United Kingdom

In the wake of the global mental health crisis, exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic, the demand for mental health services has reached unprecedented levels, leaving universities grappling with the challenge of providing adequate support. Libraries have emerged as crucial allies in this endeavor, acting as knowledge hubs and offering vital resources to address the pressing mental health needs of students and researchers.

UKSG Annual Conference 2024

Empowering minds: libraries leading the charge in student mental health

Truth and Responsibility
“Truth and Responsibility” is a call to reimagine anthropology to meet the demands of the present moment. The imperative to bear witness, take action, and be held accountable to the truths we write and circulate invites us to reflect on our responsibility in reckoning with disciplinary histories, harms, and possibilities. To whom are we giving evidence and toward what ends? For whom are we writing? To whom are we accountable, and in what ways? We are thrilled to announce the theme of the 2021 AAA Annual Meeting to be held in Baltimore, MD: Truth and Responsibility.

Many consider anthropology to be a holistic social science dedicated to cross-cultural understanding as a way to reduce bigotry and more fully comprehend “what it means to be human.” Others push against this readily circulated origin story, arguing that “human” remains a highly contested, political category—evident as the presumed set of rights and protections associated with the “human” continue to be stripped away violently in the communities in which some of us live and work. Which violent histories and epistemologies must anthropologists take responsibility for in telling truth(s) about the discipline’s development? How do the dual histories of settler colonialism and slavery continue to influence anthropological thought and practices? In these political times, how can anthropologists throughout the globe work to secure a capacious, progressive vision of the human? How might movements for anti-racism, decoloniality, queer liberation, and healing such as #BlackLivesMatter, #ProtectMaunaKea, and #MeToo push a future anthropology out of the ashes of the anthropological past? Finally, what are the limits and possibilities of the anthropological imagination?

Across subfields, we find truths in patterns of human behavior, language, evolution, and cultural worlds. Industry-positioned anthropologists do this by extending the boundaries of the discipline not as an administrative solution to job shortages but as a source of intervention and knowledge production. Increasingly, anthropologists who make use of the scientific method question how status and identity help to decide which facts come to represent truth. How might quantitative researchers use our methods to identify patterned truths, and what responsibility do we hold in challenging conventional wisdom about these patterns? What responsibility do we have to both our colleagues and larger publics, to push toward increased transparency and ethical grounding in our data collection, analysis, and presentation?

Pedagogy is a key medium for the communication of anthropological truths. Which (and whose) truths are foregrounded in our curricula? What are the possibilities for a liberatory pedagogy in a precarious, “post-truth” era? Conferences, museums, organizing spaces, and classrooms are sites where pedagogy and various forms of communication can help us interrogate the performativity of truth. How might anthropologists conceive of truth performances? Might visual, aural, and choreographic performances during AAA sessions offer anthropologists alternative genres for truth-telling and truth-making that provoke discussions about responsibility?

In accordance with the urgency of the year’s theme, the questions posed in this call for papers do not have easy answers. The hope is that those who submit proposals will take up these questions and engage in collective thinking and imagining about the truths we hold, the truths we challenge, and the responsibilities we bear in co-creating a free and more equitable world. All panel proposals should have a statement about how the panel has incorporated the goals of equity, diversity, and inclusion, and/or analysis of power.

Executive Session proposals have already been selected and speak directly to the theme “Truth and Responsibility.” To practice the critical reflexivity this call for papers invites, we asked that Executive Session submissions explicitly address the diversity of session participants, such as organizational/institutional affiliation, career stage, race, ethnicity, disability, sexuality, class, religion, national identity, and gender. Proposals for Executive Sessions that demonstrated a commitment to equity and inclusion and/or a clear analysis of power (i.e. anti-imperialist, anti-white supremacist, decolonial, anti-ableist, feminist, anti-transphobic, anti-xenophobic, etc) were given priority. We are excited to be in conversation with residents of the Baltimore region and look forward to the discussions, performances, and actions generated by the dynamic group of anthropologists attending the 2021 AAA Annual Meeting.

AAA Annual Meeting 2021

“Truth and Responsibility” is a call to reimagine anthropology to meet the demands of the present moment. The imperative to bear witness, take action, and be held accountable to the truths we write and circulate invites us to reflect on our responsibility in reckoning with disciplinary histories, harms, and possibilities. To whom are we giving evidence and toward what ends? For whom are we writing? To whom are we accountable, and in what ways? We are thrilled to announce the theme of the 2021 AAA Annual Meeting to be held in Baltimore, MD: Truth and Responsibility.

technical paper

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.

Scottish Universities Press (SUP) is a library-led publishing initiative involving 18 institutions. SUP was formed in response to changes in the Open Access policy landscape and to harness the benefits of working collaboratively at scale. In this session we will outline the approach to establishing SUP, sharing tips and lessons learned. We will cover the practical challenges we have experienced as librarians becoming publishers and discuss how wider challenges in the OA landscape have impacted our efforts. We will also outline the opportunities of institution-led publishing as we have experienced them and explore the wider anticipated benefits as we move to scaling up SUP.

Developing Scottish Universities Press: a practical guide to library-led publishing

Its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats shape the academic library in terms of what it is and does, how it is seen, where it excels and struggles, and its potential for advancement or decline. The session will identify key factors influencing academic library status and positioning. It will analyse the overlap, interplay and occasional contradiction between the different strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, and will outline a framework of ten proposed strategic directions. The session will aim to enable attendees to advance the position of their libraries by leveraging their strengths, addressing weaknesses, taking the opportunities presented to them and mitigating significant threats they confront.

The position and prospects of academic libraries: a SWOT analysis and strategy framework

Academic researchers are becoming increasingly aware of the need to make data and software FAIR in order to support the sharing and reuse of non-publication outputs. Currently there is still a lack of concise and practical guidance on how to achieve this in the context of specific data types and disciplines. This presentation details recent and ongoing work at the University of Sheffield to bridge this gap. It will explore the development of a FAIR resource with specialist guidance for a range of data types and will examine the planned development of this project during the period 2023-25.

Practical steps towards an open research culture: Building support around FAIR data & software at the University of Sheffield

The UN SDG Publishers Compact, launched in 2020, was set up to inspire action among publishers to accelerate progress to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030, asking signatories to develop sustainable practices, act as champions and publish books and journals that will “inform, develop and inspire action in that direction”. This Lightning Talk will discuss how our new Bristol University Press Digital has been developed as part of our mission to contribute a meaningful and impactful response to this call to action as well as the global social challenges we face.

Responding to the UN SDG Publishers Compact – Bristol University Press Digital

Researchers face more pressure to share their research data than ever before. Owing to a rise in funder policies and momentum towards more openness across the research landscape. Although policies for data sharing are in place, engagement work is undertaken by librarians in order to ensure repository uptake and compliance. We will discuss a particular strategy implemented at Loughborough University that involved the application of conceptual messaging frameworks to engagement activities in order to promote and encourage use of our Figshare-powered repository. We will showcase the rationale behind the adoption of messaging frameworks for library outreach and some practical examples.

Advocating for data sharing: messaging frameworks for repository engagement strategies

This talk will outline how a completely accidental occurrence led to brand new avenues for open research advocacy and reasons for being. This advocacy has occurred within student communities such as trainee teachers, student psychologists and (especially) those soon losing access to subscription-based library content. Alongside these new forms of advocacy, these ethical example of AI use cases has begun to form a cornerstone of directly connecting the work of the library to new technology.

All Watched Over By Machines That Love Open Research

Get Full Text Research (GetFTR) launched in 2020 with the objective of streamlining discovery and access of scholarly content in the many tools that researchers use today, such as Dimensions, Semantic Scholar, Mendeley, and many others. It works equally well for open access content as it does for subscription-based content, providing researchers with recognizable buttons and indicators to get them to the most up-to-date version of content with minimal effort. Currently, around 30,000 OA articles are accessed every day via GetFTR links.

How GetFTR Supports Discovery and Access of OA Content

Although scholarly communications has become more open, problems with predatory and problematic publishers remain. There are commercial providers of lists, start-up/renegade Internet lists of good/bad and the researchers, publishers and assessors that try to understand and process what being on/off a list means to themselves, their careers and their institutions. Still, these problems persist and leaves many asking: where is the list? This plenary panel will discuss the problems of “predatory” publishing and what, if anything, publishers, our community and researchers can do to try and help minimise their abundancy/impact.

Chaired by Lorraine Estelle

There is No List: (How) Can We Combat “Predatory” Publishers in a Changing Scholarly Communications Landscape?

ChatGPT is convenient. This is one of the key reasons for its popularity. It does however present problems for academic integrity, with no reference to the source of information and no accreditation for authors. In this session I’m going to discuss a project combining the convenience of conversational discovery with the reliability of academic sources. Based on the ProQuest One Literature database, the assistant is using large language models to generate answers from academic literature including references to the source of information. I will discuss the goals, the details of the project and technology used, the outcomes and the lessons learned.

Between Convenience and Academic Integrity: Using Generative AI for Discovering Content

In this session, we present CORE-GPT, a novel question- answering platform that combines GPT-based language models and more than 32 million full-text open access scientific articles from CORE. We first demonstrate that GPT3.5 and GPT4 cannot be relied upon to provide references or citations for generated text. We then introduce CORE-GPT which delivers evidence-based answers to questions, along with citations and links to the cited papers, greatly increasing the trustworthiness of the answers and reducing the risk of hallucinations.

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