United Kingdom

This paper will explore the new approaches to research and innovations in Africa and focus on the potential of open science in sustainable and innovative research. The paper will further evaluate notable open science initiatives in Africa including the EIFL/CARLIGH open access project in Ghana and make suggestions on how to address the implementation challenges of open science practices, particularly how to equip researchers and scientists with skills and incentives to practice open science.

UKSG Annual Conference 2023

Increasing the visibility of African sustainable research: The potential of Open Science

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

keynote

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. The conference combines high-quality plenary presentations, lightning talks and breakout sessions with entertaining social events and trade exhibition.

Exploring the journey from submission through to publication (the blockers and enhances), we will be conducting quantitative and qualitative research to gain a high-level understanding of the current landscape, including examples of innovation in this space, positive impact on students and researchers and improvements to the diversity, equity and accessibility of the research output. Reviewing what the adoption curve looks like and practical recommendations for moving the pendulum in the right direction. Research will be conducted by Maverick Publishing Specialists.

Where are we with operationalising DEIA within the scholarly ecosystem post-pandemic?

As Scholarly Communications is amidst a transition to Open Science – resulting in the more widespread availability of open content, data and infrastructure - the scientific community itself become increasingly adept at engaging with 'open'. Two examples of 'open infrastructure services' are the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) and the OAPEN Library – both running on an open source version of DSpace with its metadata freely available under CC 0. The Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) indexes over 60,000 open access books, whereas the OAPEN Library provides a structured and premium hosting environment for over 25,000 OA books.

Leveraging an open infrastructure and tapping into an open service: examples of established workflows and approaches for open access books

Journal publications currently play a significant role in research assessment: in rankings, REF and recruitment. They are assessed by quantity, citedness, the journal they appear in, or peer review. However, assessing journal publications can be difficult and can drive wider system failures such as questionable research practices, rising publication costs, and delays. Increasingly there are calls to evaluate a broader diversity of roles, inputs, processes, and outputs through our research assessments but it’s not clear to what extent these approaches truly value a wider range of research 'qualities'. This participative session will explore the appropriate place of journal publications in research and researcher assessment with the assistance of the INORMS SCOPE framework.

What role should journal publications play in research evaluation?

The 2020 NAG Quality of Shelf Ready Metadata report and Jisc’s work on Plan M both highlighted that the monograph metadata supply chain is costly, inefficient, and not fit for purpose. To address this, BDS consulted with the entire monograph supply chain – publishers, suppliers, purchasing consortia, system providers and libraries to create a radically new service - the BDS Academic Library Licence. The Breakout session will explore how BDS and libraries such as Imperial College have partnered on a cost-effective, completely hands-off solution for the creation, curation, supply and sharing of high quality records that realises the aims of Jisc’s Plan M and brings about much needed change to the metadata marketplace which is resulting in service improvements and cost savings.

Streamlining monograph metadata supply with BDS

Arts scholarship is tough in the current landscape, working under a government that increasingly values STEM and in a culture that has increasing requirements in open research. Research data management, born of engineering disciplines, is not easily applicable to visual or performing arts and nor should it be. Significant changes in the language, approach, infrastructure and drivers or goals need to happen in any research data management intervention in order to provide arts research with the support it needs, not for it’s data to yield maximum impact, but for it’s compost to turn into the brightest blooms. Lancaster University has a small but impactful research output in this discipline, and it can be difficult to engage researchers in the sharing and publishing of research data when they are incredibly unfamiliar with the process and in most cases do not consider themselves creators of data at all. In this paper, 5 key challenges are presented as a way of articulating the complexity in this area, and arguments are presented that maintain that research data management is entirely relevant for the arts. This contextual understanding combined with upskilling has begun to develop relationships at Lancaster, resulting in effective publishing of the following dataset in our institutional repository: https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/news/life-survey-helping-shape-the-future-of-our-region

Archiving Brain Fruits: Research Data Management for The Arts

Nicola will talk about how Lancaster has mapped scholarly output onto the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) using SciVal and Altmetric Explorer data. She will present an overview of Lancaster’s research, exploring subject differences and areas of strengths/for improvement. She will also detail how this information has been used across the University, including at different levels of seniority. Attendees will leave with an understanding of how Lancaster has contributed to the SDGs, as well as potential methodology to use at their own university.

UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): Mapping Institutional Research

UKRI’s policy statement mandating OA monographs will be implemented on January 1st, 2024. In less than a year we will see a shift from a hypothetical future for OA books to a concrete policy with a hard deadline. How will the sector get there successfully and sustainably? This session will discuss what is needed from libraries, publishers, policy-makers and research funders in order to meet the imminent OA monograph mandates not only from UKRI but also, in Europe, cOAlition S and the PALOMERA project’s ambitious alignment of OA book policies. In the UK there are also potential implications of the next REF.

Mandates, policies, and collaboration for the success of Open Access monographs

In the UK, the increase in transitional agreements (TAs) has prompted us to ask new questions about how we measure the impact of the transition to OA, the performance of agreements, and the metrics we need. With COUNTER usage reports, we expect to see a shift in interest to global usage for individual research outputs. In this presentation, we cover: • Drivers, opportunities and challenges in open access usage reporting for libraries and consortia such as Jisc • Roles of publisher and institutional repository usage statistics • How COUNTER 5.1 supports this work • Next steps, lessons learned and the practical takeaways

A new role for COUNTER usage data in open access agreements

With the growth of E-Books and online learning platforms, more data is generated by Libraries every day. We want to start a discussion that increases awareness and knowledge of the varied kinds of data that libraries and users are generating and uncover the benefits and the harms that unregulated, unknown, data processing can lead to. This is an opportunity to develop cross-sector knowledge about publisher/supplier requirements whilst also learning how to prioritise data security and protection for our users. The generation of data has largely been taken for granted and as a sector we have failed to engage critically with the implications of large-scale sets of non-GDPR data and how this can affect the adoption of learning resources. We are concerned that information about our users and their activities are being increasingly used in ways that disadvantage Libraries and want to expand our collective knowledge to ensure that we are not being taken advantage of. This session seeks to bring together participants from across the sector to explore ways we can all benefit from data use.

#dataSOS: What's going on with Library data & what can we do about it?

Early Career Researchers in science and social sciences are both the senior researchers of the future but as doctoral candidates and post-doctoral researchers are responsible for a significant part of the actual work represented in the ever-increasing number of scientific research outputs. As part of a team from 2016- 2021 across eight countries we researched the findings from questions to the same cohort of ECRs over this period. This both included the millennial attitudes and practices of the cohorts plus also the impact of the pandemic on their behaviour. This session shall concentrate on our findings in particular from UK and US ECRs, highlighting the elements of most relevance interest to publishers and librarians

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Next from UKSG Annual Conference 2023

Where are we with operationalising DEIA within the scholarly ecosystem post-pandemic?

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Advancing Open Science in Africa: Lessons from the AfLIA Open Data Management Foundational Course for African Librarians

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