United Kingdom

A new generation of library resource sharing solutions is helping libraries transform legacy ILL practices and systems. Solutions such as Project Reshare, RapidILL from Ex Libris and Tipasa from OCLC are helping to build peer-to-peer resource sharing communities such as the N8+, improve the user experience and reduce costs and complexity. They are also challenging assumptions about library collections and the value of big deals, helping to drive forward a more open and equitable research environment.

UKSG Annual Conference 2023

New approaches to resource sharing - reassessing library collections, resetting the power balance in support of the open research agenda

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.

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.

technical paper

Through transformative agreements and other open access publishing frameworks, libraries and consortia worldwide are repurposing their former investments in subscription paywalls to enable immediate open access publication of hundreds of thousands of peer-reviewed research articles, so that no reader is excluded from access based on their financial status, and researchers everywhere can freely build on the new knowledge. But how can we equally ensure that authors do not encounter financial barriers as journals transition to OA business models and open access becomes the default in scholarly publishing? OA2020 has partnered with UNESCO, the International Science Council, cOAlition S, EIFL and other international organizations on a series of regional workshops to identify the financial barriers that authors encounter and hear the challenges they face, particularly in resource-limited contexts, in order to develop actionable plans and practical mechanisms that ensure no author is limited in their opportunity to publish their accepted articles open access in the journals of their choice. In this talk, Colleen Campbell, Strategic Advisor to the Max Planck Digital Library and coordinator of the Open Access 2020 Initiative (OA2020), will share insights gained in the workshops and the proposals that emerged.

Global equity in scholarly journal publishing: collaborating toward practical mechanisms to remove barriers for readers and authors

This paper will explore the new approaches to research and innovations in Africa and focus on the potential of open science in sustainable and innovative research. The paper will further evaluate notable open science initiatives in Africa including the EIFL/CARLIGH open access project in Ghana and make suggestions on how to address the implementation challenges of open science practices, particularly how to equip researchers and scientists with skills and incentives to practice open science.

Increasing the visibility of African sustainable research: The potential of Open Science

Exploring the journey from submission through to publication (the blockers and enhances), we will be conducting quantitative and qualitative research to gain a high-level understanding of the current landscape, including examples of innovation in this space, positive impact on students and researchers and improvements to the diversity, equity and accessibility of the research output. Reviewing what the adoption curve looks like and practical recommendations for moving the pendulum in the right direction. Research will be conducted by Maverick Publishing Specialists.

Where are we with operationalising DEIA within the scholarly ecosystem post-pandemic?

As Scholarly Communications is amidst a transition to Open Science – resulting in the more widespread availability of open content, data and infrastructure - the scientific community itself become increasingly adept at engaging with 'open'. Two examples of 'open infrastructure services' are the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) and the OAPEN Library – both running on an open source version of DSpace with its metadata freely available under CC 0. The Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) indexes over 60,000 open access books, whereas the OAPEN Library provides a structured and premium hosting environment for over 25,000 OA books.

Leveraging an open infrastructure and tapping into an open service: examples of established workflows and approaches for open access books

Journal publications currently play a significant role in research assessment: in rankings, REF and recruitment. They are assessed by quantity, citedness, the journal they appear in, or peer review. However, assessing journal publications can be difficult and can drive wider system failures such as questionable research practices, rising publication costs, and delays. Increasingly there are calls to evaluate a broader diversity of roles, inputs, processes, and outputs through our research assessments but it’s not clear to what extent these approaches truly value a wider range of research 'qualities'. This participative session will explore the appropriate place of journal publications in research and researcher assessment with the assistance of the INORMS SCOPE framework.

What role should journal publications play in research evaluation?

The 2020 NAG Quality of Shelf Ready Metadata report and Jisc’s work on Plan M both highlighted that the monograph metadata supply chain is costly, inefficient, and not fit for purpose. To address this, BDS consulted with the entire monograph supply chain – publishers, suppliers, purchasing consortia, system providers and libraries to create a radically new service - the BDS Academic Library Licence. The Breakout session will explore how BDS and libraries such as Imperial College have partnered on a cost-effective, completely hands-off solution for the creation, curation, supply and sharing of high quality records that realises the aims of Jisc’s Plan M and brings about much needed change to the metadata marketplace which is resulting in service improvements and cost savings.

Streamlining monograph metadata supply with BDS

Arts scholarship is tough in the current landscape, working under a government that increasingly values STEM and in a culture that has increasing requirements in open research. Research data management, born of engineering disciplines, is not easily applicable to visual or performing arts and nor should it be. Significant changes in the language, approach, infrastructure and drivers or goals need to happen in any research data management intervention in order to provide arts research with the support it needs, not for it’s data to yield maximum impact, but for it’s compost to turn into the brightest blooms. Lancaster University has a small but impactful research output in this discipline, and it can be difficult to engage researchers in the sharing and publishing of research data when they are incredibly unfamiliar with the process and in most cases do not consider themselves creators of data at all. In this paper, 5 key challenges are presented as a way of articulating the complexity in this area, and arguments are presented that maintain that research data management is entirely relevant for the arts. This contextual understanding combined with upskilling has begun to develop relationships at Lancaster, resulting in effective publishing of the following dataset in our institutional repository: https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/news/life-survey-helping-shape-the-future-of-our-region

Archiving Brain Fruits: Research Data Management for The Arts

Nicola will talk about how Lancaster has mapped scholarly output onto the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) using SciVal and Altmetric Explorer data. She will present an overview of Lancaster’s research, exploring subject differences and areas of strengths/for improvement. She will also detail how this information has been used across the University, including at different levels of seniority. Attendees will leave with an understanding of how Lancaster has contributed to the SDGs, as well as potential methodology to use at their own university.

UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): Mapping Institutional Research

UKRI’s policy statement mandating OA monographs will be implemented on January 1st, 2024. In less than a year we will see a shift from a hypothetical future for OA books to a concrete policy with a hard deadline. How will the sector get there successfully and sustainably? This session will discuss what is needed from libraries, publishers, policy-makers and research funders in order to meet the imminent OA monograph mandates not only from UKRI but also, in Europe, cOAlition S and the PALOMERA project’s ambitious alignment of OA book policies. In the UK there are also potential implications of the next REF.

Mandates, policies, and collaboration for the success of Open Access monographs

AfricArXiv is an award-winning, community-led digital archive for African research. In addition to African researchers, it is open to submissions from ‘scientists who report on research relevant to African affairs’. This presents an opportunity for many UK-based authors, who by depositing their eligible papers will make them more accessible to African research users and broaden their readership. Use of Creative Commons licences (whereby authors retain copyright) has made this possible, but some barriers remain. We submitted an initial batch of papers and assessed engagement by research users. We maintained regular dialogue with AfricArXiv to ensure the scholarship is relevant and beneficial, so its potential can be realised.

New approaches to resource sharing - reassessing library collections, resetting the power balance in support of the open research agenda

Next from UKSG Annual Conference 2023

Global equity in scholarly journal publishing: collaborating toward practical mechanisms to remove barriers for readers and authors