All Office of Scholarly Communication courses

FAIR data are those that are Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable. Sounds simple enough, but what do each of these terms mean in a practical sense and how can your researchers tell if their research data is FAIR?

The Research Data Team at the Office of Scholarly Communication join forces with FOSTER Open Science to offer this workshop to help you get to grips with the key principles and consider how you can help your researchers make their data FAIRer.

Once you have completed How FAIR is that research data?: an online course (for research support staff including librarians and administrators in all disciplines) we invite you to attend this workshop session with the Research Data Team from the Office of Scholarly Communication to discuss your experiences in assessing the FAIRness of your data, including any problems you encountered. We will also discuss guidelines on how to best support researchers in making their data FAIR.

FAIR data are those that are Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable. Sounds simple enough, but what do each of these terms mean in a practical sense and how can you tell if your own research data is FAIR?

The Research Data Team at the Office of Scholarly Communication join forces with FOSTER Open Science to offer a practical workshop to help you get to grips with the key principles and consider how you can start to make your own data FAIRer.

Once you have completed How FAIR is your research data? An online course (for researchers and postgraduate students in all disciplines) we invite you to attend this workshop session with the Research Data Team from the Office of Scholarly Communication to discuss your experiences in assessing the FAIRness of your data, including any problems you encountered. You are welcome to bring examples of your data to this session to further develop your skills, or try your hand at FAIRifying more example datasets from Apollo.

Helene Brinken (University of Gottingen, FOSTER) will guide you through workflows, tools and resources to help you embed open research into your research practices.

This session will take place in 1S4 Computer Room, Faculty of Education.

More information to follow.

Following the workshop, you are invited to stay for our event Reproducibility in action: improving research in the life and social sciences.

'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 the problem of predatory publishers using case studies. Attendees will be given tips on how to spot a predatory publisher or conference and the best advice to offer if one of their researchers has been approached.

Are your students confused by copyright? Do you struggle to find the answers to their questions? You are not alone!

This final session of our Librarian Toolkit series on helping researchers to publish, this workshop will deal with common copyright questions which arise during the publication process. From including copyrighted work in a thesis to sharing published work on social networks copyright is a complex minefield and it can be hard to know where to start when giving advice.

This session for librarians will equip attendees with knowledge about third party copyright, making work available open access and how researchers can share their work legally online.

David Carr and Robert Kiley from the Wellcome Trust are coming to Cambridge to talk with researchers about the Trust’s policy on data, software and materials management and sharing, which was released in July 2017. They will give short talks about the extended requirements for sharing all research outputs and an update on how their policy on open research has been working. Afterwards you will have the opportunity to ask them any questions you might have.

This event will be held in the Gurdon Institute tea-room.

At the start of this year, UKRI’s open access policy for long-form scholarship came into effect. This policy applies to monographs, edited collections and book chapters under contract from 1 January 2024 that acknowledge funding from any of the UK’s research councils. This session will introduce the policy, how to comply and the broader open access books landscape, allowing plenty of time for questions.

Advertised on behalf of ReproducibiliTea, the Open Science Journal Club in the Department of Psychology

The Open Science Journal Club invites anyone interested in Open Research to join this lunchtime session, where Dav Clark will introduce Gigantum, a free open source tool designed to streamline reproducible and collaborative data science. Gigantum aims to bring together complex tools, workflows and community approaches that enable exciting research collaborations and also enable others to evaluate and build on your work.

The session will introduce the Gigantum Client, an MIT licensed web application that runs locally, simplifying and automating tools like Docker, Git, and launching environments like JupyterLab. Dav will also describe paid services hosted by Gigantum that enable single-click publication and collaboration from the Client. You will learn about versioning and collaboration features, how to easily move work between local resources and the cloud, as well as new approaches to creating and managing scientific datasets. There will also be the chance to go under the hood to show how sophisticated users (e.g., Research Software Engineers, Data Librarians, etc.) can create customized data science environments that are easy to distribute, and are accessible to users with diverse skill sets.

All welcome - if you aren't a member of the Department of Psychology, please meet at the Department Reception by 12.55 and Ben Farrar will show you to the Nick Macintosh Seminar Room (a second escort will check at 1pm for latecomers!).

This session will include a hands-on demo, so please bring your laptops. You may bring your lunch if you wish, and Dav is happy to join participants for lunch afterwards.

• Do you use data in your research, or do you provide research support to those who do?
• Would you like to learn basic programming skills to program your own models and applications?

There is more to programming than simply writing lines of code. This free workshop will provide you with a basic set of skills to make the coding process more effective, less error prone and more maintainable.

This workshop is intended for those looking to obtain a basic understanding of the approach to be taken when designing a program as well as actually writing small programs to solve specific problems. It is designed for those with no prior experience of programming.

It is organised by the Office of Scholarly Communication and The Betty and Gordon Moore Library, and delivered by Peter Smyth (Research Associate) and Chris Park (Data Scientist) from the UK Data Service.

Much research claims to benefit communities globally but are research outputs really available to everyone, even if they are made open access?

Join us on a world tour to discover what is possible when researchers and governments make their research outputs available openly. What kind of impact do they have outside the academy – and outside the global north? What more can we do to make these outputs useful to innovators and to those researching outside the academic sector?

Everyone is welcome to attend this free event: visit our booking page.

Where and how can you share your articles? Each article goes through different versions, from submitted manuscript, through accepted manuscript, proof, and finally version of record. Often the text is very similar, but subtle differences mean that one version can be legally shared and another cannot. In this course, you will learn how to identify article versions and apply the correct terminology.

Publishing journal articles is a key element of a successful research career. As you are starting on this journey, you may have a lot of questions, for example:

• Where and how should I publish my research?
• How do I maximise the number of readers and citations?
• How should I respond to reviewers?

Some learned societies are increasingly dependent on publishing revenues, yet as open access becomes the new normal, researchers and librarians alike are questioning expensive subscription and publishing deals.

The Office of Scholarly Communication presents a panel debate for Open Access Week 2018 and Cambridge Festival of Ideas 2018. Join representatives from learned societies in the arts and sciences, including the Royal Society, the Royal Society of Chemistry and the Royal Historical Society, in conversation with their members within the University of Cambridge to ask ‘what is a learned society in the 21st century?’ How can the societies sustain their place in the academic landscape and answer the challenges created by open access requirements?

Everyone is welcome to attend this free event: visit our booking page.

We want to hear YOUR views on research. Who owns your work? Who should access it? How does your research compare to other disciplines?

Come along for a free lunch and to discuss how the University can support you in practicing Open Research. Learn about the requirements placed on researchers and the tools you could use to boost your impact. Find out what your peers think and contribute to shaping a University-wide strategy for Open Research training.

The Office of Scholarly Communication invites you to join Naomi Penfold of ASAPbio for an hour of relaxed, small group discussions on how and why publishing is changing to become more transparent, and what this means for you.

Bring your lunch and join a 'discussion table' to explore questions such as...

• why change academic publishing?
• who and what is transparency good for?
• what should we not change?
• what are preprints and why bother?
• where does peer review fit in?

ASAPbio is a scientist-driven non-profit ensuring the voices of science and the scientist are represented in innovation to improve transparency in life science communication.

This event is open to all, although will be of particular relevance to those in biomedical and life sciences.

Librarians are used to dealing with data in all its forms but sometimes researchers aren't so sure. Many funders now require evidence from the researcher of how they plan to manage the data they use and collect during the research process and this often has to be tailored to specific guidelines. This presents a great opportunity for library staff to work with the research community but how do they get started?

Join the OSC to learn more about what a data management plan is, why they are necessary, the different information needed, how to complete one and how to support someone in completing theirs. This interactive train-the-trainer workshop will include a mix of presentations and activities with a chance to put your new knowledge into practice.

Prevent research disasters through good data management

• How much information 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 information?

As a researcher, you will encounter research data in many forms, ranging from literature sources, interviews, measurements, numbers and images.

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.

Feeling lost in getting started on data management?

Attend the workshop to get inspired and started on how to structure, backup and describe your data.

This workshop (for students in the area of physical and human geography, as well as STEM subjects generally) will work through the challenges around managing research data as well as the benefits of working reproducibly. Participants will be provided with guidance and resources on how to effectively manage projects and avoid data loss throughout the research process.

You will hear of what can happen if researchers do not manage their data well as well as what happens to research data after the end of a project, such as how to share and store data in a long-term and sustainable way. It is never too early to start thinking about these things, so get a head start on your research data management practices now!

Department of Geography, Seminar Room

Paola Quattroni from Cancer Research UK coming to run a workshop on 11th May.

This is a really good opportunity to influence the Cancer Research UK data policy and give feedback to your funder about the changes you would like to see. Paola will give a short talk and then the majority of the workshop will be given over to discussions and opportunities for researchers to feedback their experiences, problems and suggested solutions to enable more data sharing. As well as discussing data sharing Paola will also bring some data management plans so researchers can find out more about what they should and should not be putting in their grant applications.

Solving the problem of Open Access or causing more trouble?

Open Access can be hard to understand at the best of times but one term that causes particular confusion is ‘mirror journals’. Promoted as one way of solving the problem of a lack of publisher interest in Open Access, these titles are appearing in every discipline but what are they?

Join the OSC for this information webinar to find out all about mirror journals, their history, the problems they can solve and those that they can potentially cause!

Are the researchers in your department confused about what they need to do about Open Access?

This support session will equip you to help them understand:

• what Open Access policies actually mean for researchers across the disciplines
• what they are required to do in order for their research to be eligible for REF 2021

Open Access can be a confusing topic for researchers and they will often turn to those within their department for answers. These interactive sessions will help those with these responsibilities to guide researchers through the process of making their research available.

Each session will begin with a short presentation introducing Open Access followed by a chance for attendees to ask questions on issues of local relevance.

Note that this session is targeted towards those supporting the sciences, technology, engineering and mathematics although those from other disciplines are also welcome to attend

The majority of professional learning happens on the job, especially where colleagues with different skill sets come together to achieve common goals. Productive relationships between academics, administrators and service providers are crucial to enabling the flow of information and skills to benefit all parties. This exchange can be facilitated by professional networks, which provide not only formal learning, but also opportunities to collaborate and learn from each other.

In this talk you will hear about the experience of two librarians, Charlotte Smith and River Cronin, who made the most of the Data Champions network (https://www.data.cam.ac.uk/intro-data-champions): how they set up a collaboration with researchers, what they achieved through it, and what they learnt in the process.

The talk will be useful to anyone thinking of joining or setting up a network, as well as current members of professional networks who are looking for new ways to challenge themselves. We hope you will be inspired to discover ways in which collaborating with diverse colleagues may provide unusual opportunities for your development and professional success.

Join the OSC for a discussion of Open Access issues relevant to HASS librarians

The Open Access message has been geared towards sharing academic outputs like journal articles and their underlying data as well as being mandated by funders but how do you promote Open Access if none of these areas apply to your work?

This final webinar in our "Librarian Toolkit" series on Open Access will address Open Access from the perspective of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences librarians and cover topics such as Open Access monographs, the implications of not having a funder and places to share your work.

A detailed programme schedule can be found further below. Alternatively you can download a copy.

Practical information regarding the event is also available. Please download a copy.

The publication of books in Open Access format has been under discussion for several years, and has attracted interest especially from researchers in Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences. Questions around the topic abound in light of developments including Plan S, changing funder policy and proposed requirements for the next REF.  

This one-day symposium is aimed primarily at researchers, postgraduate students, librarians and research support staff from the University of Cambridge, but it is also open to the public. It will explore the policies, economics and future directions of Open Monograph publishing. Attendees will have the opportunity to discuss innovations in the sector, share their enthusiasms and concerns about current developments, and learn more about the opportunities for and realities of publishing an open access book. 

IMPORTANT BOOKING INFORMATION: This event is free of charge for participants who have a Raven password and booking can be made directly from this webpage. For those who do not have a Raven password there will be a charge of £50 to attend the event. Please visit our esales form to make a booking. Please note that bookings via the esales form will close on 25 September at 11pm and bookings via UTBS (Raven password) on Tuesday 1 October noon (or earlier if we reach full capacity). Unfortunately, we cannot guarantee any dietary requirements (apart from vegetarian) for bookings made after 25 September.

Programme highlights:

Professor Martin Paul Eve (Birkbeck, University of London) will present on the economics and political-economics of open-access monograph publishing.

Professor Margot Finn (President of the Royal Historical Society) will discuss open monographs from the perspectives of the RHS.

Panel session 1: ‘Policy and practice: Moving towards Plan S and REF’. Chair: Dr Steven Hill (Director of Research, Research England). Panel: Prof Martin Paul Eve (Birkbeck, University of London), Prof Margot Finn (President of RHS), Hannah Hope (Open Research Coordinator, Wellcome Trust), Prof Roger Kain (School of Advanced Study, University of London & Chairman of the UUK OA Monographs Group) 

Panel session 2: ‘Innovations in open monograph publishing’. Chair: Patricia Killiard (Deputy Director, Academic Services, Cambridge University Libraries). Panel includes representatives from: Cambridge University Press, UCL Press, Open Book Publishers, Springer Nature and Radical Open Access 

What's new in Open Access for 2018?

Open Access is a fast moving area but it can be hard to find the time to keep up. This webinar on Open Access offers a brief update on the biggest changes both within Cambridge and the wider world in the last year.