Project Meeting no 1: Introductions and methodologies , openaccess@brookes.ac.uk

A successful kick-off meeting was held on Wednesday 2 July 2014 with our associate universities - Nottingham Trent University and University of Portsmouth. There was much talk about our local situations and how we were going to get started. Building on our experiences at Oxford Brookes of conducting research data audit interviews with some 90 researchers, we decided that stage one of the project would be to conduct semi-structured interviews with some researchers.

Who to interview?
Our next job was to decide who to interview so we considered all projects which were funded by RCUK or Wellcome Trust. We then organised the list of projects by gender of Principal Investigator (PI) and their research career position (junior, middle, senior) so that our sample had a mix of these. The day ended with each associate university having a list of tasks, the main one being deciding who to interview. For Nottingham Trent and Portsmouth, the use of semi-structured interviews is new as well having a team of interviewers made up of subject librarians, research support staff, IT staff so we have offered to visit each institution to support  this.

Sensemaking
As for sensemaking, we are considering using a variety of tools: observation; interviews, semi-structured; research process interviews; research journals/diaries ; recording activities; cognitive maps; cultural probes; artefacts and self-recording. We are now thinking that this more in-depth study will probably be on a smaller number of researchers although we were still concerned about what would make up a reasonable sample.
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Openaccess@ emails

At the OA community workshop last month, it was suggested that all universities ought to create an openaccess@ email as a single point of contact so we now have openaccess@brookes.ac.uk . Has anyone else done this yet?