Tag: conferences

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Using open citation data to identify new research opportunities

This year’s Annual Forum for the LIS-BIBLIOMETRICS mailing list took place at the British Library Knowledge Centre on 29 January 2019, and focused on the topic of ‘Open Metrics and Measuring Openness’.

As well as two keynotes, three parallel workshop sessions and a panel discussion featuring four participants, a session featuring five-minute ‘lightning talks’ gave nine of us a chance to give presentations on work relevant to the Forum topic.

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Stephen Pearson giving presentation at LIS-BIBLIOMETRICS Annual Forum 2019

Unlike most of the other offerings at the Forum, my talk wasn’t about the use of metrics in evaluations or about how to measure openness. Instead, I talked about the way in which large open sets of citation data can give interesting information about patterns of citation. I reported on some initial exploratory work we’ve done to see whether this information can help identify new research opportunities.

Where does inspiration for research come from?

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Isaac Newton

Inspiration for research can come from many different sources. For example, going back about 350 years, the act of noticing that an apple always falls perpendicularly to the ground could lead you to muse whether the earth had some power of attraction which caused this, and ultimately develop the law of universal gravitation.

Of course it’s still possible to come up with new ideas and discoveries on the basis of such ‘Eureka’ moments. But an increasing focus on interdisciplinarity has led to a situation of which it’s been said that ‘revolutionary scientific discoveries … are often the result of connecting ideas that have their origin in different disciplines.’

That quotation is from an article entitled ‘Interdisciplinary Research Boosted by Serendipity’. But do we have to rely on serendipity to discover that ideas from one discipline can be profitably applied in another field in a novel fashion? Or is there a way of systematically identifying such potential links?

I’d suggest that the technique of bibliographic coupling can help.

Bibliographic coupling

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Diagram illustrating bibliographic coupling

If two documents share several references in common, as Documents A and B do, then those documents are ‘bibliographically coupled’. And there’s at least a possibility that the two Citing Documents are using similar approaches to the research questions they’re respectively addressing.

In many cases the two Citing Documents will be by researchers who are addressing the same research question, or very closely related questions, and so the sharing of references has no deeper significance. A potentially more significant scenario occurs when the two Citing Documents are by researchers working in somewhat different fields. In that situation, the bibliographic coupling is a pointer to at least the possibility of a previously unidentified cross-disciplinary research connection.

COCI, the OpenCitations Index of Crossref open DOI-to-DOI citations

So, what citation database could we use to try to identify such connections? The most well-known ones are the commercial products Web of Science and Scopus, but there are at least two barriers to using them for this type of work. The first is the need to pay a subscription cost to use them at all. The second is the limit to the number of records one can download. This makes it difficult to amass a dataset big enough to allow the required ‘mining’ for links.

We used COCI, a dataset created by the OpenCitations organisation. This was originally known as the Crossref Open Citations Index but it’s now the OpenCitations Index of Crossref open DOI-to-DOI citations.

Updated at least every six months, this dataset comprises all the DOI-to-DOI citations specified by open references in Crossref, which currently amounts to almost 450 million DOI-to-DOI citation links based on over 45 million bibliographic resources.

Looked at in terms of proportional coverage and from our own institution’s point of view, it comprises c.8,000 University of Manchester papers published since 2014 (which makes up around one-third of the total), together with their citation references.

This figure gives an example of the information which COCI provides, for each of the more than 45 million bibliographic resources whose DOIs it contains.

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Diagram illustrating information in COCI

The data is available in several formats. We downloaded it as a CSV ‘dump’, and then filtered it to extract only those records where the DOI of the citing paper matched that of a paper in our own institutional publication records. This table gives some examples of the information which we then combined with the COCI information.

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Table illustrating Manchester metadata for enhancing information from COCI

This meant that we were able to create a rich dataset which comprised c.8,000 records for University of Manchester papers, each in the following format.

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Diagram illustrating information in COCI enhanced with Manchester metadata

Pointers to new research collaboration possibilities?

A colleague from the Library’s Digital Technologies and Services team wrote a program which pulled out all pairs of bibliographically coupled papers which had at least two references in common but where the authors came from different Faculties. We then used the free VOSViewer software to produce the following visualisation of bibliographical coupling links between publications by Schools/Divisions in different Faculties. (The closeness of the nodes is proportional to the strength of the bibliographic coupling.)

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Network visualisation of bibliographical coupling links between publications

What does this show? Here are two examples.

  • The two closely juxtaposed purple nodes at the bottom of the visualisation show that papers from the Division of Information, Imaging and Data Sciences (in the Faculty of Biology, Medicine and Health) and the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering (in the Faculty of Science and Engineering) shared references in common.
  • The two closely juxtaposed green nodes at the left of the visualisation show that papers from the School of Mechanical, Aerospace and Civil Engineering (in the Faculty of Science and Engineering) and the School of Environment, Education and Development (in the Faculty of Humanities) shared references in common.

Do they highlight previously unsuspected opportunities for innovative new cross-disciplinary research? Unfortunately, no.

  • The juxtaposed purple nodes simply reflected the fact that closely related algorithmic approaches to medical diagnosis and to computer vision are used in both the Division of Information, Imaging and Data Sciences and the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering. Although this is interesting, it’s not the kind of unsuspected connection we’d hoped to uncover.
  • Similarly, the juxtaposed green nodes show that approaches to the optimisation of land, water and energy use are an area of interest both to researchers in Civil Engineering and to those in Environment, Education and Development. Again, this isn’t an unsuspected connection which the bibliographic coupling has surprisingly brought to light.
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Nobel Prize Medal (Nobel-Prize CC-BY Abhijit Bhaduri via Flickr)

We’re not expecting to hear Manchester’s next Nobel Prize winners thanking us for bibliometric work which first alerted them to the possibility for a ground-breaking collaboration in their acceptance speech any time soon. However, the way in which this work highlighted related research being carried out in different Faculties (however unsurprising the specific examples) serves as an encouraging proof of concept.

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‘A new world of possibilities’ – reflecting on OpenCon2018

Guest post by University of Manchester Library scholarship winner Chukwuma Ogbonnaya, PhD Student at the school of Mechanical, Aerospace and Civil Engineering, and early career Lecturer in the Department of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering at the Federal University Ndufu-Alike Ikwo in Abakaliki, Nigeria.

OpenCon is a unique conference because it brings Librarians, Publishers, Civil society organisations, Policy makers,  Government agencies, Post-doctoral, Doctoral and Undergraduate students, across the globe together. These participants think, discuss, engage and co-create solutions to promote open philosophies. OpenCon2018, which was held at York University, Toronto, Canada between 1-4 November 2018, was my first Opencon attendance. I applied to attend the Berlin conference in 2017 but unfortunately was not selected. When I saw the notification for OpenCon2018 from The University of Manchester Library, I quickly applied because I wanted to be involved in open research based on my findings during the last application. I was pleasantly surprised when I was announced the winner and that was the beginning of a chain reaction of surprises.

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Chukwuma and fellow attendees enjoying a discussion session during OpenCon2018

Immediately the announcement was made, I was pleased and I did not waste time to share the news with my family, friends and my home University in Nigeria through the Vice-Chancellor (Professor Chinedum Nwajiuba). I quickly started my visa application the following day. It can be time-consuming and stressful for researchers from African countries and the Global South to obtain visas to travel to conferences, which is a real problem as it prevents researchers from these countries participating in important discussions – this tweet by Zaid Alyafeai sums up the problem. I was apprehensive, especially given the tight turnaround time – will it be possible to obtain a Canadian visa in three days for a Nigerian, I pondered? Now, here is the second surprise. I was given a multiple entry Canadian visa that  will expire in 2022. What this means for me is that I can easily apply for conferences in Canada to present my research as well as listen to experts in my field. This has been made possible by the OpenCon2018 award.

The third pleasant surprise was the design and programming of OpenCon2018. The programme was so unique with collaborative and engaging sessions. It was highly participatory and everybody has multiple choices of what activity/topic/theme to participate in. There were discussion panels comprising presenters with practical experiences and those at the early stage of their career.

My favourite panel was “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” because it was simply outstanding. They focused on the need to include everyone in the emerging open infrastructure designs irrespective of gender, race, country and region. It was obvious that allowing people to have access to the knowledge infrastructure would empower them to contribute to the development of the wider society. Associate Professor Leslie Chan really made a long lasting impression on me during the panel discussion. He described a situation where open science should not just translate into an “automation of knowledge inequality” but should indeed be a “commitment to think critically and to push the boundaries to imagine a more inclusive, equitable and radical future”.

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The diversity, equity and inclusion panel at OpenCon2018 included discussion of “the need to include everyone in the emerging open infrastructure designs irrespective of gender, race, country and region”

I want to share my experiences in some of the activities I participated in during the conference:

STORY CIRCLE AND STORY OF SELF

OpenCon2018 believes that “stories are at the core of how we identify and express ourselves, interpret and shape our worlds, and connect with others”. The intention of story circle was to create a safe space where participants can tell a small group of people about themselves as well as share their thoughts on what open science means to them. No comments or questions are expected to follow beyond highlighting what brought the participant to OpenCon2018. For me, it was good that it came quite early in the conference because it provided an opportunity for me to start networking as well as gaining insights into how others perceive open access.

DESIGN THINKING WORKSHOPS I & II

I participated in the Europe workshop. The interactive workshop was to inspire contextual culture change towards a more open, diverse, inclusive and equitable research and education system. We addressed the question of how we might, as open advocates, congratulate our peers on non-open successes while staying true to our values. Within the group, we were divided into clusters based on our current activities/work. I was in a PhD and Post-Doctoral group and we explored how design thinking can be used to understand, design and communicate Open Access solutions for PhD students. The process involves defining the problems based on an understanding of the system, empathising with a typical PhD student based on how they think and feel, brainstorming and ideating solutions, prototyping the solution, testing it and implementing it in the real world. The videos and slides were used for a systematic analysis of the personhood of a typical PhD student. Current experiences and future aspirations of a PhD student were captured in order to reveal where and how interventions can be implemented to help PhD students understand how Open Access can support their current and future career development. The skills and learning acquired from the design thinking workshop are transferable and I will be applying it in designing human-centred systems within my research projects in the future.

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Chukwuma’s Design Thinking team

PUBLISHING WITH OPEN ACCESS JOURNALS (UNCONFERENCE SESSION)

The unconference session is a hands-on session in which a speaker lead participants through exploring critical questions on the topic. The session focused on how to identify predatory journals and legitimate Open Access journals. It was a discussion session with rich experience-sharing on how fake Open Access publishers can be identified and avoided. It was apparent that Open Access publications can contribute to making a researcher’s work more available, visible and accessible whilst giving the researcher more control on how and who can use their work. When a scholar’s work becomes accessible, it can increase citation, and such recognition can support funding applications to carry out further work. However, falling prey to fake/predatory Open Access publishers could be disastrous. Such predatory journals lack strong peer review mechanisms and reputation within the research community. Consequently, the time and money spent on undertaking quality research could be lost when the wrong choice of journal is made. The degree of openness of Open Access journals were discussed including types of Open Access copyrights. Finally, the presenter (Vrushali) shared how DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals), which indexes and provides access to peer-reviewed Open Access journals, can assist researchers identify recognised Open Access journals. In summary, the session was very informative and I would use the strategies discussed to make informed choices in the future, as well as guiding others.

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Unconference session on identifying credible and predatory journals

DITCHING JOURNAL IMPACT FACTORS AND JOURNAL BLACKLISTS FOR GOOD (UNCONFERENCE SESSION)

The unconference session on spotting predatory journals influenced my choice of the discussion group. The discussion group led by Emma Molls focused on how impact factor metrics play a role in influencing researchers to publish in traditional journals instead of Open Access journals. The fundamental question was “how might we rethink journal quality in a way that it benefits authors, editors, and librarians without duplicating the faults of the past?” A critical discussion and questioning on whether impact factor captures the ideals of quality and impact were raised. For instance, a question on whether the impact factor of a journal should be equated to the impact factor of an article was raised. We also explored other possible metrics which can act as a measure of the impact of an article including citation, reproducibility, transparency and significance. We then considered the incentives that could motivate scholars to consider Open Access publishing.  These include the recognition system in the research community/workplace and sponsors’/funders’ influence on where outputs should be published, among other factors.

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OpenCon 2018 Discussion Group

DO-A-THON GROUP

This activity of the OpenCon2018 is the creativity and innovation session where new ideas and organisations are birthed through collaboration and networking. Individuals  are encouraged to propose ideas no matter how sketchy they might be! Participants interested in a proposed idea come together and use their diverse skills to develop the idea and create a possible network that can allow them to continue collaborating on the idea after the conference. My group started developing a platform that can bring together those who have good ideas but cannot develop them due to lack of resources or expertise and those who can transform the ideas into reality. We applied a design thinking approach in seeking a solution. Afterwards,  we set up a Whatsapp group to continue working on the idea. Members are from UK, Canada, Germany, Jordan and Tanzania and we held a Skype discussion on the project in early December 2018 to review progress on the assigned tasks at the conference.

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The Doathon group hard at work designing a platform that can bring together those who have good ideas but cannot develop them due to lack of resources or expertise

SUMMARY

OpenCon2018 may have come and gone but one thing is certain – it has opened a new world of possibilities for me in becoming an advocate for Open Access, open research, open data, open education, open government and indeed open philosophy. This was what I wanted and I now have it! I’m looking forward to working with The University of Manchester Library to contribute to the promotion of the Open philosophy across the University. My experience will also be promoted in my other institution, Alex Ekwueme Federal University Ndufu-Alike Ikwo, Nigeria after I complete my PhD studies at Manchester.

Finally, I look forward to contributing towards supporting and volunteering with communities/organisations/institutions seeking to build tools, processes, systems and infrastructures that promote open philosophy to achieve an inclusive, fair, participatory and equitable system. I believe that applied open principles can empower people to bring on board their professional and personal diversities and uniqueness into the building blocks of a better society we all desire.

Chukwuma Ogbonnaya

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Announcement

PhD student with a passion to promote the Open philosophy wins our sponsored OpenCon 2018 place

We’ve now assessed all applications for our sponsored OpenCon 2018 place and are pleased to announce that the successful applicant is Chukwuma Ogbonnaya. Chukwuma is a PhD Student at the school of Mechanical, Aerospace and Civil Engineering, as well as working as an early career Lecturer in the Department of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering at the Federal University Ndufu-Alike Ikwo in Abakaliki, Nigeria.

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Chukwuma Ogbonnaya, winner of The University of Manchester Library’s sponsored OpenCon2018 place

Chukwuma’s application stood out due to his ability to combine passion with practical ideas for improving openness in research, based on his own experiences as a researcher and student. Having experienced both the frustration of gaining access to the supporting data of other scientists, and the substantial effort required to manually explain his own data to ensure it’s meaningful to readers, Chukmuna is motivated to explore the development of systems to support effective and systematic sharing of important research artefacts such as contextual data and code to aid analysis and reproducibility of published research findings.

The panel was particularly impressed with Chukwuma’s ideas for establishing a researcher network to support and encourage research staff and students across The University of Manchester to embrace the Open philosophy. Chukwuma plans to achieve this through both developing strategies for and engaging in outreach activities to explain the benefits of open research and learning.

Chukwuma was keen to attend OpenCon 2018 to network with like-minded fellows to develop his knowledge and critical skills. Collaboration is essential to developing serious challenges to established norms of scholarly communication, and we’re hoping Chukwuma will meet equally passionate delegates to help him develop and hone his ambitious plans.

We look forward to hearing from Chukwuma on his experiences at OpenCon 2018 and working with him on upcoming open research activities, including Open Access Week 2018 and our next Open Research Forum in November.

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Provocative and inspiring: Force11 Scholarly Communications Summer School, 2018

FORCE11 Scholarly Communications Institute at the University of California, San Diego

I was delighted to win a tuition scholarship to attend this year’s Force11 Scholarly Communications Summer School in San Diego, California. The demanding pace of our work in the Library’s Research Services division means it’s tricky to take time out to consider our work in broader contexts. I was therefore grateful for the opportunity to spend a whole week debating pressing issues and potential innovations in the scholarly ecosystem with researchers, fellow librarians and thought leaders, especially in such a beautiful location with the chance of a trip to the beach!

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Exploring the Geisel Library at the University of California San Diego campus

Force11’s Summer School (#FSCI) is more intense than a conference, both in duration and active participation: I signed up for classes, not talks, taking place over 5 days. I chose classes on the nature of collaboration in research; alternative approaches to peer review; and exploring what we mean by public Humanities – topics that I hoped would allow me to both apply and stretch my existing practical experience of supporting research dissemination. On the whole, classes were well-structured with a combination of expert insight, stimulating practical activities, and thought-provoking discussions. These were my highlights from each class:

Collaboration, Communities and Collectives: Understanding Collaboration in the Scholarly Commons

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Envisaging an alternative dynamic research system inspired by the principles of the Scholarly Commons

I loved hearing from Daniel O’Donnell and Maryann Martone on the concept of the Scholarly Commons, developed from considering what our system of scholarship would look like if we started it from scratch nowadays, with access to the internet and public funding. The Commons is ‘an extension of the Open Science concept,’ a ‘conceptual space or spaces onto which we can map principles, best practices, service and standards that govern the production and dissemination of scholarly and research works so that they are maximally useful to all who need or want them.’ Its underlying principles are still being developed, and we were encouraged to contribute our suggestions. We considered how implementation of the Commons principles could disrupt the scholarly ecosystem, with my group envisioning a dynamic system of research communication centred on the connections between research objects, allowing continuous, versioned peer review rather than final, formal publication. Our instructors likened this approach to Cameron Neylon’s aggregation model of scholarly communication.

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Summarising peer review and what it means to researchers

Pre- and Post-Publication Peer Review: Perspectives and Platforms

Cochrane’s John Hilton led an engaging class where we problematized the practise of peer review and appraised alternative methods of quality control for research. I was astonished to learn that peer review didn’t become standard practice until around the 1970s – did you know Crick & Watson’s ground breaking paper on the structure of DNA was never peer reviewed?! It was fascinating to consider how peer review occurs in many varied forms in addition to the formal, pre-journal-acceptance stage, though it’s often not recognised as such when it happens less formally, e.g. after conference presentations, on social media, and as comments on pre-print servers. I enjoyed exploring alternative approaches to peer review, such as F1000’s post-publication peer review platform (adopted by funders The Wellcome Trust and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation); RIO’s multi-phase peer review model; PubPeer; the Pinterest-like overlay journal tool Peeriodicals; and Elsevier’s awkwardly named Volunpeers. A key objective for me over the coming months, aligned with the Library’s plans to extend our open research support offer, is to increase my knowledge of the use of pre-prints in research today, including via pre-print repositories.

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Attempting to sketch what a Public Humanities could look like

Public Humanities as Scholarly Communication

This provocative class unapologetically generated more questions than answers. We’re increasingly comfortable thinking about Digital Humanities, but what about Open or Public Humanities? Can we have a Humanities which is Open or Public without being Digital? Can the Humanities be Public without being Open? (I think not). What do we even mean when we talk about the Humanities? Faced with instructor Samantha Wallace’s challenging question, ‘Can the University be removed from the Humanities?’, I was forced to confront my proprietorial stance, realising for the first time my assumption that expression or culture only become ‘the Humanities’ when the academy gets involved. I also recognised unpleasantly cynical and paternalistic notes to my thinking about Public Humanities, with assumptions about outreach work or community engagement as impact-demonstrating add-ons to research projects. I was grateful for UCSD Library’s Erin Glass’ insight that it’s unhelpful to refer blandly to ‘the public’ – this is an anonymous signifier for what are in reality distinct, identifiable communities with whom we in academic institutions should seek to build real relationships. Despite the often abstract discussion, I left this class with a practical takeaway. Prompted by Sidonie Smith’s comment on platforms and tools that ‘Just trying to stay abreast of what’s out there becomes a dizzying affair,’ I want to explore the Library’s role in supporting Humanist researchers interested in working more publicly and openly, perhaps through developing expertise with relevant platforms, tools and methods and sharing this with Humanities researchers through personal consultation. I’ll also be considering the class reflections of Micah Vandergrift, one of our instructors, for further thinking and ideas.

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Aside from deepening my understand of scholarly communication, especially problematic aspects of the traditional research publishing ecosystem and emerging challenges to these, the most valuable aspect of the Summer School was the opportunity to meet colleagues from around the world. Delegates represented six continents (no applicants from Antarctica sadly!), and it was amazing to share experiences of managing Open Access funds with a librarian from Canada; discuss our Library’s DMP service with a research student from Chile; hear the plans of one of the first Scholarly Communication librarians to be appointed in Nigeria; and consider new theories of research collaboration developed by sociologists from Russia. Everyone I spoke to was passionate about open scholarship, generous with their insights and unafraid to challenge assumptions with nuanced arguments. The people – instructors, delegates and organisers – made FSCI a stimulating and inspiring event, and I left California with a refreshed sense of purpose and creativity which I hope to channel into enhancing our scholarly communication support at Manchester.

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Announcement

OpenCon 2018: Apply now to win a Library-sponsored place!

Photo: R2RC.org, CC-0

We’re excited to be sponsoring a Manchester PhD student or early career researcher with a passion for Open Research to attend OpenCon 2018 in Toronto, Canada, from 2nd – 4th November.

Photo: R2RC.org, CC-0
Delegates at OpenCon 2017

Organised by SPARC, the Right to Research Coalition and a global conference committee, OpenCon encourages the exploration of opportunities to advance Open Access and Open Data in a positive and supportive environment (see Code of Conduct). This is a great opportunity to learn more about Open Research issues, develop critical skills, contribute to collaborative projects and meet members of a growing global community advocating for a more open system of sharing the world’s information.

The travel scholarship covers the cost of the registration fee, flight and shared accommodation. The University Library will reimburse the cost of sundries not covered by the scholarship.  In return we’ll ask the successful applicant to contribute to one of the Library’s upcoming Open Research Forum events and write up their conference experience in a short report for our Library Research Plus blog.

To apply, please complete the application form available via https://apply.opencon2018.org/referral/uomlibrary telling us:

  • Why you’re interested in Open Access and/or Open Data
  • How these issues relate to your work
  • Your ideas for taking action on these issues, and how you would use your OpenCon experience to have an impact
  • Your participation (past or planned) in global Open Research events

Selection will be based on demonstration of active engagement with the Open Research agenda.

The deadline for submissions is 5pm on Thursday 20th September. We’ll review applications and contact all candidates by the end of September.

Photo by: Rachael Ainsworth, License: CC-BY
Research Data Librarian Rosie Higman and Astronomy Open Science Champion Rachael Ainsworth at OpenCon 2017

For inspiration and info, check out our blog posts on experiences of OpenCon 2017, from the perspective of the winner of last year’s sponsored place, Astronomy Open Science Champion Rachael Ainsworth, and our Research Data Librarian Rosie Higman.

Good luck!

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A Research Data Librarian’s experience of OpenCon2017

Photo: R2RC.org, CC-0After following and participating in the OpenCon Librarian calls for much of the last year I was delighted to win a partial scholarship to OpenCon 2017. The monthly calls had raised my awareness of the variety of Open Access, Education and Data initiatives taking place elsewhere and I was keen to learn more about others’ advocacy efforts with students, librarians, policy makers, social entrepreneurs and researchers from around the world.

Too often when discussing Open Access and Data it seems that researchers, librarians and policy makers are at separate conferences and having separate conversations; so it is great that OpenCon brings together such a diverse group of people to work across national, disciplinary and professional boundaries. Thus I was very excited to arrive in Berlin for a long weekend working with a dedicated group of advocates on how to advance Open Research and Education.

The weekend started with a panel of inspiring early career professionals discussing the initiatives they are working on which showed the many different levels it is possible to influence academic culture. These included Kholoud Al Ajarma’s work enabling refugee children to tell their stories through photography, the Bullied into Bad Science campaign which supports early career researchers in publishing ethically, Robin Champieux’s efforts to affect grassroots cultural change and research into how open science is (or is not!) being incorporated into Review, Promotion and Tenure in American and Canadian universities. Learning about projects working at the individual, institutional, and national level was a great way to get inspired about what could be achieved in the rest of the conference.

Photo: R2RC.org, CC-0

This emphasis on taking practical action was a theme of the weekend, OpenCon is not an event where you spend much time listening! After sharing how we all came to be interested in ‘Open’ during the stories of self on Saturday afternoon, we plunged into regional focus groups on Sunday working on how we can affect cultural change as individuals in large institutions.

The workshops used design thinking, so we spent time thinking through the goals, frustrations and preoccupations of each actor. This meant that when we were coming up with strategies for cultural change they were focused on what is realistic for the people involved rather than reaching for a technical solution with no regard to context. This was a great chance to talk through the different pressures facing researchers and librarians, understand each other’s points of view and come up with ways we can work in alliance to advocate for more openness.

During the do-athon (think a more inclusive version of a hackathon) I spent much of my time working with a group lead by Zoe Wake Hyde looking at Open Humanities and Social Sciences which was born out of one of the unconference sessions on the previous day.

When discussing Open Research, and particularly Open Data, the conversation is frequently geared towards the type of research and publishing which occurs in the physical sciences and so solutions do not take account of the challenges faced by the Humanities and Social Sciences. These challenges include a lack of funding, less frequent publishing which puts more pressure on each output, and the difficulties of making monographs Open Access. Often at conferences there are only a couple of us who are interested in the Humanities and Social Sciences so it was great to be able to have in depth discussions and start planning possible actions.

During the initial unconference session we talked about the differences (and potential conflicts) between Digital Humanities and Open Humanities, the difficulties in finding language to advocate effectively for Open in the Humanities, and the difficulty of sharing qualitative social sciences data. It was reassuring to hear others are having similar difficulties in getting engagement in these disciplines and, whilst trying to avoid it turning into a therapy session, discuss how we could get Humanities and Social Sciences to have a higher profile within the Open movement. It was by no means all discussion and true to stereotype several of our group spent the afternoon working on their own getting to grips with the literature in this area.

It was inspiring to work together with an international group of early career researchers, policy makers and librarians to get from an initial discussion about the difficulties we are all facing to a draft toolkit for advocates in little over 24 hours. Our discussions have continued since leaving Berlin and we hope to have a regular webchat to share best practice and support each other.

Whilst getting involved with practical projects was a fantastic opportunity my main takeaway from the weekend was the importance of developing a wider and more inclusive perspective on Open Research and Education. It is easy to lose sight of these broader goals when working on these issues every day and getting bogged down in funder compliance, the complications of publisher embargoes and the technical difficulties of sharing data.

The Diversity, Equity and Inclusion panel focused on the real world impact of openness and the importance of being critical in our approaches to openness. Denise Albornoz spoke powerfully on recognising the potential for Open Research to perpetuate unequal relationships across the world with wealthy scientists being the only ones able to afford to publish (as opposed to being the only ones being able to afford to read the literature) and so silencing those in developing countries. Tara Robertson highlighted the complicated consent issues exposed through opening up historic records, Thomas Mboa focused on how Open Access prioritises Western issues over those important in Africa, and Siko Bouterse spoke about the Whose Knowledge project which campaigns on ensuring knowledge from marginalised communities is represented on the Internet.

This panel, much like the whole of OpenCon, left me reflecting on how we can best advance Open Access and Open Data and re-energised to make a start with new allies from around the world.

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An Astronomy Open Science Champion’s experience of OpenCon2017

Photo by: Rachael Ainsworth, License: CC-BY

Advocating for openness in research is a big part of the work we do in the Library’s Research Services team. Trying to win the hearts and minds of skeptical researchers can be a challenge but increasingly we find that we are having conversations with researchers who are themselves advocates for open research. Facilitating the development of a network of open champions across campus is something we’re keen to do more of and two recent examples of this work are holding an Open Research Forum in Open Access Week and funding Rachael Ainsworth, an Early Career Researcher, to attend OpenCon2017. To do our job well we also need to be involved in developments and discussions, so we were delighted that Rosie Higman, a member of our team, won a sponsored place at OpenCon2017. Read about Rachael’s experience at OpenCon here and come back to read about Rosie’s later in the week…

AinsworthRround

Hello! I am Rachael Ainsworth, a Research Associate in Radio Astronomy at the Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics (JBCA) here within the University of Manchester. I am the Open Science Champion in my department where I advocate, give presentations and organise events relating to Open Science in Astronomy. I am also in the current cohort of Mozilla Open Leaders, working on the project Resources for Open Science in Astronomy (ROSA): an Open Science how-to kit for astronomers to help them research openly from proposal to publication. Are you running or starting an open project and want to grow as an open leader? Apply now for the next round of Mozilla Open Leaders! You can view my application for Round 4 on my GitHub here 🙂

Photo by: R2RC, License: CC0, Edited by: Rachael Ainsworth

I applied to attend OpenCon 2017 to be inspired by and network with other pioneers of the Open Movement. There were thousands of applicants for this year’s event from over 175 countries, but there were only a few hundred places at the conference to represent our global community. I was waitlisted to attend based on my main application (which you can read on my GitHub here along with the response from the OpenCon 2017 Organising Committee). This was pretty good considering the odds, but I was still gutted. However, I was lucky enough to see that the University of Manchester Library was holding a competition to sponsor a student or staff member to attend. I therefore remixed my main application to answer the University of Manchester-specific questions (which you can read on my GitHub here) and submitted it to the competition. I was very happy when it was announced that I won the sponsored place!  

I arrived at OpenCon ready to dive into the challenges still facing Open, collaborate and brainstorm actionable solutions – big and small. I gained a lot through the European regional workshop – How might we help individuals shape the culture around them in a university? We broke into groups to establish personas/stakeholders associated with our workshop topic, we considered their pains and gains, and brainstormed potential solutions to the challenges they face. I worked in a group focusing on the persona of a 30-something year old researcher, discouraged by toxic culture in academia and seeking allies to make it a more open and inclusive environment. You could say her challenges resonated with me 🙂

As a larger group, we voted on which problems/challenges we wanted to discuss further in the second half of the workshop. We then broke into new groups based on the topics we wanted to work on, and I chose the group addressing “How might we tackle time issues?” as many researchers perceive that open science practices will involve extra time and effort without much reward. It turns out that a how-to kit and templates could be a good solution to this problem. As a result, I have met enthusiastic people to collaborate with on my Mozilla Open Leadership project, ROSA.

Since I knew I would be writing a blog post to reflect upon my OpenCon experience, I participated in the Unconference session: “How can openness be advanced with podcasting, blogging and other DIY media?” I am not a natural when it comes to blogging, vlogging, podcasting or whatever the kids are doing these days, so I went to this session to learn from those that are. We discussed how to be more effective science communicators through Open Media, and joined together to form the OpenComm Network, a group to share resources, best practices, and openly licensed content to support science communication based on our various backgrounds and expertise.

During the Do-a-thon sessions on Day 3 of the conference, the OpenComm Network collaborated to record a podcast and write a blog post around Open Media and our OpenCon experience. We set up a mini recording studio in the cloakroom for interviews and answered prompts such as what does Open Media mean to you? What are the challenges to communicating about Open issues? How would you describe your experience at OpenCon?

Photo by: Rachael Ainsworth, License: CC-BY

We then transcribed the interviews, edited the recordings, and re-wrote the transcriptions into content for the blog. Because we only had a few hours for the Do-a-thon, we ran out of time to complete our goal, but you can hear version 0.1 of our podcast here and read version 0.1 of our blog post here. We hope to have full version 1.0s at some point, but I quite like that this session resulted in a demonstration of Open Media and collaboration in progress! In the meantime, you can hear my interview here 🙂

Photo by: R2RC, License: CC0, Edited by: Rachael Ainsworth

The most impactful session/moment of OpenCon 2017 was hands down the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion panel. I won’t write too much about it here, because you absolutely need to watch and listen to it for yourself (skip to 7:47:00):

 

Photo by: R2RC, License: CC0, Edited by: Rachael Ainsworth

Through their stories, the panelists reminded us to stay critical, pay careful attention to who is missing from the room, to who is writing policy/history, and to deliberately collaborate with underrepresented communities. I was moved to tears and after three standing ovations for this session, I was eager to return to Manchester to turn these insights gained into action.

Photo by: R2RC, License: CC0, Edited by: Rachael Ainsworth

I cannot thank the University of Manchester Library enough for sending me to OpenCon 2017, and I am looking forward to working closely with them to advocate for openness across our campus and encourage researchers to take advantage of the resources and training available through the Library’s services. Next up: collaborating with Research Data Management to conduct training as part of the JBCA Autumn Computing Sessions (JACS) in December, to train postgraduate students on best open data practices!

 

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A great conference for a newbie

Mind map workshop
Image-enhanced mind map of information literacy and employability at academic libraries
Group workshops at the BLA Conference 2014
Group workshops at the BLA Conference 2014 in Leicester

I recently attended my first conference representing The University of Manchester, for the annual Business Librarians Association (BLA). It was a particularly good conference for a first-timer as the themes were interesting and relevant to most academic libraries across the country, not to mention the friendly and welcoming atmosphere from fellow delegates and sponsors.

The major themes were:

  1. Customer Service Excellence
  2. Employability and Information Literacy
  3. Marketing

Customer Service Excellence

Many academic libraries are thinking about Customer Service Excellence (CSE) status, which The University of Manchester Library achieved in 2013. Helen Loughran from Leeds Metropolitan University (soon to be known as Leeds Beckett University) spoke about her experiences with her institution’s application, which is the largest university in the country to achieve accreditation so far.

While Helen’s talk was of most benefit to people thinking about or currently working towards CSE status, there were certainly ideas to take away for those with it already, to maintain and continuously improve standards. She posed some thought-provoking questions:

  • Are customers engaging with a library’s social media platforms, asking questions? If so, are there staff allocated and trained to answer these questions?
  • Do all staff across the institution know who to pass online queries on to, including when received in error?
  • When a customer has expressed dissatisfaction, should we consider inviting them in for a chat?

To this I would add my own thought:

  • Could we use a computer-aided text analysis program for determining the tone of free-text (typed words) feedback? There are many processes for qualitative data summation, but putting qualitative text data through a tool like Diction could give better analysis.

How do librarians improve student employability?

The position of a careers service will vary between institutions, in some cases being closely tied to the library. But I think everyone whose work is related to students will have some concern for those students’ employability. Paul Chin from the University of Hull quoted that 79% of students go to university to improve their job opportunities (NSS, 2011). He went on to explain that people don’t always realise all the skills that they have already, asking this question:

Can students articulate their graduate attributes?

Mind map workshop
Image-enhanced mind map of information literacy and employability at academic libraries

In addition to developing and offering excellent training, if we can help students to be able to explain why they studied and what it will enable them to do, this will ultimately improve their interview performance.

Kaye Towlson from De Montfort University ran a breakout session titled How do librarians improve student employability? In groups, we produced an image-enhanced mind map to visualise a student’s journey through the library. Our group’s mind map (pictured) includes a customer-centric hub with spoke roads leading to books, social media, technology, skills portfolio, meeting spaces and global citizenship.

Jane Secker from LSE spoke about how information literacy relates to digital literacy. It’s not just about technology, but extends out of the library into the curriculum for all students. She also made this suggestion:

Just because young people are mostly “tech-savvy”, this does not mean that they can “just do” academic research without guidance.

Tuning out the white noise

Ned Potter from the University of York gave a great presentation on library marketing, explaining how unfocused communication is often lost or not seen at all (noticeboards, websites, some email). He suggested ways to counter it. We may well be offering services beyond the traditional (book lending) remit of a library:

Promote non-library specific expertise via non-library specific channels.

This could include ensuring your content is searchable via Google, which is used must more than a library’s website as a starting point (much more). Ned also encouraged the use of direct, tailored and targeted communications to ensure the message about library value really hits home.