Beyond the EU: DORA and NIS 2 Directive's Global Impact
1115 wed fyne folan
1. Supporting effective communication and
workflows in social science research:
summary of a group discussion
UKSG Feedback session, March 2012
Bernie Folan
Los Angeles | London | New Delhi
Singapore | Washington DC
2. What’s happened
Conversations with librarians ... “greater need for librarians
and researchers to talk, with publishers listening”
Discussion chaired by SAGE, facilitated by the RIN, librarians
and social science early career researchers (6-8 of each)
Article published in Serials July 2011 summarising key
findings
Survey to test strength of response to challenges uncovered
Charleston Feedback Session November 11
UKSG Feedback Session March 2012
Next...
Los Angeles | London | New Delhi
Singapore | Washington DC
3. Problems in the discovery, use and creation of
research material
Combat reliance on narrow discovery methods
and misunderstanding of search tools by some
experienced researchers who are supervising
doctoral students.
Browsing outside discipline is essential, but it is
now a predominantly search culture.
Library branding needs greater prominence on
publisher platforms to highlight library value
Los Angeles | London | New Delhi
Singapore | Washington DC
4. Problems in the discovery, use and creation
of research material (continued)
Improve adoption of search and browse skills training
amongst all researchers and appoint institutional advocates.
Greater transparency needed on service inclusion and
overlap between widely-used services and gateways (for
both researchers and librarians).
Institutions with devolved budgeting need improved systems
to purchase cross-disciplinary material as well as fund OA
submissions.
Los Angeles | London | New Delhi
Singapore | Washington DC
5. What librarians and researchers need from each
other to improve research workflows
• Greater attendance of librarians at departmental
subject meetings and other fora to better
understand researcher needs and concerns.
• A need to explain the mechanics of content
purchasing and its challenges to researchers.
• Explanation to senior financial managers on
agreed common themes (eg. finer detail of usage
analysis) is required to avoid misunderstandings.
Los Angeles | London | New Delhi
Singapore | Washington DC
6. How can librarians and publishers work together
to demonstrate value and impact of research
material on their institutional strategic goals
Institutions require local data reporting, beyond usage stats,
(e.g. author numbers, usage and citation of local research)
Institutions can be poor at knowing and valuing what they
have, for example PhD numbers.
It is essential, though challenging, for authors to demonstrate
the impact of their research beyond academia.
Need for a single robust academic ID and profile site.
Initiatives in existence, but a need for one solution that can be
tied into academic appraisal and help showcase institutional
output. Los Angeles | London | New Delhi
Singapore | Washington DC
7. Resources beyond scholarly articles and
chapters for research and output
Researchers are using a wide variety of alternative
research resources, from blogs and Twitter to Listserves.
Libraries could optimize use and generate more revenue
from their special collections and archives and market
them better beyond niche research circles.
To differing degrees, and dependent on discipline,
researchers are contributing beyond journal articles and
book chapters. Mostly they are observing a careful
balance between openness and traditional publishing.
Los Angeles | London | New Delhi
Singapore | Washington DC
8. Institutional mechanisms for funding open
access in the humanities and social science
Increased lobbying of Research Councils and other bodies
required to make funding available and access to it
transparent in Social Sciences
Improved education about OA funding is needed at senior
levels to ensure facilities are in place.
Greater education around what OA means and how it works
is needed by researchers at all levels – many are unsure and
are confusing „open‟ with „free‟.
Greater efforts to persuade „big names‟ to publish in newer
OA outlets essential to move things along in favour of OA in
the humanities and social sciences.
Los Angeles | London | New Delhi
Singapore | Washington DC
9. The library’s evolving role in providing
teaching material alongside research content
Teaching materials should be available within the institutional
network not at an outside link.
E-textbooks and e-books are still too expensive and DRM
issues stand in the way of success.
A wide variance in the sophistication of reading list support
tools and practices is in use. Reading list compilation provides
many challenges. Good practice needs to be more widespread
with systems put in place to combat bad practice.
Higher education IT departments are often in institutional silos.
They could work together to find solutions to challenges with
more creation and sharing of open source programming
solutions. Los Angeles | London | New Delhi
Singapore | Washington DC
10. “The 3 big issues for us are probably
common ones: constraints on content we
can purchase (budget cuts and more cuts)
promoting awareness of what we have (we
still have a lot of great content despite
budget issues) and how to access it:
providing training (too few librarians for the
magnitude of the task)”
Los Angeles | London | New Delhi
Singapore | Washington DC
11. ● Research project, commissioned by SAGE, to investigate the
value of academic libraries for academic departments.
● SAGE appointed LISU to undertake the research Dec 2011.
● Building on existing research: How libraries can
- Better market their services
- Improve perceptions with key decision makers.
● Preliminary results now online
● Get involved – surveys coming soon!
http://libraryvalue.wordpress.com/
Los Angeles | London | New Delhi
Singapore | Washington DC
12. Working together: evolving value for
academic libraries – 4 Phases
● Phase 1: desk research aiming to identify recent significant
publications on the issue of value of academic libraries
(January 2012)
● Phase 2: series of 8 case studies of HE libraries in the UK,
US and Scandinavia (January – March 2012)
● Phase 3: triangulation of case study results with a series of
informal surveys, distributed to librarians to ascertain extent
to which issues and findings from the case study resonate
with own experience (April-May 2012)
● Phase 4: evidence gathered synthesised into final report
(June 2012)
Los Angeles | London | New Delhi
Singapore | Washington DC
13. Exploring future business models
• OA round table
• Jointly hosted by
SAGE and BL
• Chair: Simon
Inger
• International
participation
• Report: end 2012
Los Angeles | London | New Delhi
Singapore | Washington DC
14. Championing discoverability
● White paper, released
January 2012
● The development of
more sophisticated
discovery and visibility
strategies very much
depends on heightened
cross-sector
collaborations
Los Angeles | London | New Delhi
Singapore | Washington DC
15. Article:
http://goo.gl/eusOQ or
http://dx.doi.org/10.1629/24183
Comment on blog:
http://libraryvalue.wordpress.com/
Bernie Folan
SAGE, London
Email: bernie.folan@sagepub.co.uk
Twitter: @berniefolan
Los Angeles | London | New Delhi
Singapore | Washington DC
Editor's Notes
Thanks so much for coming today. This session is a chance for me to share the outcomes of discussions with a group of early career researchers and UK and US librarians just over a year ago on challenges in all stages of the social science research enterprise.Much will be relevant to other areas outside the social sciences but we focused primarily on Soc Science.Personally, this project has developed form my own interest in understanding changing research patterns and the evolving role of the library.So, the aim has been to identify which one or two of these challenges to tackle in order to find a solution working alone or with other stakeholders.Can I ask how many librarians we have here? It’d be great to get some feedback from you on the issues I’ll be highlighting.It would be good if this is as interactive as possible, so I’ll check for questions at various stages and then speed up if needed later on to finish on time
One researcher decried a well-known source’s anthropology search as ‘horrific’, and oneof the librarians warned that some experienced researchers, who are supervising early careers, havenarrowed their discovery methods worryingly, for instance relying on one archive source too heavily.There was a feeling that there is a ‘real danger of fossilization’. Researchers do not always fully understand the parameters of what is available tothem via different tools and even the newest library discovery tools can be too blunt a tool.There are gaps in search and browse skills at many levels, with a clear need to improve low levels of take-up of training. It was noted that once a complicated search to deliver highly-targeted results has been performed, it can be saved as an RSS feed. RSS can also aggregate all searches and other inputs into a ‘one-stop shop’.---Early career researchers often have far a greater grasp on the economics and detail of open access funding than some vice chancellors.Libraries with devolved budgets can find it ‘nightmarish’ to purchase cross-disciplinaryresearch, and often do not manage it. For these institutions there is a real fear that, as well as beingunable to purchase core material, it will make future OA funding models impossible to implement.
Librarians want to understand the expectations researchers have of how the library can support them and discover how aware researchers are of the range of tools and material available. And to deal with misunderstandings or myths.
Librarians want to be provided with this info by publishers to help them demonstrate value to senrmngmnt not have to find more time to number crunch themselves.All of the librarians present agreed that it would be useful to benchmark their use of resources againsteach other to help contextualize usage. However, there was acknowledgement that there are sensitivitiesin all quarters in relation to the information on title or company usage existing in the public domain.There was agreement that more data is needed to provide a complete picture of resource provisionand value. Useful ‘non-usage’ information examples discussed by the participants included:■ publishers supplying institutions with information on number of published authors and mapping of these authors onto purchased material■ publishers relating content purchased or available to courses taughtThe librarians present welcomed the provision of additional information, but were conscious of thepressures on time resulting from processing this extra data. They would value publisher assistancein supplying data that is not currently available to them or would be too time consuming to gather andassess themselves. Single ID just nice to have
This is about how research is happening.Interesting to note differences in disciplines. English = closed, private, solitary.Anthropology = open, share, we need to be open.It was very clear from the comments made by the researchers that interacting with contributorsand others in a network outside of peer-reviewed journals, for instance via blogs, can be hugelyintellectually stimulating and is a key part of some research processes. Twitter is used to enable publicengagement with research. All acknowledged that one of the huge academic challenges is that sources such as video and audioare not peer reviewed. Helpful quality filters are absent. All present agreed that peer review is stilla critical process. In some disciplines it was acknowledged that peer review partially happensin public with more and more researchers ‘polishing’ their work on blogs via the comments.A feeling that special collections, in many cases, need to be promoted more effectively beyond niche research circles.There was a suggestion that libraries could generate revenue from their special collections of primarysource material.
Misperceptions about OA research whereby ‘open’ was confused with ‘free’. The mistaken perception is that the research must be low quality if it is ‘all free’. Only a small number of researchers understand the mechanics behindfunding and payment to enable the opening up of research, and it was felt that it is easy forpublishers and librarians to forget this.None of the institutions represented was confident that mechanisms for funding open access publishingwere in place, and a range of budgetary and functional problems within universities were discussedat length, including what some participants saw as a lack of understanding of OA fundingmodels at vice-chancellor level. Currently the mandate to make research accessible can be fulfilled via institutional repositories, so a strongimpetus is not felt to exist.Open access is a real problem right now for publishers and librarians, especially as the current transitional phase incurs the heaviest costs for institutions. They are still funding subscriptions, while needing to fund OA research, and are busy setting up institutional repositories. When the current economic climate is factored in, OA becomes a hard sell for librarians and a difficult concept for university senior managers who may hold the purse strings but are removed from the detail.
Many reading list challenges exist, for instance reading lists being created without the library’sknowledge or in some cases courses being introduced and inadequately communicated.Some reading lists have large amounts of out-ofprint material as core reading. For some courses,these older books are still key texts. Although often unpopular, it is necessary for libraries to put inplace processes and systems to combat some of these problems, and in some institutions they arealready working well.There are online tools for creating reading lists that feed into the VLE which can more easily generatearticle links. There is a huge variance in how libraries are using these tools, with some librariesexploring and using tools heavily, and others still far off.
The scholarly publishing landscape is changing rapidly. To ensure we’re able to support the scholarship of the future, SAGE is also hosting a round table on the future of Open Access with the British Library. We will be issuing a white paper sharing the findings of this discussion later in the year.
This year SAGE published a new white paper investigating how we improve discoverability through collaboration between librarians, publishers and vendors. Drawing from interviews, case studies, and scholarly literature, the white paper assesses the current environment and proposed cross-sector conversations to further visibility and usage of scholarly communication.
