It seems like a long time since our first project meeting way back in July when we started on our journey. Having each given some background to where each university was with systems, structures and processes, we started to think about how we could explore researcher behaviour at each of our universities. It was decided that Nottingham Trent University (NTU) and University of Portsmouth would draw on the experiences of Oxford Brookes who had successfully used structured interviews for their research data audit and to use these techniques to discover more about researchers and the publication process. At the same time Oxford Brookes would conduct some more in-depth ethnographic studies on a number of researchers at different levels using a set of cultural probes which could be observations, diary keeping - video or written, recording open access pain points. We will be making more progress on this in the next six months.
OA Baselining
Institutional
OA baselining has been our main concern over the summer months. We have been trying to create a CARDIO type tool for Open Access Compliance. Here’s an extract:
The idea is that each institution gathers together all the stakeholders for Open Access and then uses this tool to assess their institutional readiness for open access. We are concentrating on a version that could be used in a workshop-type setting - perhaps it could be tested at a community workshop if one is being held on OA baselining. A test version should be ready by the end of September 2014.
Individual
We explored the possibility of a re-run of the ‘Unlocking attitudes’ survey which was conducted in 2011 by the Repositories Support Project(RSP) and there was some interest in this from fellow pathfinders. Each of the institutions that took part in that survey had data that could serve as a baseline to attitudes now. For Oxford Brookes, if we were going to do this, we had to move fast as our Pro Vice- Chancellor was planning to run research roadshows for each REF Unit of Assessment starting in October 2014 and this was likely to affect researcher attitudes. Sadly we decided not to do it and to focus on the institutional baselining however we have a new academic/research staff induction gathering next week and would like to find out their understanding of OA as they are new to Oxford Brookes and then follow-up with another survey just for them a year later. Just a short survey of about 5 questions .
What next?
By December, we hope to be testing a number of cultural probes with a pilot group of researchers, Stuart Hunt, the project director will be presenting at the RLUK conference in November and the Collaborative Assessment for Institutional Readiness for Open Access will be ready for use. Our community workshop is booked for May 20 2015 at Oxford Brookes University.
