DWLresearch

The new Wellcome Trust Open Access (OA) Polic y will apply to any article that includes original, peer-reviewed research and is submitted for publication from 1 January 2021. Changes in a nutshell No embargoes accepted All research articles must be openly licensed Wellcome no longer providing funding for Article Processing Charges (APCs) in subscription/hybrid journals UNLESS they are part of a transformative agreement New grant condition added, namely, that all WT grant holders automatically grant a CC BY public copyright license to all their future Author Accepted Manuscripts (AAMs) This means that from 01 January 2021 a ll research articles supported in whole, or in part, by Wellcome must be: Made freely available through PubMed Central (PMC) and Europe PMC by the official final publication date Published under a Creative Commons attribution licence (CC BY), unless they have agreed, as an exception, to allow publication under a CC BY-ND licence Guidance and routes to compliance WT h...

Library Services over the Xmas Break Most of the Library Research Services Team will out of the office after Friday 18th December and will be back in on Monday 4th January. Online library resources will be available as normal over the Xmas break including the library search for ebooks, books, journal articles etc., A-Z Databases for literature searching and the Figshare Leicester Research Archive for open access research publications, data and theses. The Library Building will be closed on bank holidays but open on other days. Check the Library Opening Hours for full details. You will still be able to browse and borrow books, and book study space s on the days the building is open.  Please remember that the library building is still operating under COVID-19 restrictions , so please: wear a face covering (unless exempt) use the sanitising stations and clean down your study area before and after use bring your University ID for entry no food and drink apart from bottled water the...

Four Leicester academics feature in this year's list of Highly Cited Researchers, compiled by Web of Science.  To be in the list of Highly Cited Researchers you must have published multiple highly-cited papers that rank in the top 1% by citations for field and year in the Web of Science. The four Leicester academics are: Melanie J. Davies, Professor of Diabetes Medicine. Kamlesh Khunti, Professor of Primary Care Diabetes and Vascular Medicine. Alex J. Mitchell, Honorary Professor of Psycho-oncology and Liaison.  Gary B. Willars, Associate Professor, Department of Cell Physiology and Pharmacology. You can read the full list and further explanation here .

T here is a great answered question in British open access policy: what will happen to books? It has long been signalled that OA policy for the next REF, and for research funded by UKRI, will require books to be made open access. Perhaps the real question is how will books be made open access?  The current proposal by UKRI is as follows: Monographs, book chapters and edited collections that acknowledge UKRI funding to be made OA.  The version of record, or author manuscript, should be made available via an online platform...  ... using a maximum 12 month embargo and CC BY or CC BY-ND licence.  This policy would apply to works published on, or after,  1 January 2024 . UKRI are still to decide on some issues including: definitions, exceptions (there are quite a few listed), author copyright.  This policy will also inform  future REF  open access policy. We provided more details on these proposals and the accompanying consultation ear...

  The University of Leicester is celebrating International Open Access Week 2020: ‘Open with Purpose: Taking Action to Build Structural Equity and Inclusion’. Today we would like to focus on the research outputs deposited in the institutional repository and their dissemination and reach to a global audience. The University of Leicester was the first UK HEI institution to go out for tender and procure a single solution for joined research data and publications repository  in 2017, which was fully launched and operational in November 2019. Since then we had over 1,5m views and over 1.1m downloads for both data and publications. The vast majority of deposited items are journal articles followed by theses, conference contributions and datasets. Even though the journal articles are the majority of items deposited, the 'Top 10' accessed items (over the past year) consists of 4 theses, 3 reports, 2 datasets and a book chapter: 1.        School Visi...

'Equity' is the theme of International Open Access Week this year. An important goal for the open access movement has been equality of access to academic publications. The aim is to reduce the barriers that readers outside the well-funded university system in Europe and North America face in accessing journals and books.  It is telling that many of the journals and working papers we support through University of Leicester Open Journals have emerged from disciplines and projects with strong practitioner participation or geographic focus. Museum and Society  publishes articles by both academics and museum professionals, reflecting a long-standing agenda within the School of Museum Studies. The museum sector has many small institutions within it, with correspondingly small budgets. Outside of national institutions like the V and A, which houses the UK's National Art Library, a library budget becomes a 'nice to have' rather than an essential service. Open access greatly...

Early observations from the ‘Open research practices, engagement and perspectives’ survey. By Tom Moore  With the 2020 Open Access Week theme “Open with Purpose: Taking Action to Build Structural Equity and Inclusion” we thought this would be a good opportunity to give some early observations from the survey conducted between May and October 2020 of Leicester researchers on ‘Open research practices, engagement and perspectives’. The observations will focus on two areas: Potential for local structural inequity and exclusion: Role (the position in research career) External research funding The survey was jointly produced by the REF environment and library research services teams. For the research services team, the primary purpose of the survey was to take stock and get a picture of where the research community at Leicester are with the Open Research agenda. To identify potential case studies and to help us target and develop our advocacy, training and engagement program. ...

  Welcome to our University of Leicester celebration of International Open Access Week, I do hope you will join us and be involved in this important community event, which aims to make openness the default for scholarly research and ensuring that equity is at the heart of open access and open research initiatives and practice. Theme for Open Access Week The theme this year is “Open with Purpose: Taking Action to Build Structural Equity and Inclusion” and we have a variety of resources, recordings, and planned blog posts on topical Open Access (OA) challenges and benefits, all of which will support this important OA week theme, and more importantly, we hope this week will be an opportunity for new conversations, and an opportunity to think about the importance of opening up research in order to build more equitable foundations for opening up scholarly research outputs to all.  Even though we have seen a dramatic increase in the growth of open access  and evidence that...

The University Library Research Services Team are looking forward to celebrating International Open Access Week 2020 which runs from 19-25 th October 2020. The theme this year is ‘Open with Purpose: Taking action to build structural equity and inclusion’. During OA week we shall be publishing a series of themed blog posts, open access recorded conversations with UoL research stakeholders covering a variety of OA topics, and as usual we will be available for a virtual consultation on any open research topic (e.g. via MS Teams).  Celebrating open data, open publications, and open theses on Figshare with an Open Access Week upload competition We shall be taking part in the Figshare international OA week upload competition  where the University of Leicester, among other institutions worldwide, will be taking part in this exciting competition.  Figshare is the platform for our institutional research archive and we encourage you to deposit your data (via our figshare platfor...

 This video is aimed at our PGR students, but gives anyone an overview of what our team does in the library:

Image source: MikeAMorrison - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0 We have had quite a few a queries from University of Leicester authors during the past few months around 'read and publish deals', transformative publishing deals, new author dashboards from publishers with which we have signed a 'Transformative agreement' (TA), and what this all means for individual authors and their publishing choice.  Jisc Collections: working with publishers to support OA Jisc Collections is supporting Higher Education (HE) with the transition to open access (OA) through the negotiation of transitional (transformative) OA agreements which allow 100% of UK output to be published OA in accordance with UK funder policies.  What is a 'transformative journal'? PlanS  implementation comes into effect in January 2021 and they have produced a really useful collection of FAQs on this and they define a transformative journal as: "A subscription/hybrid journal that is actively committed to tr...

 EThOs - e-theses online service A free database provided by the British Library which searches over 500,000 UK Doctoral Theses, including those from the University of Leicester. Conduct your search. Search results with a green open padlock symbol mean that the full text of the thesis is available for free download. Click on the result you are interested in. You should then see more details about the thesis, including an abstract. You might be given more than one option for downloading the full text PDF of the thesis - either from EThOS or from the Institution that awarded the PhD. In order to download from EThOS you need to create a free EThOS account. Not all theses included in EThOS are available as full text PDFs. Some will have restricted access and some may not have been digitised. Those with restricted access will have a brown dotted padlock symbol next to them and those that have not been digitised will have no padlock symbol. Click on a result for more details. You will cu...

The library are pleased to announce that from Wednesday 29 July we will be providing a Click & Collect service to support essential University research for University Staff and Postgraduate Research students. Current University of Leicester staff and Postgraduate Research students can request items to be retrieved from the David Wilson Library’s lending collections (excluding Archives and Special Collections). Requests should be made through  Library Search . When your book is ready for collection an email will be sent to your University email address, you can then collect your book from the designated collection point in the David Wilson Library foyer.  You will need your University ID and to have downloaded the University Safe Zone app when coming onto the campus. You will be able to collect items Monday to Friday, between 11am and 3pm. Please note that there are no toilet facilities near the collection point, and parking spaces are limited. ...

Updated 08/02/21 The removal of the statute of the Bristol merchant and slave trader Edward Colston has focused public attention on the historic connections between places in Britain and the combined histories of slavery and imperialism. Physical legacies of the past - some, but not all, memorials - have become touchstones for debating this controversial legacy. This guide is intended to document resources that may help people research these connections.  Leicester’s traditional strengths in local and urban history mean that the David Wilson Library’s collections have a strong focus on the history of places, the built environment and public heritage. Hopefully this guide will allow you to answer questions like: who does this statute represent? Or what were there links between a town and the slave trade? Note: there are a number of print books listed here. Hopefully, these will become more accessible as we come out of lockdown. For our current services, please see our...