Open Access Policy for the university

If you are publishing in journals this will be of interest...

The university has a new Open Access Policy.  In essence this states that, "The university supports the principle of making publically funded and peer‐reviewed research available via open access."  This reflects HEFCE's policy of making open access a requirement for submission to the next Research Excellence Framework - for journal articles.  You can read more about HEFCE's stance here, along with details about the work they are doing in relation to monographs.

Open Access can either be through the 'gold' or 'green' routes:

Gold - is where the research is made available through publishing with an open access journal OR through paying a subscription-based journal to publish the article available on an open-access basis.  (Limited funds are available to pay the Article Processing Charge (APC) if that applies to the journal you are submitting to.  See the link below for the application form.)

Green - is where the research is made available via a repository (e.g. WestminsterResearch), where this is allowed by the journal that has accepted your work.  In this model the publisher sometimes imposes an embargo (i.e. you have to wait for a period before you have the right to include your research on WestminsterResearch), but some journals do allow immediate inclusion on an institutional respository.

More information is available about how this will work at Westminster on the WestminsterResearch pages (use the links in the grey sub-menu to navigate).  You should look particularly at the 'Information for our authors and open access policy' section, which gives links to two useful resources - SHERPA/JULIET and SHERPA/ROMEO.

These resources have been around for an age and give you a quick reference to what the policies of funders are in relation to open access (SHERPA/JULIET) and what the policies of individual journals are (SHERPA/ROMEO).  SHERPA/ROMEO will show what a journals policies are in relation to:

• paid open access
• the deposit to an institutional repository of: author's pre-prints (i.e. pre-refereed and not compliant with the HEFCE policy), author's post-prints (as published minus publisher formatting), and the publisher version/PDF. 

This new policy will give impetus to the use of WestminsterResearch as not just a record of published work, but as a repository of it; and in many cases you will already have the right to deposit the full-text of articles you have authored onto WestminsterResearch.

If you would like to discuss any of this with me, please get in touch.  I have been briefed, and I am also attending an update session next week where I could raise any issues that you wish to raise.

Further Reading

See my post on Open Access Search Tools

Open access - search tools

With the change in policy from HEFCE in relation to the REF, it looks like there is some impetus for these long-standing initiatives below to come into their own.  Most useful in this list, which I collated a couple of years ago, are CORE, DOAB, DOAJ, EThOS, OAIster, and PQDT Open.

CORE - an aggregated search of UK repositories (it's like Google Scholar for UK research repositories).  Further information.

DART-Europe - research theses from a consortium of European research libraries

DOAB - Directory of Open Access Books

DOAJ - Directory of Open Access Journals

EThOS [Electronic Theses Online Service from the British Library.  Selected items available for download after registration]

OAPEN [Open Access Publishing in European Networks] is a collaborative initiative to develop and implement a sustainable Open Access publication model for academic books in the Humanities and Social Sciences.

OAIster - a union catalogue of open access resources, provided by OCLC/Worldcat.  Further information

OpenDOAR Search - search contents of open access repositories listed on OpenDOAR [Directory of Open Access Repositories]

OpenDepot Search - search of e-prints from researchers at institutions that do not have an institutional repository

PQDT Open [Proquest Dissertations and Theses Open] - provides the full text of open access dissertations and theses available on the Proquest platform

ROAR Search - search contents of repositories listed on ROAR [Registry of Open Access Repositories]

SHERPA Search - search UK repositories listed on OpenDOAR [Directory of Open Access Repositories]

EThOS [Electronic Theses Online Service]

Those groovy people at the BL have produced this video about the 'Ethos' service.  Search the collection now: http://ethos.bl.uk/

It’s a free research tool which gives access to much of the UK’s doctoral research. Search over 350,000 theses covering every subject area, and download over 100,000 straight away.

• Search and read theses on your topic;
• Find examples of how to structure and approach your thesis;
• Research the work of specific institutions or academics.

MENDELEY - AN ALTERNATIVE TO ENDNOTE, REFWORKS, ETC

Mendeley is a relatively new reference manager and research tool, which has done much to introduce a social network element to reference management.  It was in the educational/tech press earlier in the year when Elsevier (the publishing giant) bought the company for a reported £45-£60 million (see the report in Wired for example).

A colleague has been offering introductions to this, and you can see his slides below.

Introduction to Mendeley from Allan Parsons

Or here is another set of slides from a librarian in Singapore:

Mendeley - Introduction from Hazman Aziz

Begin at the beginning - researching your assignment

“Where shall I begin, please your Majesty?” he asked.
“Begin at the beginning,” the King said, very gravely, “and go on till you come to the end: then stop.”

- Lewis Carrol, Alice’s adventures in wonderland (1865), ch. 12 

Earlier in the year I wrote a blog post on Improving your essay writing skills, which is quickly becoming one of the most frequently accessed posts I’ve written. If you are currently writing your first academic assignment, it’s worth a look, as it sets out the process in brief and covers two key elements – the introduction and the conclusion.

I wrote very little about how to go about looking for literature to support your writing in that post, and I want to address that here – albeit in part only. Specifically, I want to write about starting your research, covering how to begin, using table of contents and indexes, and coping with unfamiliar terms and concepts.

Where shall I begin?

It is very natural to begin your search for supporting material by typing some version of the essay title into Google or Library Search, hoping to find material that covers the topic. This is sometimes a productive strategy – especially as some works in the library may be in high demand - but can just as often send you down blind alleys, make you miss more useful material or plunge you into writing that you are not yet able to understand. Try and resist.

Before searching for material to help you answer the question, start reviewing what you know already. The questions you are asked to research always relate to material that is covered to some degree in the modules that you are taking, so you shouldn’t be starting with a blank slate. Review the reading and thinking you have already done.  Then try to pose a series of questions you need to find answers for. This will help you get the most out of the literature when you start reading.

Your lecturers have supplied a reading list, and although you are often required to go beyond this, you should start here before moving on to other works.   

Using table of contents and indexes

Look in the table of contents and the index of books to try to pinpoint sections which relate to the topic you will be writing on. Think laterally about the terms you are looking for – you will need to consider synonyms, antonyms, and alternative terms which may be broader or narrower than the topic as defined in the question. This is also true when using Library Search or any other database to find resources.

Unfamiliar terms and concepts

Look for terms that you are unfamiliar with in textbooks, or in encyclopedias. Wikipedia can help, but concentrate on more authoritative sources such as subject-specific encyclopedias. The e-resource CredoReference provided by the library can really help here, providing authoritative articles on many topics – especially in the area of philosophy and cultural studies.

The Informed Researcher - booklet

Vitae have previously published a number of natty little booklets for researchers, with titles such as 'The balanced researcher'; 'The creative researcher'; 'The engaging researcher' and 'The leading researcher'.  Now, at last, we have 'The informed researcher.'  What, as they say themselves, is  research about if not "finding, absorbing, creating and disseminating information?"

This, along with an Information literacy lens has been developed in collaboration with the Research Information Network (RIN) and the Society of College, National and University Libraries (SCONUL).

Further reading

Researcher Development Framework [from Vitae]

Why do Wikipedia entries always appear at the top of Google results?

I had thought that Google ranks results according to the number and significance of links to a particular page, as well as calculating the number of references to your search terms in that page.

So, why when you compare the number of incoming links to the top two results for the search term  'Research' does the top entry (a Wikipedia entry) have 110 million incoming links, compared to the second entry with 947 million?

It could be that the links to the Wikipedia entry are from sites that themselves have lots of links, but I doubt it.  I think, more likely, that links to the Wikipedia domain are also included within the rank, so that individual Wikipedia pages are boosted because of the popularity of the site as a whole.  This means that any entry on Wikipedia is likely to have a high ranking.

Here are some reasons to avoid using Wikipedia.

Tweet your way to academic success

The LSE's Impact of Social Sciences Project aims to look at the ways that the impact of research in the social sciences is achieved and at effective ways that it can be measured.  For academics in any discipline wishing to increase the impact of their research, it is well worth looking at.  The guide on using Twitter to increase your visibility is embedded below.

Follow me on twitter at: @photolbrrn

Open publication - Free publishing - More academia

Google Scholar - citation data

You have probably already noticed that records in Google Scholar include links to articles etc that cite the work referred to.  Click on the 'Cited by...' link and you get a list of works which cite it.

You may have also noticed that the works with the highest number of citations are generally higher in the results list than those with fewer citations.  The reason that this is not always the case is that Google puts a higher weight on citations which have themselves a high number of citations.  This is the same way as Google works, where referring URLs are used rather than references.

Although launched on April 1st, the Google Scholar Metrics for Publications is (I think) a legitimate service from Google.  It takes the citation data already available and uses it to rank publications, in a similar sort of way as that available with the well-established Journal Citation Reports (JCR) or the alternative SCOPUS.

However, whereas JCR only looks at the most highly-ranked journals, the advantage with Google Scholar is that a much wider range of journals are included.  You can have a look at an example for 'cinema OR film.'  One major problem, though, is that you can only group journals by words appearing in their title - thus missing out Screen and Cineaste from the example given (a list with them included is available here).  This makes the service interesting, but in need of development.

In a similar vein, Google's previously announced 'my citations' service allows you to create a profile and track works on Google Scholar that cite works that you have authored.  You can then make this profile public if you wish (see Albert Einstein's profile for example), or keep it to yourself.  It is very easy to set up: go to 'my citations,' type in your name, affiliation, email address and areas of interest and then varify the list of publications listed.  It really is very easy and is recommended for academics who wish to promote their work (which is anyone who has published I guess).

WestminsterResearch

One way of monitoring the research output of the university is to look regulary at WestminsterResearch. This is the university's institutional repository - where academics are encouraged to log their publications etc. It is managed by ISLS.

As well as browsing all content, you can also browse by author or just view School of Media, Art & Design research (you can also create an RSS feed from this page).

The content of WestminsterResearch is now included within Library Collections Search (soon to be renamed Library Search!); and is also included in the Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR) and the Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR).  The repository is also indexed by Google scholar. 

The presence of research citations on these sites should increase the visibility of the university's research output.