United Kingdom

From launching Open CourseWare twenty years ago to passing one of the first faculty open access policies in the US in 2009, MIT has a long history of supporting and advancing openness in education and scholarship. In recent years, open advocates at MIT have increasingly incorporated a focus on equity in our efforts, based on a belief that equitable opportunity to contribute to scholarship is as important to the integrity and usefulness of scholarship as is open and equitable access to read and use scholarly products. In this talk, Chris Bourg, Director of Libraries at MIT, will talk about progress and potential for understanding, advancing, and sustaining open and equitable scholarship at MIT and through collective action with other institutions.

UKSG Annual Conference 2022

Advancing equity and openness in scholarship: A view from MIT

keynote

The UKSG Annual Conference is a major event in the scholarly communications calendar which attracts delegates each year from around the world - librarians, publishers, content providers, consultants and intermediaries. The conference combines high-quality plenary presentations, lightning talks and breakout sessions with entertaining social events and trade exhibition. This year we are delivering Telford both in-person and digitally.

The UKSG Annual Conference is a major event in the scholarly communications calendar which attracts delegates each year from around the world - librarians, publishers, content providers, consultants and intermediaries.

Open science is a strategic priority for UKRI, the UK’s largest public research funder.  Working in partnership across the research environment is essential to progress open science and to bring about more accessible, transparent and re-useable research.   In this talk Rachel Bruce will describe the UKRI open research strategy and reflect on partnership with a range of stakeholders, including libraries and publishers

From open access to open science for UK Research and Innovation (UKRI)

The scholarly record has always comprised *more* than books and journals - pamphlets, reports, working papers etc, i.e. the much-ignored and often-misunderstood ‘grey literature’. Curiously, digital makes it harder for the "more" to be included in today's scholarly record and much is now missing. What makes this urgent is that Web 2.0 has unleashed a huge increase in born-digital grey stuff (all of the above but now also tweets, blog posts etc). In this lightning talk you’ll learn about the extent of the problem and a project that’s trying to address it.

Wait! What? There's lots of vital stuff missing from the scholarly record!

At University of Birmingham, the Library Services Research Skills Team have been part of a successful ‘Influential Researcher’ programme, supporting academic researchers with gaining a sense of agency over the range of metrics, personal identifiers (PIDs) and online publication profiles that are intrinsic to research culture. This lightning talk explores the background of the ‘Influential Researcher’ programme, its development through the lens of responsible metrics, and highlights how running ‘Online Publication Profile’ workshops (where attendees are sent a personalised action plan prior to the session) give time-poor researchers a practical set of steps for curating their online identities.

Influential Researcher: tackling researcher engagement with metrics through personalised action plans

Enabled by the web-dominated digital era, many publishers are supporting enhanced forms of scholarly publication that include features such as embedded multimedia, interactive maps, annotations, non-linear navigation, and more. Decisions made about how to implement these features can have implications for the long-term sustainability and preservability of the publications. In a project funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and led by NYU Libraries, our teams evaluated a variety of enhanced publications for preservability and developed a set of guidelines to be used by publishers, authors, and platform developers to improve the likelihood that these publications can be preserved.

Scholarship that’s built to last: strategies for publishers, platform creators, and authors

The role of universities in supporting regional regeneration and growth is increasingly well recognised. But how do universities navigate this complex landscape, and how does this activity align with their broader missions around teaching and research? Once known as the 'third mission' or 'third leg of the stool', I argue that Knowledge Exchange is now a critical and integral part of how universities deliver their mission and strategies. As both government policy and KE practice evolves, how can all parts of the university work together to deliver for their regions, and how might this benefit the university?

The role of Universities in delivering inclusive regional growth through Knowledge Exchange

At one extreme a university may operate irrespective of the geographical location it inhabits whilst at the other, it may be the very life blood of its community. The Government's current focus on the role of 'place', regional growth and the levelling up agenda, poses an interesting dilemma for some, but opportunity for others, to reconsider their function as an anchor institution within their community. We will explore this using examples from Lancaster University's civic journey.

Universities put in their place


We continue to operate in an environment characterised by significant volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. A fractured global geopolitical settlement, profound environmental and climate pressures, the rapid driving forces of digital transformation, and significant social, economic and health inequalities. These pervasive challenges have been amplified through the seismic impact of the coronavirus pandemic. These are not partisan issues – they affect us all. Josh will explore the positive role that libraries can play in responding to the challenges as compassionate leaders striving towards social justice.

Compassionate leadership: the role of libraries in promoting social justice

The ESAC Initiative is open and global community of practice of librarians who are sharing their experiences and expertise in the operational aspects of open access agreements. The ESAC community also develops community resources and guidelines to empower librarians as they move into the era of open access, including the ESAC Workflow Recommendations, ESAC Transformative Agreement Registry, and most recently, the ESAC Market Watch and the ESAC Reference Guide to Transformative Agreements. The presentation will introduce how the community can learn from a number of key trends in the demographics and distribution of scholarly journal publishing in transition, and use these to better understand their position in the scholarly publishing market and make strategic considerations regarding their interactions with publishers.

What can we learn from the ESAC Market Watch?

The REF 2021 Open Access mandate was established in recognition of the benefits of OA publication and in an effort to increase the proportion of UK-funded research that is openly accessible. The REF is, however, primarily an assessment of research quality, not availability. As researchers and academics selected their best outputs for REF submission, the possibility arose that an association would be implied between openness and quality. In order to find out whether this had happened at the University of Winchester, research-active staff were invited to complete a survey measuring the likelihood that they would choose Green and Gold OA for outputs that they perceived to be of particularly high quality. The results show that there may in fact be a perception amongst Winchester academics that Open Access is more appropriate for very good outputs than for those perceived to be mediocre. The implications of this are briefly discussed.

OA the great and powerful? Exploring the link between Open Access publication and perceived output quality at a small public research university in Hampshire

COVID has impacted so many parts of our lives since early 2020. But what has been the effect on users’ journal content discovery, reading and publishing habits and what does that mean for both user experience and researcher-centric development in 2022 and beyond? How has user behaviour changed across the world and across disciplines, from the humanities and social sciences to science and medicine? In this session we’ll explore the trends and patterns seen by one global publisher and what this means for each step of the publishing workflow, from online search to reading to publishing your research.

Advancing equity and openness in scholarship: A view from MIT

Downloads

Next from UKSG Annual Conference 2022

From open access to open science for UK Research and Innovation (UKRI)