International Open Access Week - Early observations from the ‘Open research practices, engagement and perspectives’ survey.

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.

Survey responses

The survey was (optionally) anonymous and categorised by REF unit of assessment (UOA). We received 250 responses, with representation from all UOAs. The majority of responses (78%) were from ‘staff members’ on teaching & research, research only and teaching only contracts, this was followed by ‘postgraduate researchers (PGR’s)’ (14.4%) and ‘postdoc researchers (PDR’s)’ (7.6%). Over half of respondents (56%) had external research funding; for ‘staff members’ this rose (59%) and dropped for PGR’s (44%) and PDR’s (42%).

Observations

Over 80% of respondents have an ORCID. This was a pleasing finding. There was little difference between funded or not, however the figure dropped to 45% for PGR’s.
Most respondents have not participated in producing pre-prints (68.9%) or in Open Peer Review (77.5%). Those with external research funding (36.43%) produced pre-prints more than those without (21.82%).
There was near unanimous agreement in there being ‘value in anyone being able to access my research’ (95%) and an overwhelming ‘preference to publish open access’ (82.5%) with PDR’s in strong agreement (79%).
‘Engaging and adopting open research practice’ and ‘Sharing research data and other research outputs’ should receive more credit (reward and/or recognition). ‘Strong agreement’ was highest from PGRs (47.22% & 52.78%) and PDR’s (42.11% & 68.42%) compared to that of staff members (26.15% & 31.28%).
There was strong agreement across all groups that there was a ‘need for more support for open research activities’, this was highest among externally funded researchers (51%), PGRs (52%) and PDR’s (57%).
80% of respondents agreed that the University of Leicester should endorse a statement ‘committing to the values, principles and culture of Open Research’, with this rising to over 90% for PGR’s.

What next

Analysis of the survey will take place over the coming months, these early observations show that for PGR’s and PDR’s there is value in adopting open research practices and a need for more support and recognition.

There will be a new series of open research training sessions running between January and June 2021, these will be advertised and available to book toward the end of 2020 for PGR’s and for staff.

We want to hear from you

We are always interested in learning more about your open research practice. Please get in touch by email or we would be happy to arrange a consultation via teams with one of our Research Services Consultants.

OA Week: virtual drop-in

Please join us on Friday 23^rd October 11:00-11:45 for our Ask the Library Open Access team event.

This is your opportunity to ask questions about open access funding arrangements, transformative publishing agreements we have signed, OA requirements of research funders, Plan S, Wellcome Trust open research requirements, or anything else related to open access and open data.

We encourage you to submit your question in advance. No registration required, feel free to join us in Teams. We look forward to hearing from you.

________________________________________________________________________________

Join Microsoft Teams Meeting

Learn more about Teams | Meeting options

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

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 Fields. The field we are interested is ‘Operations Research and Marketin

Advanced Search Tip: Proximity (Adjacency) Searching

Proximity (Adjacency) Searching vs Phrase Searching When you're searching literature databases you might want to find a phrase. The easiest way to do this is to put the phrase in "speech marks". E.g. "heart disease" This will find that exact phrase - with the words next to each other in that order. BUT... You may be interested in variations on that phrase e.g. heart disease, disease of the heart, diseases of the heart, diseases of the human heart. In that case it might be better to use a proximity/adjacency search - this allows you to find one keyword next to another. Or one keyword within a specified number of words of the other keyword. When using a proximity search the keywords can be in any order. Different Databases Use Different Proximity Operators In Ovid Medline : heart adj disease finds the word heart next to the word disease, in that order. (This is the same as searching for the phrase, of course) heart adj2 disease fin

DWLresearch

Search This Blog