Engaging Students in Publishing
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What are the key drivers behind the dramatic growth in library-based publishing? This session explores differences and similarities through three case studies from different countries: Sweden, the UK and the USA. The presenters will describe the forces that are changing the roles of their parent libraries and show how these are also shaping the nature of their publishing programmes. They will also discuss some of the opportunities they see for the future of libraries as publishers and the challenges these new entrants are encountering.
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Engaging Students in Publishing
- 1. Learning through Research: Engaging students in publishing at The University of Manchester Simon Bains, Head of Research Services and Deputy Librarian The University of Manchester Library @simonjbains
- 2. • The strategic imperatives • Scholarly communications developments • Library and Press collaboration • Student publishing projects • The shifting publishing landscape • Publishing as a research skill
- 4. “More targeted support and guidance on publication strategies and ensuring all researchers meet the University’s commitment to open access”
- 5. “We will prepare students for a range of career paths…engaging them in employability and developing research skills” “Students are provided with opportunities and support to develop their technical and information skills so that they become highly digitally literate.”
- 11. Learning through research Ethical grand challenges University College for Interdisciplinary Learning Volunteering My Learning Essentials My Future My Wellbeing The Manchester Advantage
- 13. Meet the Robin Hood of Science http://bigthink.com/neurobonkers/a-pirate-bay-for-science Sci-Hub As Necessary, Effective Civil Disobedience http://bjoern.brembs.net/2016/02/sci-hub-as-necessary-effective-civil-disobedience/ I think what Sci-Hub is doing is terrible — bad for publishers, researchers, and librarians http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2016/03/02/sci-hub-and-the-four-horsemen-of-the-internet/ By means that I don’t approve of, but can’t improve on, it has cut the Gordian Knot of scholarly communication http://svpow.com/category/open-access/sci-hub/
- 15. Thank you. Simon Bains, Head of Research Services and Deputy Librarian The University of Manchester Library @simonjbains
- 16. (Possible) questions for you… 1. Business models How do you build sustainable publishing services for your institution? 2. Purpose What's more important in library publishing, product or process? 3. What's in a name? What should we call our library publishing entity? 4. Complement or competition Local action or support for wider initiatives? 5. What is publishing? It’s not all about PDF…
Editor's Notes
- Title Page
- My presentation will start by looking at the strategic drivers that justify investing effort in student publishing, move on to explain what the Library is presently doing to support researchers and why we are working closely with our Press, briefly describe two internally-funded projects we have worked together on recently, and then finish by stressing the importance of not of students publishing, so much as students learning about publishing as an aspect of their digital and information literacy.
- I want to set what I have to say within the University strategic context, because whatever my personal views on scholarly communications, the best ways to publish academic research and the importance of engaging with the issues, I can only gain or allocate resources if I can be very clear how doing so supports the University’s objectives. While this might be clear in the context of the institutional research strategy, it’s less clear that there’s value in engaging students in publishing, and that there is value in the Library, or the Press, creating new student-focused services to do so.
- On research, Manchester is very explicit about the need to provide more support to researchers to ensure they are increasing their chances of publishing, being read and being cited, and it’s good to see Open Access feature prominently in Goal 1, which focuses on research. The senior academic leadership at Manchester is clear that OA is a good thing, both in terms of increasing the chances of citations, and in terms of the ethical principles behind research being open to all.
- Goal 2 in our strategy is about learning and students, and it’s interesting to see here the commitment to student development. Manchester places great emphasis on developing its students into well-rounded citizens, with a mixture of skills, perspectives and behaviours which mark them out as Manchester graduates, that extend beyond their knowledge of the subjects they have studied. We are also keen that our reputation as a research intensive university actually has a tangible impact on our students. We want their experience to be genuinely distinctive as a result, but it can be hard to evidence this, and the Russell Group of elite UK research universities can be accused of trading on their reputations whilst not actually delivering a superior, or in any way distinctive, experience when compared with universities without the same scale or history. We do take this very seriously, and the University’s strategy commits to developing student research skills, as well as undertaking more broadly to ensuring our graduates are digitally literate. So there are two objectives here: to prepare our students to follow an academic career, should they wish to do so, but also to recognise that these skills are valuable whatever route they take, and will contribute to improving their employability, which is such an important measure of our success.
- In recognition of this, Manchester has established a Learning through Research initiative. At Manchester, our teaching is informed by outstanding research. Our learning environment allows students to develop and use core research skills, enabling them to have an impact beyond their academic study. We aim to ensure that on many of our undergraduate courses, students have the chance to get involved in research activities as part of a structured and supported learning process. Opportunities include: making the most of material found in the collections of the University’s museum and art gallery as well as the holdings of the historic John Rylands Library; engaging with the latest scientific and technological advances; analysing large official data sets; performing literature reviews to uncover new perspectives. The image here is of Siddharth Krishnan, the Manchester student who won the Life Sciences category of the Undergraduate Awards, an international academic awards programme that identifies leading creative thinkers through their undergraduate coursework. Siddharth, who is studying Pharmacology with Industrial Experience at the Faculty of Life Sciences, entered his work to characterise a novel gene linked to Alzheimer’s disease. In addition students in our School of Environment, Education and Development, School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, School of Arts, Languages and Cultures, and School of Law, were highly commended. So our investigation of student publishing sits within this wider context, where students at all levels are encouraged to regard themselves as researchers and to produce work that is well-worth sharing and disseminating.
- Turning now to the question of why the Library should be a publisher, the University of Manchester Library has a well-established research services team, which has been in place since 2012, and which focuses on supporting scholarly communications, research data management, citation analysis and the use of our specialist finance datasets. Getting them together for a team photo was a little like herding cats, but most of them are in this photo, taken in the summer last year. In terms of publishing, our focus initially was on preparing the University to be able to manage the outcomes of the Finch Review, and compliance with funder mandates to make the outputs of research they had funded open access. But beyond the operational complexities of making this happen at scale, managing a grant which is now in excess of £1 million a year, we have sought to position ourselves at the centre of the intellectual debate as well. Like all academic libraries, we advocate for Open Access, but as our expertise has grown, our position has become more nuanced, and we have sought to influence our colleagues on debates about Green and Gold, about approaches to copyright ownership and about publishing as a role for the University vs engagement with commercial publishers. We have also begun to get noticed as a provider of publishing advice, which has led to approaches from academics about support to create new journals or to help publish monographs. So in this context we have been asking ourselves the question: should we become a publisher?
- Of course, The University of Manchester has a well-established University Press, founded well over 100 years ago, so we are not in the same situation as other institutions which have started new presses, often as part of their libraries. MUP underwent a strategic review a few years ago, and one of the recommendations of that review was to work more closely with the Library given our shared interest in scholarly communications. “The skills of professional library staff combined with the tools that add value to digital content mean that libraries have the potential to play a leading role in advancing new models of scholarly communication. This trend, supported by recent UML strategy, suggests there needs to be appropriate collaboration between MUP and UML.” The challenge has been how to work together, as MUP has to generate profits, and is not operated as an overhead in the same way as the Library, so whereas we have the flexibility in the Library to prioritise more or less as we wish, the Press has to understand how any initiatives will be funded. This has presented some challenges, and we’ve moved less rapidly than we would have liked, but over a 2-3 year period we’ve done some interesting work and have learnt a lot about each other, and about the needs of our researchers and students.
- An opportunity to work together came late in 2014, when the University established a Centre for Higher Education Research, Innovation and Learning (CHERIL). CHERIL issued an internal funding call, and the Library led a bid with the Press as a partner. We succeeded in winning funding for our proposal, Student Open Access Research (SOAR), and embarked upon a project to explore the issues surrounding student publishing. We sought to understand levels of awareness and demand, support and training needs, technical infrastructure requirements and the costs of running student publishing services. In addition, we wanted to explore the relationship between research and learning, and the concept of the student publishing service as a tangible benefit to taught students at a research-intensive institution like Manchester. The photo is of a workshop where we brought students and academics together to discuss student publishing. Key findings, which informed our thinking about the next steps, were: A student journal can act as a training tool, developing the skills of research students, and preparing taught students for what it means to be a researcher. Don’t underestimate the work necessary, from the students themselves, from their tutors, and from the service provider. Publishing is time-consuming, and requires student editorial teams to develop expertise in activities that are likely to be very new to them. We couldn’t determine clearly what the market for a student journal publishing service at Manchester would be, and so concluded that it would be premature to develop a service, at significant cost, ahead of clarity about the demand. Instead, we decided that it would be more sensible to develop the draft toolkit we produced into a full training service.
- Our follow up proposal, for funding in 2016, was to respond to what we learned during the project by creating training materials and providing software, to support both taught and research students in developing their publishing expertise and learning about the power of research dissemination. We’ve called this one PuRLS (Publishing and Research Learning for Students). The primary objectives of this project are to deliver : A student publishing course, comprising modular online and face to face training and including associated software, building on the toolkit developed by the SOAR project, and experience of working with Manchester Medical School students. Journal publishing software on which to practice new skills, carefully selected to maximise value to inexperienced authors and editors. Internships to provide students with the opportunity to learn by doing, working with both University Press and Library. We are also investigating what will be required to produce a sustainable student journal, should there be sufficient student interest and academic support.
- So at this stage our focus is on publishing as a skill more than the creation of new publications. This approach fits effectively into a wider University framework for providing our students with what we’re referring to as ‘The Manchester Advantage’: We aim to make a Manchester degree distinctive by offering a number of opportunities beyond the degree. The key ones to focus on here being: Learning through research University College for Interdisciplinary Learning My Learning Essentials My Future Without going into a lot of detail, these are all themes which emphasis learning and skills, and into which we can feed Library-led teaching and skills provision. My Learning Essentials is a teaching programme which the Library leads, and we are now setting up a companion My Research Essentials programme, and our publishing training will slot into it.
- So what I’m trying to do here is set what we are doing in a wider context. While there may well be value in setting up student journals, there are also significant costs, and the likelihood is that such a service would touch a very small number of students while requiring a lot of time and commitment to make it sustainable. We don’t reject the notion that we should do it, but we are determined that if we do it we will do it very well, and will have to accept the cost of doing so. We certainly don’t think that the Library should be the publisher; instead, we will develop on a partnership that will include the Press, our academics, and our Marketing department. However, in advance of this, an appropriate education programme will hep us prepare the next generation of researchers for a scholarly environment which has changed dramatically, and will continue to do so. In the UK and Europe, the requirements of the big research funders are important drivers, but for universities like Manchester with social responsibility commitments, it’s also important that we explain to our students why we seek to be open with our research, and how that benefits society. For the many students who will not go on to pursue academic careers, I think we develop our students into socially responsible citizens by encouraging them to think about these issues and why they matter. And, of course, in a very practical way we ensure that when they graduate, our students have developed their communication skills and enhanced their CVs.
- It has been fascinating to see the reactions to the SciHub repository, and follow the debates, since it gained a high profile as a result of the court injunction at the end of 2015. These quotes are from selected recent commentary. Whatever your views on the merits, ethics, and likely consequences of it, I think it is just as valuable, perhaps more so, to encourage students to consider the moral, commercial and legal arguments that surround scholarly publishing, and establish their own positions on such issues, as to train them in how to set up a journal on OJS.
- Returning to the University’s strategy, we can see how this work responds directly to a University commitment to develop its students, and this is the most important thing: every project I lead for the Library needs to help the university achieve its strategy, and I’m very clear that the work we are doing at the moment is doing that.
- 1. Business models. How do you build sustainable publishing services for your institution. Ensure that publishing is reframed as a "cost center" not as a "profit center" -- these financial expectations drive everything. Other funding models: Make it free for your own university and then charge pay to publish from outside? What about using the library content budget to pay for work we create? 2. The purpose of library publishing: What's more important in library publishing, the "product" or "process"? Is the creation of the student journal the valuable thing or training students to do the work. 3. What's in a name -- what should we call our library publishing entity? Should we use the term "university press"? Does this box us into a narrow model (humanities, books, an old form of peer review). If one chooses the UP name, starting a publishing services operation is often necessary to handle the other types of demand/local publishing. 4. A connected question to 3: Is library publishing complementary to or competitive with existing publishing entities? The intent is shaped primarily by the local institutional context; what the parent institution wants. That said, the library believes that too much money is spent on commercial publishing. Redirecting academics to university presses or the Open Library of the Humanities seems like a better strategy than starting more small humanities journals locally as library publications. 5. What is publishing? Library publishers are recognizing that publishing needs are increasingly broad and not all are well served by traditional publishers. For example, digital humanities. Improving the discoverability, etc. of new form scholarly products (multimedia, etc.) may be a sweet spot for library publishing. Leveraging (data) repository systems, e.g., Sofie reusing Figshare for conference proceedings. This builds on the notion of overlay journals, such as the one launched on top of ArXiv.