Open access at Leicester

Open access at Leicester

International OA week

The wrap up of the International Open Access Week 2017 is a perfect occasion to give you an update on Open Access (OA) related activities at University of Leicester accompanied with fun statistics (as fun as statistics can be!).

During the Open Access week the University Open Access and Research Data Team ran a series of pop-up stalls at various locations across the main campus as well as in hospital sites (RKCSB & Glenfield), offering advice on raising the discoverability of research profiles. Also as part of the celebrations we have launched a completely redesigned OA website. Visit www.le.ac.uk/openaccess to explore the essential guidance how to make your research outputs OA.

Fig.1. Main page of new, redesigned Open Access website (www.le.ac.uk/openaccess)

The outreach campaign was in addition to routine talks and tailored training sessions that the team provides for departments across the University every year. Throughout the year 2017 we have delivered 16 of such sessions for researchers and 3 workshops in collaboration with RED, designed for our administrative staff.

Leicester Research Archive (LRA) in numbers

LRA is the University of Leicester institutional repository, showcasing all the research outputs to the members of public. LRA is growing both in case of readership (downloads per year – fig.2B) and in terms of number of items available (deposited items per year - fig.2A). One can browse the repository itself (https://lra.le.ac.uk/) or thanks to google indexing just use the google scholar to find the required items. Every new item, made available in LRA is indexed by google within 10minutes which boosts its discoverability.

Fig.2. LRA statistics – number of deposits per year (A) is over four times higher than in 2012. The number of successful downloads (B) per year shows that our readership doubled over the last two years.

Top trumps

The most read/downloaded items in LRA are PhD thesis, and while speaking of it we have to mention that thanks to digitisation project funded by Alumni all theses dating back to 1920’s were scanned and made available via LRA.

Top three downloaded theses:

1) 8722 downloads: Social and psychological factors in learning English as a foreign language in Lebanon. (1991) Yazigy, Rula Jamil, http://hdl.handle.net/2381/35692

2) 6761 downloads: Mass media and society: The six normative theories and the role of social, political and economic forces in shaping media institution and content: Saudi Arabia - a case study. (1987) Al-Ahmed, Mohammed S., http://hdl.handle.net/2381/34594

3) 4271 downloads: Physical and Chemical Investigations of Starch Based Bio-Plastics. (2015) Abolibda Tariq Ziyad Y., http://hdl.handle.net/2381/33021

Searching ABS Journals in Business Source Premier

In Business and Management Studies, researchers undertaking a literature review sometimes search across a defined group of journals. This is a way of focusing the literature search to make the results more relevant to the questions in hand. Groups are often chosen from the Association of Business Schools (ABS)'s Academic Journal Guide . Read more how about how they put together the guide here . There are several ways to search across ABS journals. Here is how to do it in Business Source Premier, a leading literature database for this subject area. 1. Login into the ABS journal guide. If you have never used it before you will need to create an account. 2. You can use the guide to draw up a group of journals either by using the Rankings information or the Fields. Fields divides up the journals into categories of research focus e.g. Accounting, Finance etc. In this example we will use the Fi...

You can now export multiple citations from Google Scholar

You can now export multiple citations from Google Scholar if you have a Google Account. Go to Google Scholar and sign into your Google Account. Conduct your search. Click on the Star icon (Save) under each reference you want to export. Then click on My Library in the top, right of the screen. Select all the references and click on the Export option: Click the Star/Save Icon Choose Export Option To Export into EndNote Choose the EndNote option. Open the EndNote file that is created. The references should automatically import into EndNote. To Export into RefWorks Choose the RefMan option. Save the RIS file that is created. Login to your RefWorks account. Click on the plus (+) button. Choose Import References. Add the RIS file you just saved. Set the file import option to RIS - Reference Manager. Click import and your references will be imported. --- Good Practice Tip: Always check that all the reference information you need has been...

Research as comics - Applied Comics Network

On Saturday 9th May I attended the first Applied Comics Network event to talk about the PhD sessions I offer on 'Communicating your research as a comic strip'. The event was looking at the use of comics for informational and educational purposes. Attendees included academics, PhD students, graphic facilitators and comic creators. Applied Comics Network is run by Lydia Wysocki ( Newcastle Science Comic , Applied Comics Etc ), John Swogger (Archaeology in the Caribbean, Something Different About Dad), and Ian Horton (Coordinator for Contextual and Theoretical Studies, London College of Communication). They started the event off (before & after the interruption of a fire alarm!) by looking at the different types of comics the network might cover. They had all come up with different categories but they included: Instructional (instructions for using/doing things) Informative (providing facts/information) Educational (these might be factual or have a narrative to ...

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