Researcher Support Library Services: Research Infobites Series

What does ‘open access’ really mean? Why is it so important? How can it help me as a researcher? What can I do to contribute to the open research movement? 

This session is open to all researchers, whether Open Access is a new concept for you, or you are familiar with the open research landscape but would like to learn more about the new options available to you. Topics covered include:

• Beyond APCs: the different ways in which researchers can be more ‘open’ in the current research landscape 

• The origins of 'open access' as we know it today 

• Recent developments in the open research landscape, from Plan S to new Transformative Agreements for UoP researchers

• What the future might hold for open access

You find more about Open Access in our guidance on being an open researcher, including what's happening right now in the world of open access – see our page on Plan S and funder policies.

Research metrics are used to 'measure' the impact of research outputs, researchers, research groups, and even journals – but the current system is broken. Metrics are all too often misused, manipulated, or misunderstood, all to the detriment of the researchers they seek to measure. 

Responsible metrics is an approach which advocates for the appropriate and accountable use of metrics. This session covers: 

• Issues with the current system, from bias and manipulation to misuse and false proxies 

• Ongoing initiatives in the campaign for responsible metrics, and what research institutions like the University of Plymouth are doing to further the movement 

• Tips on how to use research metrics responsibly in different scenarios

This session pairs well with ‘Scope the research Web! Using Scopus and Web of Science for greater insight into research’.

You can find more information on this topic in our guidance on bibliometrics.

Scopus and Web of Science are in a race to build tools to leverage the massive amount of data they each hold about researchers, research outputs and institutions. In this session we’ll look at a few of the easy-to-access features within these search platforms to: 

• Keep on top of the literature 

• Explore new research fields 

• Examine other authors/ potential collaborators 

• Find and export article-level metrics to help answer questions about research. 

This session pairs well with our infobite ‘“With great power comes great responsibility”: Appropriate use of metrics’.

Creating an accessible online presence for your research outputs has many benefits, from improving the discoverability of your work to ensuring attribution. It also makes it easier to track the impact and reach of your outputs. Learning how these identifiers can connect and sync with each other also makes it easier to keep your online presence up-to-date and maximise these benefits. 

This session covers:

• What online researcher identifiers there are, which ones you might need, and how to set them up

• How to ensure that your existing identifiers are complete and correct  

• How to sync your online identifiers and minimise the manual burden of updating them 

The session will focus on your University of Plymouth Symplectic Elements profile (including recent updates to its available features), ORCID, Scopus IDs, Web of Science ResearcherID and Publons, and Google Scholar. 

You can find more information on this topic in our guidance on online identifiers.

Publishers and funders are increasingly mandating research data to be deposited into a repository or data centre. Additionally, institutions such as the University of Plymouth, are requesting data to be made “as open as possible as closed as necessary”. If the researcher is unprepared for this they may “dump” their data into a repository to quickly fulfil expectations!

This session will cover the essentials required for deposit:

• Ethical and other barriers to sharing data

• Preparing data to share

• How and where to deposit data to maximise re-use and impact

You can find more information on this topic in our guidance on research data management.

Links:

• Research Data Management Library Guide​
• Open Research​
• Information Specialist
• Training on DMPs is available via the Doctoral College 'Researcher Development Programme'
• Sherpa Juliet- funder requirements checker​
• How to Guides- Digital Curation Centre​
• Choose a License- Creative Commons ​
• Registry of Research Data Repositories​
• Promoting your Data- CESSDA​
• Depositing Datasets in PEARL Using Symplectic Elements