Sensemaking and Open Access goes Public

On Tuesday 17 June, all the JISC OA pathfinder projects gathered in London to introduce their projects. Sarah Fahmy form  JISC  has put together a Netvibe which shows all the blogs for the projects - http://www.netvibes.com/sarahfahmy#General

This was the first time that we had presented about the project. One of the key points that we wanted to make was that this project was centred around researcher behaviour and the need for change in behaviours as expressed by Ben Johnson in his Post 2014 OA webinars and vociferously by researcher, Stephen Curry

 ‘Most academics are failing to adopt the principle of open access, according to Stephen Curry, a structural biologist at Imperial College London and campaigner for open access. He says the RCUK policy may not be forcing enough academics to change their behaviour to publish more work—but the inclusion of open-access requirements in the next Research Excellence Framework certainly will. “Every single university in the country is going to make sure their submissions are REF-compliant,” he says. “The REF grabs everybody by the balls.” Research Fortnight, 11 June 2014 http://www.researchresearch.com/index.php?option=com_news&template=rr_2col&view=article&articleId=1344415

The other key point about our project, presented by Stuart Hunt, was that it was going to be taking an ethnographic approach and we would be trying to use a sensemaking method as described in the recently published.

Madsbjerg, C, Rasmussen,  M B (2014) The moment of clarity.Harvard Business Press

After our presentation, we had a workshop session looking at the problems of OA compliance. Interestingly academic engagement came up as one of the major problems. Another observation by one of the delegates was that there hadn't been much talk about the 'green' route, which for most non-research intensive universities like us with only a small block grant if any would be the OA route that we would be following.