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Collaboration key for advancing open research: repository progress for Jisc and the British Library

Jisc and the British Library share an interest in the persistence and open access of the UK research record, and work together towards this aim. As the UK national library, the British Library is an integral part of the UK research infrastructure, a legal deposit library and a research organisation in its own right. Jisc […]

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Jisc, research analytics and metrics

Jisc has provided analytic services related to research for some time, from the JUSP and IRUS services that give insight about the use of journals and articles, to dashboards helping universities understand security threats to their research networks. In the last year or so, however, we have begun to look again at what we can […]

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Public engagement and open science

Yesterday I was on a panel at the ‘Science in Public’ conference in Cardiff, asking the question, what is the contribution that open science can or should make to public engagement in science. The other panelists were Steven Hill (Research England), Paul Manners (NCCPE) and Melanie Smallman (UCL). However, the session was very interactive, and […]

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Working together to implement Plan S

Plan S outlines the aspirations of an international group of research funders, including UKRI, to reach 100% open access quickly and cost-effectively. This morning we have got more draft detail on how the signatories to Plan S, cOAlition S, envisage it being pursued. We now know, for example, that there is an important future for […]

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Open science: copyright is only one part of the picture

This week I was lucky enough to be invited to say a few words to the Copyright for Knowledge group meeting. I was invited to speak about open science and its implications for copyright and licensing regimes in the UK and Europe but, although I did touch on that, I did rather go off topic […]

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Saving authors’ time

This is a rather speculative thought piece. Where we want to get to is authors doing the minimum amount of work necessary to get their papers published, but not less work than that. Two recent developments suggest that the time might be right to think again about this: the first is the announcement by PLOS […]

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What might the Facebook business model do to academic research?

Facebook has been in the news a lot recently, and rarely in a good way. This post is not about Facebook, but it is about that business model, critiqued brilliantly by Jaron Lanier in a Politico post last week. It is clear now that it is possible to have very negative effects with a business […]

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Collective action for scholarly infrastructures

Today I’m rather belatedly picking up on Cameron Neylon’s January post, which itself was a response to David Lewis’s proposal that libraries devote 2.5% of their budget to pay for shared scholarly infrastructures. I’ve been concerned about the sustainability of scholarly infrastructures for some time, for example working with arXiv on developing their model a […]

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The changing role of research funders in open science?

Over the Easter weekend, the European Commission released a call for tenders for “Open Research Europe”. This is to be a new publishing platform that enables recipients of H2020 research grants to publish their research open access without paying an APC. It follows similar initiatives by the Wellcome Trust, UCL, Health Research Board Ireland, the […]

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Reproducibility and open research

Last week I was fortunate enough to attend two workshops that gave me the opportunity to reflect on open research and its contribution to research integrity. One was a stimulating afternoon at the BMJ to consider the future of publishing in health research, and the other was the first meeting of the UK Research Integrity […]