All Office of Scholarly Communication courses

• Where should you publish your research?
• What publishing format should you choose?

This session looks at the things you need to consider in order to reach your audience effectively, including:

• Indicators to use to assess the appropriateness of a journal for your research - Journal Impact Factor, publisher fees and publication times
• Who should own the copyright to your work?
• How you can use other people’s copyrighted material

The University’s one-year Rights Retention pilot has taught the library a great deal about the practicalities of supporting self-archiving through rights retention. In a meeting in November 2022, the Research Policy Committee considered the findings from the pilot so far and endorsed the development of a self-archiving policy for researchers. We would like to invite you to attend a briefing session to gather your feedback.

Dear esteemed author...

So-called predatory publishers regularly approach researchers via email to solicit manuscripts and conference papers. With the emphasis on publishing as a measure of academic success still strong it can be easy to give in to temptation and flattery but this can do more harm than good to a future career.

This session will look at whether these publishers are a problem, how to spot a potential problem publisher or conference and the best advice to offer researchers if they are approached.

Many researchers consider publishing a book, often in the form of a monograph, and the process can be daunting the first time around. You will get the starter-kit to get your idea off the ground, with a collection of tips and tools to make your life easier. By the end of the session, you'll have the basic knowledge -and more importantly the confidence- to take your publishing project further.

Have your say to help us negotiate the best possible read and publish agreement with Springer Nature.

UK Universities are negotiating with Springer Nature with the aim to reach a sustainable and affordable read and publish deal. Read more.

Experts from Jisc will facilitate discussions with small groups of Cambridge researchers about your experience with the publishing process and how you get access to the materials you read. By taking part, you will help to shape the approach to negotiations and communications over the next few months. This will also be an opportunity to deepen your understanding of how the negotiations are conducted, the issues involved in academic publishing, and the way colleagues in different disciplines approach these questions.

This course covers the practical steps you need to take in order to ensure that work submitted for publication by University of Cambridge researchers is compliant for REF2021.

We will introduce the principles of open access and open research, and guide you through the necessary steps to meet the open access requirements of REF2021. We will demonstrate key processes for uploading work to Symplectic, including choosing the right version of a work to upload. There will be plenty of time in the session to ask questions.

This course will be useful to you if you:

• administer the uploading of research outputs to Symplectic Elements to make them open access
• manage Symplectic profiles

Open research not only furthers the global reach of your work, it accelerates the pursuit of knowledge and fosters truly international collaboration. The University of Cambridge promotes and supports open research, so how do you embed open research into your working practices?

The Office of Scholarly Communication invites you to learn more about exciting initiatives in the life and social sciences that are already changing research culture by enabling collaboration, improving access to knowledge, and putting transparency and reproducibility at the forefront of research.

• Professor Chris Chambers (University of Cardiff) will introduce Registered Reports, a format of preregistered empirical publication in which peer review happens prior to data collection and analysis. Registered Reports aim to eradicate a variety of questionable research practices, including low statistical power, selective reporting of results, and publication bias, while allowing complete flexibility to report serendipitous findings. The initiative has been taken up by over 190 journals, including Cortex, outlets in the Nature group, generalist journals including Royal Society Open Science, and emerging clinical trial formats. Professor Chambers will discuss early evidence of impacts on the field and emerging Registered Report funding models in which journals and funders simultaneously assess proposed protocols.

• Professor Benedict Jones (University of Glasgow) leads the first Psychological Science Accelerator project, a globally distributed network of psychological science laboratories (currently over 400), representing over 50 countries on all six populated continents, that coordinates data collection for democratically selected studies. Discover how this diverse and inclusive project is accelerating the accumulation of reliable and generalizable evidence in psychological science, reducing the distance between truth about human behavior and mental processes and our current understanding.

Our speakers will also explore a range of allied initiatives, including the newly established UK Reproducibility Network. We will invite you to share your own experiences, questions and ideas.

Join us at 3pm for afternoon tea and a chance to network with our speakers and open advocates from the University community. Talks will begin at 3.30pm.

Researchers and students can now not only make their code and data available for their academic papers, but also enable others to reproduce the results with a single-click.

Code Ocean is an easy-to-use executable repository and reproducibility platform that facilitates replication and reuse of research code. This demo will provide an overview of the Code Ocean platform and explore benefits such as:

• preservation code will work today, tomorrow, next week, next year

• advanced tech suite of tools which follow reproducibility best practices

• impact enable easy reuse of code to extend research

• collaboration code is easy to share and discover.

Lunch will be provided.

Are you new to research data management or in need of a refresher? Join the OSC for a recap of all things RDM in an accessible one hour workshop.

This session will feature a whistle stop tour through the dos and don'ts of RDM in order to give attendees a brief overview of some of the major issues.

This session is being offered in conjunction with the new course Managing Data Management: Getting Started with Data Management Plan Support. The courses may be taken separately or as a pair to suit the needs of the individual learner.

PREVENT RESEARCH DISASTERS THROUGH GOOD DATA MANAGEMENT

• How much data would you lose if your laptop was stolen?
• Have you ever emailed your colleague a file named 'final_final_versionEDITED'?
• Do you know what your funder expects you to do with your research data?

As a researcher, you will encounter research data in many forms, ranging from measurements, numbers and images to documents and publications.

Whether you create, receive or collect this information, you will need to organise it.

Managing digital information properly is a complex issue. Doing it correctly from the start could save you a lot of time and hassle when preparing a publication or writing up your thesis.