United Kingdom

Wider access to academic research is recognised as a benefit of open access but what does that mean for the public? With an increasingly educated population, more people want access to reliable information.

In 2019, the library research support teams at the University of the West of England and University of Bristol, delivered a public engagement event at a public library. This aimed to showcase the tools available to access academic research outputs and provide guidance on how to appraise the information found.

This talk will explore the feedback received and next steps in response to Covid 19.


UKSG Annual Conference 2021

Engaging the public in academic research – what has open access done for the wider community?

open access tools

open access publishing

open access

public engagement

The UKSG Annual Conference is a major event in the scholarly communications calendar which attracts delegates each year from around the world - librarians, publishers, content providers, consultants and intermediaries.

UKSG Annual Conference 2025

lightning talk

The UKSG Annual Conference and Exhibition 2021 will be held online for the first time. The event is a major event in the scholarly communications calendar which attracts a large number of delegates each year from around the world - librarians, publishers, content providers, consultants and intermediaries. The conference combines high-quality plenary presentations, lightning talks and breakout sessions with virtual social events and a major online trade exhibition.



 UKSG Annual Conference is a major event in the scholarly communications calendar which attracts a large number of delegates each year from around the world - librarians, publishers, content providers, consultants and intermediaries. 

OA Switchboard - A mission-driven practical solution, that thrives on collaboration

Open Access Books: How to Find, Acquire, and Use Them

Lancaster University’s Research Intelligence service launched in early 2019, and has gone from strength to strength, allowing opportunity to collect a staff award along the way. Joanne will detail the organic approach that was taken towards service design, how engagement from the research community was cultivated and relationships built and managed. She will share how this translated into bibliometric services, the analyses and reports that currently serve researchers at Lancaster University, and how the service will pro-actively plan for the future.

Charismetrics: winning researcher hearts and minds with the Research Intelligence service at Lancaster University

Lightning Talks A

In early 2020 Universities UK and Jisc established a new high level negotiation strategy group to oversee UK universities negotiations with major publishers. This presentation will provide an update on the context for the group and its objectives. It will then provide an overview of the progress that has been made in negotiations with publishers in 2020, before looking to the priorities for the group in 2021 and beyond.

The UUK-Jisc Content Negotiation Strategy Group - a new approach to UK academic sector negotiations with journal publishers

OA publishing and the financial sustainability challenge - reflections based on the experience at The University of Manchester

Society finances are often thought to rest on a three-legged stool, where publishing is complemented by event and membership income. Publishing revenues have been under pressure for years. In partner-published societies, the inclusion of journals in big deals means shrinking revenue and a loss of transparency, while at the same time independent society publishers have struggled to sell single subscriptions in a market where the majority of funds are directed at big deals. Society approaches to OA, however, are driven by the needs and preferences of their members and therefore many societies are embracing OA and aiming to transition away from subscription revenues. In practice this has meant independent society publishers implementing new models, working with consortia as well as agents and introducing entirely new workflows and metadata to manage deals, in a very short space of time. By contrast partner-published societies have been swept along by their partners, usually with a further loss of visibility and control over their own titles.

 
Then 2020 arrived, bringing with it a global pandemic, and the other two legs of the society stool became as unstable as publishing revenues. Societies were unable to deliver their usual events, and thus lost the new members who would usually sign up for those events. In the UK the government pressed ahead with a hard Brexit but delayed decisions until the last possible moment, leaving societies, like everyone else, to scramble for a response. The question must be asked: How might societies and institutions better work together to properly support the scholars who rely on both sides?

Societies and the three-legged stool

In a continually developing marketplace, an array of challenges are being addressed by publishers to meet the needs of the research community and increasing requirements of funders.  Pressures and needs related to the COVID health crisis only exacerbated these.

Publishers are offering a range of sustainable business models to support Open Science and Open Access publishing. These options maintain research quality, integrity and author choice. They also assist researchers in making data FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Re-usable) and support initiatives to make research more available through public libraries. This session will explore how scholarly publishers add essential value to and continue to safeguard quality, which is critical in a time of global pandemic and ‘fake science’.

Innovating to meet research community needs in an ever-changing, uncertain environment 

Scientific research fulfillment as a humanity global enterprise requires an inclusive and equitable communication infrastructure capable to deal with geographic, cultural, multilingual and thematic diversity. SciELO Network of 17 nationally operated collections of selected Open Access peer reviewed journals represents a major effort towards an inclusive global flow of scientific information. In 2021, it indexes, publishes and interoperates over 1200 journals which communicate pure and basic research covering most of the disciplines with a high coverage of local, national and regional topics and target audiences. This presentation will share SciELO advances, challenges, barriers, and lessons learned on the globalization of research communication.

For an inclusive global flow of scientific information

Within the topic, it mainly introduces how CMAPH responded to the pandemic in a Time of Global Challenge. CMAPH as the most numerous, influential, and authoritative medical journal publication in China have established a series of policies toward to pandemic and Open Access in 2020. We have implemented “manuscript fast-track flow” policy, established a COVID-19 Academic Research Communication Platform with Chinese and English version, and all articles published in the platform applied open access policy. By doing all these attempts, CMAPH is going to maintain its strategy on priority publication, academic quality, and to be more involved in global activities and collaboration. In the topic, we also intend to discuss the challenges to Chinese Sci-tech Periodical, and how OA publishing developed in CMAPH.

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