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?

Open Access Communicating and Collaborating

Last week was full of OA events and discussions. All the OA pathfinder projects (2 via Skype) met up in London to introduce our projects to each other. We all took part in a 'speed dating exercise' where we identified any common threads  between projects and opportunities for sharing and jointly communicating. We thought that  the Coventry and Northumbria projects were the most interesting from our perspective, maybe because they are similar universities to us.

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.

Making Sense - A Researcher Centred approach to funder mandates - JISC OA Pathfinder

Here in the Directorate of Learning Resources at Oxford Brookes University, we are very pleased to have received the good news earlier this month that we have been selected as one of the 8 JISC OA Pathfinder projects to  look into how we can help researchers in  UK Universities conform with Open Access funder mandates.

Making sense:a researcher centred approach to funder mandates

Lead Institution: Oxford Brookes University

Project Director: Stuart Hunt shunt@brookes.ac.uk

Project Manager:  Rowena Rouse rrouse@brookes.ac.uk 

Associate institutions: 
Nottingham Trent University, University of Portsmouth

About the project
Our project will provide the infrastructure and processes to support researchers working within non research-intensive universities to conform to OA funder mandates. We will consider human behaviours and how engagement with OA processes can be improved, putting the researcher at the centre, building within and around the research context.

We will apply an ethnographic sense-making approach to work with, and observe, the researcher in their own context.  The aim of this approach is to integrate with, rather than impose upon, the researcher and the research environment, enabling conformance with specific funder mandates as a part of the research workflow.

We will:

• Develop a methodology and create a toolkit for a researcher-centred approach.
• Create a dataset from our investigation of researcher working practices
• Communicate with the wider OA community via an iterative case study and 
   hosting a workshop for the OA Implementers Community.
• Release all project outputs via open access under a Creative Commons license

Project Timeline - June 2014 -May 2016

Activity	Q2/14	Q3/14	Q4/14	Q1/15	Q2/15	Q3/15	Q4/15	Q1/16
Create project blog
Conduct research and gather data
Disseminate progress (via blog)
Create researcher-based toolkit
Launch of toolkit
Host OA community workshop
Evaluate toolkit and impact
Launch roadshows at project sites