United Kingdom

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.

UKSG Annual Conference 2022

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

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.

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.


JASPER: preserving diamond Open Access journals

Phil will talk about the development of the N8+ project, its potential to reset the power balance between universities and publishers worldwide, and the role it could play in the development of "collective collections". He will argue, more broadly, that the best hope for progress in our work tends to come not from big ideas but from small, specific, concrete advances.

N8+ and collective collections: what’s the little idea?

Controlled Digital Lending (CDL) is a developing practice which allows libraries to lend a digital copy of a physical resource in a "lend like print" manner. Ex Libris has a vision of integrating CDL capabilities within our products to help librarians serve their users in the most modern and adaptive way possible.

Ex Libris has already taken steps to support libraries by providing CDL capabilities within Alma Digital, with more planned in the fields of reserves management, general circulation, and resource sharing. Judith Fraenkel, Director of Product Management will take you through these plans, and more, in this session.

Looking to the future: CDL and library solutions

During this session we will seek to explore how libraries can move towards a more strategic way of thinking about investing in Open Science Infrastructures moving away from short-term commitments to mid to longer term ones by referring to countries who have changed their funding strategies in favour of OS infrastructure. What strategies are being applied on both national and institutional levels, why and how? A panel discussion will hear from library consortial and national approaches as to why they changed their funding strategies to include OS infrastructure, which we hope will give others the confidence to do the same.

From speed dating to long-term relationships: strategiesfor including support for Open Science Infrastructures into
library budgets

The Open Access (OA) policy landscape is shifting - funder policies are beginning to include OA for books. This is uncharted territory for most publishers and academics, and those at the nexus of publishing OA books require support. 

This interactive workshop will consider current developments in this area and provide an outline of the key findings of our work. We will invite feedback from attendees to inform understanding of the requirements and challenges faced by the academic community. 

In order to provide this support, we have carried out research looking at academics’ opinions concerning publishing OA books and have identified key pain points experienced when dealing with OA book policies.

Supporting academics in navigating the emerging landscape of open access book policies

Some UK HEIs have begun to examine whether legacies of colonialism or other injustices are present in curricula. Imperial College has developed a novel computer-based method that combines our reading list management system, a journal database and the World Bank to evaluate the distribution of authors cited on reading lists by affiliated country income status. The results applied to modules over different time periods will be shared as well as our broader thoughts and experience of the implications, opportunities and limitations of quantitative data to support decolonisation, particularly in a STEM setting.

Data and decolonising the curriculum

The pandemic laid bare a trend many educators throughout the world had already noticed. The near reverence with which students used to regard serious newspapers had largely evaporated and, in some cases, been replaced with outright contempt. I taught scholarly research and writing at the start of our new millennium and, like most of my colleagues, I encouraged skepticism toward the media. We taught our students that even the most prestigious newspapers shouldn’t be taken for gospel and that all articles were susceptible to error and bias. Today, this kind of instruction is neither necessary nor helpful. For the most part, students are already skeptical of the media and, where they detect opinions in news sources different from their own, they are increasingly likely to dismiss everything in those sources as fundamentally unreliable. In this session, we will consider the main reasons students have lost faith in the media and explore non-naïve and responsible ways of building it back.

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

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

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

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

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