Scottish Journal of Performance now available in the repository

This week the Open Access team archived the first two issues of the Scottish Journal of Performance (SJoP). SJoP is a peer-reviewed postgraduate-led Open Access journal published by The Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.

CC-BY 4.0 Scottish Journal of Performance

We were lucky enough to get Ben Fletcher-Watson and Thomas Butler from SJoP to speak at the open journals workshop held in Parliament Hall last week. Just to recap, last week the University hosted a workshop called Managing Journals: Challenges and Opportunities. The workshop brought together journal editors and managers, with varied perspectives and editorial practices, to speak about their experience of running locally operated journals. The presentations delivered by Ben and Thomas gave a fascinating insight into a truly unique journal which comprises of more than just text, but also multimedia such as videos, images, and soon audio.

In his presentation, Ben mentioned the need to preserve the journal in as many places as possible. With this in mind, Ben requested that the library archive SJoP articles in the institutional repository. This has the dual benefit of giving the journal an additional permanent storage location as well as potentially increasing readership by offering another access avenue. When uploading content to the repository, we also enhance the metadata and add elements such as subject headings and classifications, which further increases the discoverability of content.

You can read the SJoP articles held in the repository here: http://research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk/handle/10023/5513

‘Scottish competition bagpipe performance…’ : first Royal Conservatoire of Scotland postgraduate thesis added to Research@StAndrews:FullText

Since 2000, the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, Scotland's national centre of professional vocational training in performance arts, has offered research programmes leading to the awards of Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) and Master of Philosophy (MPhil). These postgraduate research degrees are validated and awarded by the University of St Andrews.

The Royal Conservatoire currently doesn't have a mandate for the electronic submission of theses. However, there is a desire to make as much of their thesis content electronically available, where possible. The University's digital repository, Research@StAndrews:FullText, is the ideal place to make that happen. Also, given the nature of the Royal Conservatoire's theses; multimedia, performance-based, and the associated copyright issues that can arise, the St Andrews repository staff are best placed to deal with these, given their experience of copyright issues in theses.

Consequently, in the repository there is now a collection specifically for the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland's theses, and the first title, hopefully the first of many, has been added:

'Scottish competition bagpipe performance : sound, mode and aesthetics' by Simon McKerrell.

Although the aforementioned copyright issues can be complicated, it is hoped that by working together, the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and the University of St Andrews will be able to realise their shared goal of making the fruits of research electronically available to all.