In this quite long third episode of Opening Remarks, we take a look at the work that we’re doing in the Library to help foster an open and responsible research environment at The University of Manchester. There are three segments: a conversation with Scott Taylor about the Open Research Programme that he’s leading, a chat with Zoë Fletcher and Eleanor Warren about their contribution to that work, and then some snippets from our recent Open Research Exchange event.
All of this follows a slightly longer than usual preamble from me (Steve) and Clare where we talk about: Nigel Slater, figs, interior design, lockdown life and some other stuff. Skip forward to 11 minutes if you want to give that a miss.
Open Access Week is a busy time of year for us all in Research Services, hence why I (Steve, Research Services Librarian) am writing this blog post on the Monday after Open Access Week has ended. I thought it would be worth writing something anyway, to reflect on the last few months, but also to advertise a new exciting event that we’re planning for next month (scroll to the bottom of the post if that’s what you’re here for).
Working remotely
The biggest, and most obvious, change to how we do things in Research Services has been the transition to working remotely. We’ve all been working from home since the end of March and, without wanting to blow our own trumpets too much, the transition has been a pretty smooth one. While service users can no longer get us on the phone, we are still available via all the usual channels plus we’re now available via the Library’s Library Chat widget. Just navigate to the Researcher Services webpages and, when the widget pops out, type in your question.
You can ask us anything about any of our services and we’ll do our best to give you an answer immediately. If that’s not possible, we’ll be able to put you in touch with someone who can help.
At the end of March, we suspected that the amount of work coming through the service would start to drop at some point, with researchers not being able to access labs, or conduct interviews, or anything else that involved leaving the house. That hasn’t happened, however. In fact, if anything, our services have only gotten busier as the months have passed.
Open Access Week 2020
This year’s Open Access Week was a low key one here at the University of Manchester. We did deliver two open access related My Research Essentials workshops during the week, though. We even attempted to live tweet our popular Open Access in 5 Simple Steps workshop for those who weren’t able to make it.
We’re going to try something new with today’s Open Access in 5 Simple Steps session. While @UomLib_Lucy is doing a great job of presenting, @UoML_Steve is going to be attempting to live tweet. So if you can’t make it, keep an eye on this thread for a serialisation of the content. https://t.co/qGbtlLmBqt
Being at home and using video calling apps all the time provided us with the excuse we needed to record our own open research podcast. Whether that was a good thing or not is up to you. If you’d like to listen to the episodes that have been released so far, you can find us on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher and other podcast platforms.
Open Research Exchange
If I’m being totally transparent, this entire blog post has been written primarily to give me somewhere to announce our first Open Research Exchange, which is coming up on Wednesday November 18th. We’ll be hosting an online exchange of experience, where we’ll be hearing all about how University of Manchester researchers are embedding open research practices. We’ve got an exciting lineup of speakers to talk about their experiences, but we’d also love you to come along and share yours too.
You can find out more about the event, and book yourself a place, via our Eventbrite page. It’s free and online and open to anybody who wants to come along.
In this special Open Access Week edition of the podcast, we present an open research variety show of sorts. We talk to Lucy about open access, transformative deals and coming back to the world of scholarly communications after maternity leave. We get Eleanor and Chris back to talk about open research data and FAIR principles. Then we round things off by talking to Olivia about our Choosing a Credible Journal My Research Essentials session.
Other discussion points include: the CITV show Rosie and Jim, the weather, and Clare becoming very strong.
You might have seen we recently released the first episode of our open research podcast Opening Remarks. This is something we’ve been talking about doing for a while, but the transition to working from home sped things up a little bit. We now spend a lot of our time talking to each other on platforms that enable audio recording, so our feeling was this would be a good opportunity to put that technology to good use.
The idea behind Opening Remarks is simple – we want to have conversations with colleagues from across the University about open research; how open research is supported and facilitated, but also how researchers embed open principles in their practice. We want these conversations to be informal, interesting and informative.
Our intention is to record six episodes in this initial series, covering research data, open access, research communications, metrics and lots more besides. We’d been keen to hear from you about what you think we should be talking about, and we’d be even keener to hear from you if you’d like to be a guest! Come and talk to us about the open research that you do!
The first episode is already available on iTunes and, pending successful reviews, should be available on Stitcher, Spotify and Google’s podcast player in the next couple of days. Do give it a listen and let us know what you think! You can contact us on Twitter at @UoMLibResearch or email us at researchdata@manchester.ac.uk.
Opening Remarks is hosted by Clare Liggins and Steve Carlton, two Research Services Librarians with very little broadcast experience but lots of enthusiasm.
I’ve been a Research Services Librarian at Manchester since January 2019, specialising in open access and research communications. Before I arrived at Manchester I’d been working in open access at several other institutions across the north west, including spells at the University of Liverpool and the University of Salford.
I’m interested in open research and its potential to help researchers reach broader audiences, and outside work I’m into professional wrestling, non-league football, the music of Arthur Russell and the Australian TV soap Neighbours. If I can find a way to talk about any of those things in the podcast, I will.
I’m a Research Services Librarian in the Research Data Management Team. I’ve been working at the University since January 2019 (Steve and I started on the same day) and am interested in anything to do with promoting the effective practice of Research Data Management, including training, as well as anything to do with Open Research.
My background is in Literature and writing, and before working at the University I was a Law Librarian. Due to my background, I am also interested in finding ways of working with these areas to adopt Research Data Management processes more widely.
In my spare time I enjoy reading books about feminist writers, spotting beautiful furniture in films from the 1950s, cooking recipes written by Nigel Slater and making up voices for my cat.
In this first episode of Opening Remarks, we talk about the perils of working from home in the summer, then invite our colleagues to talk to us about research data management for an hour. We’re joined by Chris, Eleanor and Bill to cover: the complexities of supporting research data management across disciplines, the joys of checking data management plans, and we talk up some of the services we offer. We also get a bit excited talking about the impending arrival of an institutional data repository.
Music by Michael Liggins
Artwork by Elizabeth Carlton
The University is purchasing a new costing tool for research projects. In order to provide some more information about the costing tool and what it can be used for, we sat down to have a conversation about how helpful it will be for costing research projects, with a focus on research data.
This podcast brings together people working in Research IT, in the Research Support Offices and the Research Data Management team in the Library. We talk about the costing tool, the finance implications of proper costing and the viewpoint of various funders on managing costing requirements at the start of your project and how a data management plan (DMP) can help.
For more information about research data, please see our online resource, Research Data Explained or visit the Library’s Research Data Management website. For any questions please email us.
It’s been a year since we launched Open Access+, an enhancement to our open access support services that aims to help University of Manchester researchers raise the visibility of their work. Since March 2019, 397 papers have been opted in, we’ve tweeted over 2,000 times from @UoMOpenAccess and generated 380 unique Communities of Attention reports. You might even have seen Scott Taylor’s excellent UKSG Insights article about the service.
The idea behind the Communities of Attention reports was simple. If a Twitter account is tweeting frequently about papers published in x journal, it’s likely that the account is either a) a bot, b) the journal’s marketing team or, more interestingly, c) someone who is very interested in research in that field. This approach obviously works better for journals with a narrower scope, though there’s a lot to be said for broadening your network. Armed with this information, our researchers could (hopefully) identify the leading voices in their field or at least find some useful accounts to follow.
An example of a Communities of Attention report
You might have noticed that I’ve been talking about the Communities of Attention reports in the past tense. Here’s why. The reports were generated via a time consuming process which involved Python scripts, APIs and lots of manual editing of CSV files. We received some positive feedback and, as there wasn’t any other way that our researchers could get this information, we thought this work was worthwhile.
Recently, partly inspired by the work we’ve been doing (we think!), Altmetric introduced the new “Mention Sources” feature. As a result, you’re now able to build your own much more sophisticated Communities of Attention report in just a few clicks. It’s really cool! You can select multiple journals and see which Twitter accounts, news platforms, blogs, etc. mention their papers most frequently. And much more besides. Here’s a short video of the feature in action.
In this video, I search for who’s tweeted most frequently about papers published in the journal Acta Astronautica and then drill down so I can see the top account and the associated tweets.
Rather than replicating what the Altmetric Explorer now does and presenting that information in a spreadsheet, we’ve decided it’d be better to just point our researchers to the Altmetric Explorer. Where we used to include Communities of Attention reports in emails to our researchers, we now include some instructions on making use of the new feature instead.
The Open Access+ service continues to go from strength to strength, however, and moving away from generating and circulating Communities of Attention reports will give us an opportunity to focus on more useful activities that will help our researchers raise the visibility of their work. We have exciting plans for the future that will help us do this. Watch this step!
Open Access Week is here again. Beyond all of the activities we’ve got planned, the week also gives us an opportunity to reflect on the progress that has been made in recent years. We’re also looking to the future and thinking about how we can help our researchers take advantage of all of the benefits of making their research openly available.
Recently I was privileged to be able to present at 6:AM, the Altmetrics conference, on the Library’s Open Access+ service. This service relies heavily on altmetrics of various kinds, and my talk (I hope) offered a useful case study for how altmetrics can be used to help remove barriers to research. Our work has predominantly focused on removing the paywall, arguably the most important barrier. But we’re now looking to help researchers reach their audiences more effectively, whoever they may be and whatever their barriers might look like.
In my talk I spoke a bit about what those barriers might be, and gave Discoverability and Language (someone used the term “comprehensibility” elsewhere at the conference and this is a better term) as examples of further barriers that might prevent audiences from engaging with research. These are the barriers that OA+ attempts to help our researchers remove, or at least dismantle a little bit.
Open Access+ is an opt-in enhancement to the open access support that we provide through the Open Access Gateway. Researchers that want to take advantage of OA+ can check the box that says “I would like to receive customised guidance to help raise the visibility of my paper once published, and for the Library to promote the paper via its social media channels”.
The Open Access Gateway
This funnels the paper down a slightly different workflow than the one we use for non-OA+ papers. I’ve broken down what OA+ does into the following three categories in order to stop this post from becoming very long.
Signposting All authors using the OA Gateway, whether they opt-in to OA+ or not, are presented with a deposit success screen. This signposts them to useful tools, platforms and services that can help raise the visibility of their work and help them reach their audiences.
We encourage researchers to think about creating non-technical summaries on Kudos, as well as looking into whether The Conversation might be a useful platform for them to talk about their work. There are services across the University that can help too: Engagement@Manchester can advise on public engagement activities and Policy@Manchester can help researchers to get their work in front of policymakers.
Connecting The first thing we do when a researcher opts in to OA+ is generate a Communities of Attention report. We take the last 1000 DOIs from the journal that the article has been accepted in and push them through (technical term) the Altmetric API using a fancy Python script that we developed in-house. After a bit of wrangling from our Research Metrics team, we’re left with a spreadsheet that shows the Twitter accounts that tweet most often about papers in that journal, as well as blogs and news platforms that frequently mention papers in that journal too.
We send these reports to the author that deposited the paper within 48 hours of us receiving their AAM via the OA Gateway. The reports help researchers to build their online networks, giving (hopefully) helpful suggestions as to which Twitter accounts to follow, and which blogs and news platforms they might be interested in keeping an eye on. These blogs and news platforms might be useful when thinking about their research communications plans too.
We use these reports later on for a slightly different purpose too.
Amplifying The number of scholarly research articles being published continues to increase and it’s becoming even harder to keep track of the research in your field, let alone adjacent fields. In an increasingly crowded “marketplace”, it’s getting harder for researchers to get attention for their work and there’s pressure on them to take more responsibility for effectively disseminating their findings.
Twitter’s really useful for sharing research. Many researchers are really good at Twitter, but we often hear from those who feel uncomfortable promoting their own work. Or who don’t really like the idea of using social media full stop. If an author opts in to OA+, we’ll put together a tweet thread about their paper once it’s been published.
We bring together and surface a load of the stuff that we promote and support right across the Research Services Division in this thread. We link to the OA version of the paper and research datasets. We include interesting Altmetric mentions as well – blog posts and news articles often report on research findings using much more accessible language. We tag in authors, research funders and other Faculty/School/research group accounts and include any subject-specific hashtags that we can find.
We try and help people to decide whether the paper might be of interest to them by including some snippets from full text in the thread too. We use a tool called Scholarcy for this – it uses AI to break a paper down into its most significant chunks. This 3-4 tweet abstract gives a bit of an introduction to the paper and aims to persuade people idly scrolling through Twitter that they should click on the link and read the full text.
Finally, we go back to the Communities of Attention report we prepared earlier and tag in some of the Twitter accounts that we identified. We were a bit nervous about this approach (are we spamming people?) but the feedback we’ve had suggests that this is really useful for both the author and the people tagged in. Phew! Generally, feedback for these threads has been great.
Conclusion As I said in my talk at 6:AM, OA+ isn’t going to improve how we do research communications at Manchester overnight. There’s lots more that we can do to help our researchers’ ideas “travel further” (that’s an expression that I stole from Andy Miah), and audiences that we haven’t quite cracked yet. We’re already thinking about the next phase of the project and what that might look like: should we just go ahead and tweet about every paper we get through the Open Access Gateway? Is that even possible? Should we think about using other platforms to reach those who aren’t on Twitter? There’s lots to think about.
In the meantime, we are noticing subtle changes in behaviour. Researchers are starting to adopt some of our techniques when it comes to tweeting about their work, and we’re getting good engagement with our tweet threads. We’re also increasingly getting suggestions from researchers for things they’d like us to include in these threads, which makes things a lot easier for us! We’d like to encourage more collaboration when it comes to putting these threads together, and that’s something we’ll be trying to facilitate moving forward.
blog.research-plus.library.manchester.ac.uk 