United Kingdom

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.

UKSG Annual Conference 2022

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

technical paper

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.

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.

Publishing through a pandemic: how has COVID affected how we discover, read and publish research?

Licence agreements for online content can be bewildering and risky if you don't have legal knowledge or training, but there are certain key elements that any good licence should include. This talk will help you find your way around licences by giving a rundown of the top ten clauses, where to find them, and what to do if they’re not there.

10 things to look for in a licence

Adam Matthew digitises archival collections, making these available for researchers worldwide. Adam Matthew acknowledges that archival records are not neutral and the same goes for primary source databases. Just as archives are critically evaluating archival silences and hidden voices and considering methodologies for improving access to diverse voices, so too is Adam Matthew. This lightening session outlines the ways in which Adam Matthew has appraised its editorial processes, analysing every step from content discovery to post publication support. It will describe efforts made to contextualise archival gaps and silences through commissioned content, and to amplify marginalised voices through enhanced metadata.

Amplify what is hidden, acknowledge what has been erased: addressing silences in primary source databases

In scholarly publishing, there is a long-tail of small, open access, peer-reviewed journals. Many sadlyy are not archived in a long-term digital preservation scheme, and so something needs to be done to prevent these journals from vanishing from the internet. A team of organisations have come together to find a solution that will decrease the number of unarchived journals. This is project JASPER.

The first phase (now ongoing) is a pilot to check if journals indexed in DOAJ will engage with archiving services when prompted to do so and with the offer of help. DOAJ acts as a conduit for the journals and a single point of contact for participating preservation services (initially CLOCKSS, Internet Archive, and PKP-PN). Preserved content then appears in the Keepers Registry.

In phase two we will expand to support more journals and to involve more preservation services in hope that the content will be preserved by at least three services, in line with best practice.

The lightning talk will focus on lessons learned and next steps.


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

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

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

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

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