building a good reputation for their research, its quality and the research results. Open access is the movement that could assist ECRs to: (a) widely disseminate their scholarly outputs, (b) demonstrate the research and societal impact of their work and, (c) organise online research portfolios that can be accessed by all researchers, as well as prospective employers

Developing strategies to ensure compliance with funders’ open access policies

Funding bodies for higher education institutions (HEIs) in the United Kingdom (UK) have recently introduced policies with a strong focus on open access (OA). The Research Councils UK (RCUK) ‘Policy on Open Access’ mandates OA compliance through either hybrid or pure OA journals, or through self-archiving. The Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) has recently introduced a self-archiving policy for journal articles and conference proceedings. Both policies have necessitated new practices among UK HEIs that relate to advocacy, adoption of internal OA policies, managing article processing charges (APCs), and monitoring and reporting compliance with them. This case study details the path Royal Holloway University of London, has taken to navigate its way through these recent changes and challenges

RCUK Open Access Report 2014

This report analyses the Royal Holloway developments with regards to the implementation of the RCUK Open Access Policy1 for the year 2013 – 2014

FOSTER’s Open Science Training Tools and Best Practices

FOSTER is an EU project aiming at identifying, enriching and providing training content on relevant Open Science topics in support of implementing EC‘s Open Science Agenda in the European Research Area. During the previous two years a wealth of training resources have been collected, which are now presented in a dedicated training portal. The paper describes how to use the FOSTER training platform and the tools available to identify suitable training materials and create modular e-learning courses

Learning about text and data mining: The future of Open Science

The volume of digital data is doubling every two years. In the world of science, the cumulative total of articles published since 1665 is estimated to be more than 50 million. There is a wealth of knowledge hidden in this huge amount of articles, but reading and analysing all of them manually is not humanly possible. Text and data mining (TDM) can provide a solution. It can process millions of texts quickly and reveal patterns and trends that can lead to new discoveries in various fields, for example in research analytics, medicine, agriculture and social sciences. The European project OpenMinTeD [http://openminted.eu/] helps to solve these problems with a new platform on text and data mining

Aggregating Research Papers from Publishers’ Systems to Support Text and Data Mining: Deliberate Lack of Interoperability or Not?

In the current technology dominated world, interoperability of systems managed by different organisations is an essential property enabling the provision of services at a global scale. In the Text and Data Mining field (TDM), interoperability of systems offering access to text corpora offers the opportunity of increasing the uptake and impact of TDM applications. The global corpus of all research papers, i.e. the collection of human knowledge so large no one can ever read in their lifetime, represents one of the most exciting opportunities for TDM. Although the Open Access movement, which has been advocating for free availability and reuse rights to TDM from research papers, has achieved some major successes on the legal front, the technical interoperability of systems offering free access to research papers continues to be a challenge. COnnecting REpositories (CORE) (Knoth and Zdrahal, 2012) aggregates the world’s open access full-text scientific manuscripts from repositories, journals and publisher systems. One of the main goals of CORE is to harmonise and pre-process these data to lower the barrier for TDM. In this paper, we report on the preliminary results of an interoperability survey of systems provided by journal publishers, both open access and toll access. This helps us to assess the current level of systems’ interoperability and suggest ways forward

Building scalable digital library ingestion pipelines using microservices

CORE, a harvesting service offering access to millions of open access research papers from around the world, has shifted its harvesting process from following a monolithic approach to the adoption of a microservices infrastructure. In this paper, we explain how we rearranged and re-scheduled our old ingestion pipeline, present CORE's move to managing microservices and outline the tools we use in a new and optimised ingestion system. In addition, we discuss the ineffciencies of our old harvesting process, the advantages, and challenges of our new ingestion system and our future plans. We conclude that via the adoption of microservices architecture we managed to achieve a scalable and distributed system that would assist with CORE's future performance and evolution

Releasing 1.8 million open access publications from publisher systems for text and data mining

Text and data mining offers an opportunity to improve the way we access and analyse the outputs of academic research. But the technical infrastructure of the current scholarly communication system is not yet ready to support TDM to its full potential, even for open access outputs. To address this problem, Petr Knoth, Nancy Pontika and Lucas Anastasiou have developed the CORE Publisher Connector, a toolkit service designed to assist text miners in accessing content though a single machine interface. The Connector aims to solve the heterogeneity among publisher APIs and assist text miners with data collection, provide a centralised point of access to all openly available scientific publications, and provide a high-performance, constantly updated access interface

Do Authors Deposit on Time? Tracking Open Access Policy Compliance

Recent years have seen fast growth in the number of policies mandating Open Access (OA) to research outputs. We conduct a large-scale analysis of over 800 thousand papers from repositories around the world published over a period of 5 years to investigate: a) if the time lag between the date of publication and date of deposit in a repository can be effectively tracked across thousands of repositories globally, and b) if introducing deposit deadlines is associated with a reduction of time from acceptance to open public availability of research outputs. We show that after the introduction of the UK REF 2021 OA policy, this time lag has decreased significantly in the UK and that the policy introduction might have accelerated the UK's move towards immediate OA compared to other countries. This supports the argument for the inclusion of a time-limited deposit requirement in OA policies