Open Access in the Humanities Roadshow - update

© SPARC Europe

This is an update to an earlier post about the Open Access in the Humanities Roadshow that is being hosted by the University of St Andrews, and organised by SPARC Europe and the University Library. You can now see details of the event and book your place through Eventbrite, here.

Date: Wednesday 26th November
Time: 12:00 noon - 2.00 pm
Venue: Lower College Hall, North Street, St Andrews.


The programme is as follows:

• Welcome and general introduction: Lily Neal, on behalf of SPARC Europe, the sponsor of this OA in the Humanities UK Roadshow
• 12.00: Introduction to the event and welcome from the University and the Library, Janet Aucock
• 12.05: Eelco Ferwerda of OAPEN and DOAB
• 12.20: Dr Rupert Gatti, Open Book Publishers and University of Cambridge
• 12.35: Dr Guy Rowlands of the University of St. Andrews
• 12.50: Q&A and discussion. Lunch and Publishers’ exhibition: view the publishers’ Open Access publications, meet the publishers and chat with them about publishing opportunities

A number of Open Access publishers will also be present at the event in a 'tradeshow' area. This presents a unique opportunity to meet publishers in person, and to discuss the practicalities of publishing openly in both Open Access monographs and journals.

The publishers that will be present:

• Manchester University Press
• Knowledge Unlatched
• Ubiquity Press
• Open Book Publishers
• OAPEN
• The Open Library of Humanities
• Open Humanities Press

We hope to see you there!

For further details please contact open-access-support@st-andrews.ac.uk.

Celebrating Open Access @ St Andrews

We are always delighted at the wealth of content we discover through our open access services, and the insight we get on the amazing research going on in our academic community. To celebrate this, we have created a range of bookmarks with images illustrating some items in our repository. The first three in the series are shown below, and we will be adding more soon.

 Image from Byrne, RW, Bates, L & Moss, CJ 2009, 'Elephant cognition in primate perspective' Comparative Cognition & Behavior Reviews, vol 4, pp. 65-79. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/1612 

Image from Jaeger, A, Selmeczy, D, O'Connor, AR, Diaz, M & Dobbins, I 2012, 'Prefrontal cortex contributions to controlled memory judgment: fMRI evidence from adolescents and young adults' Neuropsychologia, vol 50, no. 14, pp. 3745-3756. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/3243

Image by Tiago Marques, fieldwork for: Aars, J, Marques, TALO, Andersen, M, Belikov, S, Boltunov, A, Buckland, ST & Wiig, O 2009, 'Estimating the Barents Sea polar bear subpopulation size' Marine Mammal Science, vol 25, no. 1, pp. 35-52. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/1879

 

3000 items and the open access cake

In what is becoming a regular summer event, this week we celebrated another landmark for our open access repository with the 3000th item made available in Research@StAndrews:FullText

Akira O’Connor deposited a version of his paper in our Research Information System, Pure, in order to make it open access. The publisher of the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, MIT Press, allows authors to archive the final version of their article after a short embargo.

“In the JoCN paper, we report an experiment in which we scanned people's brains as they were completing a memory task. Using these fMRI scans, we were able to show that the left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (a region of the brain's surface near your left temple) is actually involved in processing the meaning of words, rather than directly involved in memory retrieval as was previously thought.”

Dr O’Connor already has a number of open access papers in Research@StAndrews:FullText: in most cases these are his accepted manuscripts, the version most commonly allowed by publishers. His latest paper is currently submitted to an open access journal, Frontiers in Psychology. When told about our latest landmark, he contacted us to say:

“That the library has put so much effort into making our work accessible to all is something I'm very proud of. The OA fund and Research@StAndrews:FullText provide a range of options for St Andrews researchers to publish their work in the most suitable journal whilst also acknowledging that the way scholarly output is disseminated is changing. It's a comprehensive approach to open access and I look forward to seeing it go from strength to strength.”

UPDATE: More on open access from Akira O'Connor's blog

The ‘3000’ spot was narrowly missed by an open access article in PLoS ONE, which has been added to our repository under a Creative Commons Licence. The lead author of this paper, PhD student Joana Carvalho, is supervised by co-author Dr Tiago Marques, who also has a number of research outputs in the repository and has previously featured in our blog. This new article describes a study of the population status of the western chimpanzee, Pan troglodytes verus, which has been classified as an Endangered species.

Other recent open access items contributed to the repository include Phd theses:
How terrorism ends : understanding the outcomes of violent political contestation by Sarah V Marsden
The victims of a sorted life : ageing and caregiving in an American retirement community by Philip Y Kao
and journal articles:
Policy change and learning in the RBC model by Kaushik Mitra, George W Evans and Seppo Honkapohja
4273π : bioinformatics education on low cost ARM hardware by Daniel Barker et al.

We will be organising a ‘champagne moment’ soon with our winning author by way of celebration. In the meantime Library staff took a few minutes out to share some open access cake. Not only has our content grown since 2010 - so has our cake!

Open access cake 2010

Open access cake 2013

University Librarian John MacColl

Highlighting open access outputs in School of Classics

Following collaboration between the Library repository team and School computing officers, the University of St Andrews School of Classics has developed new web pages highlighting content from Research@StAndrews:FullText.

Using RSS feeds and scripts to repurpose the data, the new Classics site provides a dynamic list of completed theses, with options to view abstracts and link to the full text. There are also handy links back to Library web pages with further information on finding theses and general advice on open access. (Note, not all theses are available to download immediately due to embargoes).

In addition there is a page that links to open access research publications by staff in Classics, all of which have full text available in Research@StAndrews:FullText

Our embedded usage stats show healthy downloads for some of these research outputs, for example 'Written Into the landscape : Latin epic and the landmarks of literary reception' (PhD thesis by James S McIntyre, 122 downloads) and 'Training athletes and explaining the past in Philostratus' Gymnasticus' (Book chapter by Dr Jason Konig, 70 downloads).

Link to School of Classics Postgraduate research and staff publications from http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/classics/research/

Public visibility for St Andrews research activity

A new portal showcasing the excellent research at University of St Andrews, Research@StAndrews, is now publicly available from the University's Research pages.




The Research@StAndrews portal features activities, researcher profiles, links to Schools and research publications.