Thursday 11 August 2016

Sharing our ‘top tips’ for promoting Open Access at JISC OA Pathfinders ‘Teachmeet’ Advocacy event

Emily Bennett from University of Portsmouth shares her top tips for promoting Open Access (OA).

Back in June we were asked to do a ‘Teachmeet’ session at JISC OA Pathfinder Advocacy day at the University Northampton. This is not something we’d done before, so we were unsure what to expect!
Fortunately, things went well. It was great to try this different style of presentation as it
gave us a chance to meet other people and share ideas. Our session was based
around the ‘top tips’ for promoting OA we’ve gathered over the last few years at Portsmouth.

Tips for promoting OA poster


These are our top tips:

  • We run monthly workshops for academics about OA. These workshops are well attended because they are part of Portsmouth’s Researcher Development Programme, run by the department of Research and Innovation Services. We’ve done quite a bit of work over the last year developing these workshops by distributing questionnaires to explore academics’ existing knowledge of OA before the workshops and using feedback questionnaires afterwards. We are quite pleased with the final result and have released the presentation under the CC-BY licence. So please feel free to download and reuse :) Download the presentation for academics about OA. We have also released the pre and post workshop questionnaires, which can be downloaded from here.
  • Compliance reporting. Every 3 months we compare Pure to Scopus to work out what articles we are missing from Pure. This report gets sent to our Associate Deans for Research, and so passes the responsibility of chasing articles to the faculties.
  • The Library does not validate outputs submitted to Pure that have incorrect or missing information. For example, if they do not include the full-text author’s accepted manuscript version of the article. Instead, we contact the academic and request that they send this information through.
  • We communicate with academics through all channels, including email, social media etc. We’ve got an OA information website and we distributed a printed poster and single page flow chart to all academics.
  • At Portsmouth we’ve got good links between the Library and the Research and Innovation Services (RIS) department. My role as Research Outputs Manager is based in both departments, and we work closely together on our CRIS system, Pure. Also, links with RIS help in the promotion of OA because they have good links with the researchers. In addition to promoting the OA workshop on the Researcher Development Programme that they run, they also produce the Research and Innovation newsletter, which is distributed to all academic staff every 3 months, and includes a ‘Library Update’ section. For example, see page 4 of the Summer 2016 edition.
So overall it was a useful and interesting day in Northampton. If anyone wants to know more about our ‘top tips’ then please feel free to get in contact. emily.bennett@port.ac.uk.

The Making Sense project had two other teachmeets on the day.



Open Access at Nottingham Trent
Watch the Open Access video - every university should have one

Ruth Stubbings from Nottingham Trent University showed the video and offered some tips on creating a 'talking head' video. See an earlier blog post - http://sensemakingopenaccess.blogspot.com/2016/07/oa-advocacy-at-nottingham-trent.html


OA Cat
Rowena Rouse from Oxford Brookes traced the journey of the OA Pathfinder project with posters about CIAO, MIAO and OA cat.