Open Access Week 2016 at QUT

As many of you know, last week it was Open Access Week.

Open Access Week is a global event, and it is an opportunity for the academic and research community to continue to learn about the potential benefits of Open Access and to help inspire wider participation in helping to make Open Access (OA) a new norm in scholarship and research.

“Open Access” to information – that is the free, immediate, online access to the results of scholarly research, and the right to use and re-use those results as you need. And it has the potential to maximize research investments, increase the exposure and use of published research, facilitate the ability to conduct research across available literature, and enhance the overall advancement of scholarship (see http://www.openaccessweek.org/page/about).

Typical activities during the Open Access Week include talks, seminars, symposia, or the announcement of OA mandates or other milestones in OA.

In Brisbane the research support team of QUT organised a seminar with researchers from Queensland University of Technology (QUT), University of Queensland and Griffith University. The researchers were talking about why Open Access and sharing data is important for their research. This was really interesting, in particular since the three researchers came from different disciplines.

Since 2012 the Open Access Week has an official motto every year and in 2016 it was "Open in Action."  It was all about taking concrete steps to open up research and scholarship. At the seminar everybody got a sheet of paper  that had possible actions for OA on it that everyone can do and that you could tick off. The organisers also disseminated a sheet of paper  that said "My Open Access action is ..." and you could write your action down. Afterwards someone took a photo of it. Really great ideas!
We should do something similar at NTNU next year!


I also attended a great seminar at the Kelvin Grove campus of QUT. Besides experiences by researchers there were also talks by someone from AOASG, the Australasian OA Strategy Group, by the University Copyright Officer (employed at QUT Library!!!) and the Scholarly Communications Librarian at QUT. All were fantastic and I have got the slides of all talks, so if someone is interested to have a look at the slides, please tell me.

I also got to know that QUT has an OA Publishing Planning Too. It is "only" a sheet of paper or rather a table, but with all the important questions to ask before deciding where to publish. I love it and will use it back in Trondheim.

In addition I heard about Think. Check. Submit., a campaign to help researchers identify trusted journals for their research publications. It is a simple checklist researchers can use to assess the credentials of a journal or publisher. See http://thinkchecksubmit.org/
Colleagues from Norway, does someone use this tool/campaign? I think it's great.

Someone also talked about the Open Science Framework, a scholarly commons to connect to the entire research cycle. Check it out here: https://osf.io/

And here you have the title of an article that must be interesting for everybody working in medicine and health sciences: "Beyond open data: realising the health benefits of sharing data". It's in BMJ 2016; 355.

Thanks again to the fantastic staff of the research support team from QUT library and other organisers. I enjoyed the seminars very much and learned a lot!

Read a bit more here:
https://blogs.qut.edu.au/library/tag/international-open-access-week/

https://www.qut.edu.au/about/events/events?news-id=110819

https://blogs.qut.edu.au/library/2014/10/15/access-all-areas-with-open-access-week/

23 (research data) Things and 23 Things: Libraries for Research Data

While being at QUT I came across two fantastic tools. Many of you probably know the original 23 things programme. At least many people working in the library have been going through this programme. This great tool was then adopted to teach about research data, and as mentioned there are two useful tools :

1.
23 (research data) Things is self-directed learning programme for anybody who wants to know more about research data.
Anyone can do 23 (research data) Things at any time.  You can do them all at once, you can do some, or you can cherry-pick the Things you need or want to know about. Do them on your own, or get together a group and share the learning.  The programme is intended to be flexible, adaptable and fun. Each of the 23 Things offers a variety of learning opportunities with activities at three levels of complexity: ‘Getting started’, ‘Learn more’ and ‘Challenge me’.
So the 23 Things are designed to build knowledge as the program progresses, that means if you are new to the world of research data management, it is suggested you start with Things 1-3 and then decide where you want to go from there.  

The best is that all resources used in the programme are online available and free to use, that means they have been released under a Creative Commons license.
And this means, we can offer that programme for our researchers at NTNU, and I think we really should do that.


2. 
23 Things: Libraries for Research Data was developed by the Libraries for Research Data Interest Group of the Research Data Alliance (RDA). have a look for more information about RDA: https://www.rd-alliance.org/

This tool gives an overview over practical, free, online resources that librarians and other library staff can use to incorporate research data management into their practice of librarianship.
It is about Learning Resources, Data Reference and Outreach, Data Management Plans (DMPs), Data Literacy, Citing Data, Data Licensing and Privacy, Digital Preservation, Data Repositories and a Community of Practice.
Read more here: https://b2share.eudat.eu/record/510/files/23Things_Libraries_For_Research_Data_en.pdf

QUT cite|write

 

QUT cite|write is the student guide to citing, referencing and writing academically at QUT.

QUT cite|write consists of two parts:

• a booklet that contains:
  • an introductory guide to citing and referencing, with general information and tips
  • an introductory guide to good general principles of academic writing
  • blank templates, to record all the important details for the books, journal articles and internet sources that you find for your assignments.
• the website:
  • QUT cite that contains citing and referencing examples for the four QUT styles
  • QUT write that contains writing guides.

When I looked at the website I just loved the structured way of showing how the references have to look like when choosing the various styles.
That means the online tool gives examples of how to apply each style to different types of resources, it shows how to format your reference list and in-text citations, and it also provides rules for what to do when you have incomplete reference details, like no publication date.






I hope we can provide something similar at NTNU very soon.