Open Access and content mining

We've previously blogged about the British Library Electronic Theses Online Service (EThOS) that stores theses metadata and, where possible, the full text of digitised theses. BL Labs now wants to explore EThOS metadata for content mining or analysis of trends and is currently inviting research questions that could be answered using this approach. The move follows on from its project providing data to Virginia Tech to develop algorithms for automated subject tagging of theses.

This is another example of an overlay project underpinned by large-scale data harvesting such as the successful Mechanical Curator project that released one million out of copyright images into the public domain for researcher use and re-use.

ChemSpider is an earlier project that brings together chemical structures from a variety of sources into a free database including data from St Andrews theses. This publishing platform provides opportunities to make good quality data public, re-use and preserve known compound data and related information to advance research, develop services and surface the data on the wider internet.

It's an exciting area of Open Access and Open data and there are likely to be further developments as efforts are made digitising older theses and other sources.

Image captured by the Mechanical Curator project.  No known copyright restrictions.

Share My Thesis competition - update

Last week the British Library Ethos service announced the winner of the Share My Thesis competition. We posted about the competition back in January, see here for more information.
 
The entrants had to first tweet about why their research is/was important using the #ShareMyThesis hashtag. The 8 shortlisted entrants then had to write a short article to elaborate on their tweet. You can read the winning entries here: 1st, 2nd, and 3rd.

Although the competition is now closed, the British Library Ethos service still encourages PhD students past and present to use #ShareMyThesis to share their PhD research with a wider audience.

5000th repository item - update

This is a quick update on the 5000th item in the repository we highlighted back in February: A phenomenological-enactive theory of the minimal self, by Brett Welch. We sent Brett a copy of Martin Paul Eve’s book Open Access and the Humanities as a prize. Last week he received the book and was kind enough to send us a picture (we especially like the Saltire in the background!)

You can read Brett's thesis here:  http://hdl.handle.net/10023/6043 

Martin Paul Eve's book is also freely available to download and read online through our library catalogue, here: http://library.st-andrews.ac.uk/record=b2173431~S5

New open access inter-faith journal

We are delighted to announce the first volume of Convocamus, a new journal on the University of St Andrews Library journal hosting platform.

Conceived and produced by Samuel Mellish and a team of undergraduate students in St Mary's College, Convocamus is an inter-faith publication providing a platform for scholarly dialogue. Sam provided a case study for our recent event, Managing journals: challenges and opportunities.

Following the absence of opportunities to pursue research projects outside of the undergraduate structure, students of St Mary's College sought to form a platform for such study. As members of a religious college the students wanted to use this platform to bring together individuals from a number of religions. This led to the birth of Convocamus. 

The editorial staff hope the journal will encourage inter-faith dialogue, and provide a platform for academic debate. Also, we hope it encourages undergraduates to take their studies beyond their degree.

The first articles have already had significant interest, with over 500 PDF downloads of the current issue. The greatest usage was understandably at the point of publication (261 article downloads in December 2014), with usage continuing into 2015.

The journal's Editor-in-Chief, Sam Mellish, would like to thank all those who have contributed and read the journal so far.

Read the first issue of Convocamus at: http://ojs.st-andrews.ac.uk/index.php/convocamus/issue/view/98/showToc

You can also let your comments and thoughts be heard via the Convocamus Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/convocamus

New St Andrews membership with the Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute (MDPI)

The University Library is delighted to announce that we now have a membership with MDPI - Open Access Publishing that publishes in disciplines ranging from Biology and Life Sciences to Social Sciences, Arts and Humanities. We hope that the choice of journals, an easy user interface for authors and system integration with central funding needs will make this an attractive Open Access publication venue choice for researchers.

Please note the eligibility criteria for the University of St Andrews central open access funds.

Central funds are available for:

• Papers acknowledging funding from Arthritis Research UK, Breast Cancer Campaign, British Heart Foundation, Cancer Research UK, Leukaemia & Lymphoma Research and the Wellcome Trust, where the corresponding author is at the University of St Andrews
• Papers acknowledging RCUK funding (AHRC, BBSRC, EPSRC, ESRC, MRC, NERC or STFC), where the corresponding author is at the University of St Andrews
• Corresponding authors who are full St Andrews staff or research students and who have no other source of open access funding 

St Andrews authors who are not eligible under the above criteria will still receive the membership discount but will be requested to pay for Article Processing Charges from their own budgets, should the paper be accepted for publication.

In all cases authors must confirm eligibility with the University Library before agreeing to pay an APC.

For further information, please visit:

http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/library/services/researchsupport/openaccess/oafunding/

or email open-access-support@st-andrews.ac.uk

From Valera, S. and Bode, B.E. (2014) Strategies for the synthesis of yardsticks and abaci for nanometre distance measurements by pulsed EPR, Molecules 19(12), 20227-20256 doi 10.3390/molecules191220227

Distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License.

New open access e-books available

The contingent of open access e-books in our library catalogue continues to grow with two new recent additions. The books, published by Cambridge University Press, are both Creative Commons licensed and are freely available to read online or download as a pdf.

Open Access and the Humanities, by Martin Paul Eve (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). DOI: 10.1017/CBO9781316161012. CC BY-SA

http://library.st-andrews.ac.uk/record=b2173431~S5

“In the first decade and a half of the twenty-first century, the words ‘open access’ have been uttered with increasing frequency in universities around the world. Beginning as little more than a quiet murmur in niche scientific sub-disciplines but developing towards a globally mandated revolution in scholarly communication, the ascent of open access looks set to continue. Despite this rapid, worldwide rise, however, many misunderstandings about the phenomenon remain. At the most basic level, this includes the key question: what exactly is ‘open access’?” …

© Martin Paul Eve 2014, Open Access and the Humanities: Contexts, Controversies and the Future

The History Manifesto, by Jo Guldi and David Armitage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). DOI: 10.1017/9781139923880. CC BY-NC-ND

http://library.st-andrews.ac.uk/record=b2173411~S5

“We live in a moment of accelerating crisis that is characterised by the shortage of long-term thinking. Even as rising sea-levels threaten low-lying communities and coastal regions, the world’s cities stockpile waste, and human actions poison the oceans, earth, and groundwater for future generations. We face rising economic inequality within nations even as inequalities between countries abate while international hierarchies revert to conditions not seen since the late eighteenth century, when China last dominated the global economy. Where, we might ask, is safety, where is freedom? What place will our children call home? There is no public office of the long term that you can call for answers about who, if anyone, is preparing to respond to these epochal changes. Instead, almost every aspect of human life is plotted and judged, packaged and paid for, on time-scales of a few months or years. There are few opportunities to shake those projects loose from their short-term moorings. It can hardly seem worth while to raise questions of the long term at all.” …

© Jo Guldi and David Armitage 2014, The History Manifesto

From darkness to the light: raising the visibility of St Andrews research on the internet

"That’s why I filed the paper into PURE – the system does a great job of making materials widely visible." Dr Philip Roscoe, Reader, School of Management

PURE and Research@StAndrews:FullText have served as the University's research information system and Open Access repository for a number of years. As the mechanisms for curating and surfacing the University's research they also provide data and feeds that Schools can configure to present Open Access publications. A good example is Jennifer Kerr's and Mary Woodcock Kroble's work on the School of Management publications pages that also list theses and feeds into individual researcher profiles. The School of Classics was one of the first to incorporate PURE web services feeds and repository links into its web pages to present its publications lists dynamically. Dedicated IT staff  like Jennifer and Mary work within Schools to extract data from central services and present it in ways that showcase publications in attractive and appropriate styles for their research disciplines. This makes more efficient use of research publications data and allows Schools to build on developments in central services to present data dynamically instead of maintaining static lists of publications. We encourage Schools to consider using these services to make their research more visible and to support Open Access. Above all, we hope these services encourage researchers to deposit into PURE to raise their profile and the visibility of their publications on the internet.  PURE and Research@StAndrews:FullText are under active development.

PURE deposits
The Research Policy Office offers advice and training on accessing and using the PURE system and can provide more information on web services for School IT staff.
The Open Access and Research Publications Support (OARPS) team can help with questions about publication deposit, Open Access and PURE web services open-access-support@st-andrews.ac.uk
Our Theses web page provides support and contact details for questions about theses deposit and locating St Andrews theses.

Open Data is an increasingly important aspect of Open Access that researchers need to consider. The St Andrews Research Data Management website provides detailed information on funder compliance, policy, data management plans and other aspects of managing research data.