United Kingdom

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.

UKSG Annual Conference 2024

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

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

technical paper

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.

CORE-GPT: Combining Open Access research and large language models for credible, trustworthy question answering

Q&A - David Pride / Christine Stohn

Octopus.ac is a UKRI funded research publishing model, designed to promote best practice. Intended to sit alongside journals, Octopus provides a space for researcher collaboration, recording work in detail, and receiving feedback from others, allowing journals to focus on narrative. The platform removes existing barriers to publishing. It’s an entirely free, open space for researchers, without editorial and pre-publication peer review processes. The only requirement for authors is a valid ORCiD ID. Without barriers, Octopus must provide feedback mechanisms to ensure the community can self-moderate. During this session, we’ll explore Octopus’ aims to foster a collaborative environment and incentivise quality.

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Next from UKSG Annual Conference 2024

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

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