A new look for 2019
Welcome to the first edition of the Open Research Newsletter from the University of Cambridge's Office of Scholarly Communication (OSC). This year will be an exciting one; alongside supporting open access and research data management at the University, we will be engaging our communities of staff, researchers and graduate students in what 'open research' really means for them.
In recognition of this, we are updating the way we share our news with you. We will now send this one monthly mailing, rather than our two newsletters, Kaleidoscope and Research Data Management, bringing together the latest news, comment, jobs and opportunities from the OSC and beyond, on themes covering research data, open access, scholarly communication and open research.
We hope you find the new, combined format informative!
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Apply now to become a University of Cambridge Data Champion
Are you passionate about good research data management? Do you support FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) research principles? Are you looking to boost your career with some peer engagement?
The Research Data Management Facility at the OSC is looking for people like you! We hope you can volunteer to become a Data Champion within your department, institute or college to provide local expertise about research data management (RDM) issues.
We welcome researchers, students, librarians, IT managers, data managers, other members of staff and anyone with a keen interest in RDM and sharing. We invite applications from those working in all subject areas under the broad auspices of the arts, humanities, social sciences and STEM disciplines.
Find out more about the benefits of becoming a Data Champion and apply via this form by Friday 8 February.
Special Issue of the Journal of eScience Librarianship now available: Research Data Access and Preservation (RDAP) 2018
The Journal of eScience Librarianship (JeSLIB) aims to advance the theory and practice of librarianship focusing on services related to data-driven research and to promoting high standards in peer review and open access. A special issue has been published for the Research Data and Preservation (RDAP) Summit 2018.
Volume 7, Issue 3 (2018) Special Issue: Research Data Access and Preservation 2018, includes papers on Integrating Data Science Tools into a Graduate Level Data Management Course (Pete E. Pascuzzi and Megan R. Sapp Nelson), and Toward a Better Data Management Plan: The Impact of DMPs on Grant Funded Research Practices (Sara Mannheimer).
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Project to revolutionise scientific publishing: an update on Octopus
In June last year, we shared news of the Octopus project, a conceptual website designed to challenge the status quo of how research is read, written and reviewed, designed by Dr Alexandra Freeman, Executive Director, Winton Centre for Risk & Evidence Communication at the University's Centre for Mathematical Sciences (Kaleidoscope, June 2018).
Octopus won 'The Pitch' prize at the Royal Society in November 2018 as an idea to improve the research culture, following which the project has gone into partnership with the new UK Reproducibility Network. Alexandra has also worked with the company Science Practice to develop mock-up templates of Octopus’ key features. Your feedback on these is welcomed - explore the series of 24 pages which you can scroll through to simulate a user (in this case a researcher called Alfred Cooper) going to Octopus to read a new publication, adding a review to it and then publishing some new work of his own (before finally checking his own home page, naturally, to see his metrics!) Clicking on ‘comments’ in the bottom left of the screen will reveal a commentary to explain each template.
Cambridge University Libraries (CUL) Annual Report highlights open access achievements in 2017-2018
The CUL Annual Report, published this month, highlights the achievements in open access in 2017-2018 which have contributed to the Libraries' strategic objective of sharing collections with the world. The report draws attention to the phenomenal impact of making Professor Stephen Hawking's thesis open access, the free service to digitise and make open access alumni PhD theses, and the Professional Services Recognition Award for exceptional cross-departmental working achieved by Our Repository Integration Manager Dr Agustina Martinez Garcia.
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The latest posts from the OSC blog
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OSC Team News
Our Repository Integration manager, Dr Agustina Martinez, joined the ORCID Webinar Unlocking the Power of ORCID Integrations late last year to discuss how the University of Cambridge is integrating ORCID within systems to connect and import data to/from their researchers' records.
Forget Veganuary – all the recipes you need this month can be found in our Creative Commons Cookbook. This video from our Research Skills Support Coordinator, Claire Sewell, slices and dices CC licenses, examines their different components and explores how you they can be used to share work.
Along with Data Champions Clare Trowell and Clair Castle, Outreach and Engagement Coordinator Hannah Haines gave a lightning talk at the annual conference for the 130 University of Cambridge libraries. The talk, Cartooning the Library, explored the development and marketing of a series of cartoons for promoting OSC initiatives and services - you can read more in the parallel blog, Cartooning the Data Champions.
Our Lent Term training programme for PhD students in Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences is underway and fully booked by postgraduates eager to learn more about open research, publication, research data management and copyright!
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Blogs we've enjoyed this month
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Open Access Escape Game
Monday 18 March: 5:30pm - 6:45pm
Wednesday 20 March: 5:30pm - 6:45pm
Friday 22 March: 5:30pm - 6:45pm
Saturday 23 March: 10:30am - 11:45am
Saturday 23 March: 12:30pm - 1:45pm
Saturday 23 March: 2:30pm - 3:45pm
The OSC presents an escape challenge to test your adventurousness and sleuthing ability. Navigate a web of fiendish puzzles and mind-boggling riddles to liberate the research that has been locked down at the University – all in under an hour!
Whilst you’re battling the clock, you’ll learn a little more about open access and how we help researchers get their research out into the world.
One booking is available for each session of the game. Bookings are made for a single team, which can be made up of 3-8 players. The team member who makes the booking will be the principal contact and must please provide a telephone number and email address as well as the number of players in their team.
Bookings open at 11am on Monday 11 February via the University of Cambridge Science Festival.
Book early to avoid disappointment!
Cambridge Digital Humanities (CDH) Workshops
Training Room, Cambridge University Library
Ethics of Big Data – Introduction to Digital Methods
4 February, 2–3.30pm: Data Wrangling
11 February, 2–3.30pm: Analysing and Visualising Social Media Data
18 February, 2–3.30pm: Digital Data Legacy – Share, Disseminate, Preserve
A series of practical sessions for research students and staff who want to gain experience in digital research methods as part of the Ethics of Big Data strand of the CDH Learning Programme. No prior knowledge of programming is required; however, participants will need to bring their own laptop to the sessions.
Booking essential.
Machine Reading the Archive
11 February, 11am–12.30pm: Optical Character Recognition – An Introduction
25 February, 11am–12.30pm: Creating Databases from Historical Sources
This term’s introductory sessions describe the methods, tools and practices that form the foundations of research based on the transformation of texts into machine-readable data.
Booking essential.
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Alan Turing Institute: Data Science for Social Good 2019 Summer Fellowship
Applications are now open for the first UK edition of the Data Science for Social Good (DSSG) Fellowship, a 12-week programme in summer 2019 which will bring together some of the top talent from data science, machine learning, artificial intelligence and other related areas to analyse real-world data science challenges for non-profits and government organisations.
Apply by 31 January.
OASPA webinar in support of Academic-Led Publishing Day
Thursday 7 February, 3-4pm GMT
The OASPA webinar series focuses on issues of open research. In celebration of Academic Led Publishing Day, OASPA hosts a panel of three world experts at the forefront of publishing initiatives that promote open access and open scholarship at institutions.
The webinar is free and open to all.
Register
Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication (JLSC) seeks new Editor-in-Chief
The current Editors-in-Chief of JLSC, Mark Newton and Melanie Schlosser, are coming to the end of their four-year term and are eager to welcome new editorial leadership to the journal. Look for a call for applications for a new Editor-in-Chief (individual or team) within the next few months.
Read more
Open Science MOOC now live on the open source Eliademy platform
The Open Science MOOC offers a series of self-paced courses designed with the goal of making ‘open’ the default setting for all global research. Covering ten topics including open principles, open collaboration and reproducible research and data analysis, all content is freely available and openly licensed for use either on or off the platform, and offline in workshops. Skills and knowledge learned in each module will be useful both inside and outside of academia.
In addition to taking the courses, anyone can join the growing Open Science MOOC community on GitHub.
Explore the MOOC
Call for proposals on hosting FIT4RRI training events on Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) and Open Science (OS)
The FIT4RRI project invites proposals for different types of training events and strategies on RRI and OS to take place between March-December 2019. FIT4RRI will provide assistance in shaping a training programme, selecting training materials and recommending speakers/trainers. Some financial support for events will also be provided.
Read more
Deadline extended for feedback on implementation guidance of Plan S
Following requests from external stakeholders, the deadline for feedback on the implementation guidance of Plan S has been extended by one week. Feedback can now be provided until 16:00 GMT on 8 February 2019 via the cOAlition S website.
Read more
Survey: Research Data Alliance (RDA) asks: 'Researcher engagement with data management - what works?'
A new RDA project seeks to collect case studies from organisations around the world on how to engage researchers with research data management. It hopes to assemble a wealth of information and resources that can be used by institutions to select the methods that are most suitable for their settings.
You are invited to share your stories and approaches in this area by taking a 20 minute survey before 3 February 2019. The results from this survey, including the data, will be shared widely with the community in the form of an open book.
Read more
Survey: Understanding experiments and research practices for reproducibility
Sheeba Samuel of Friedrich-Schiller University Jena, Germany, seeks participants for a dissertation-level survey designed to gain a better understanding of what is needed to achieve reproducibility of experiments in science and to understand the research practices followed in the different scientific domains. The 10 minute survey is anonymous.
Take the survey
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