DWLresearch

By Grant Denkinson, open access lead in Library Research Services.  Here are some trends I’ve spotted that might suggest some Open Access futures: Traditional formats still exist While innovation moves on, current and traditional forms of knowledge exchange continue to be useful and preferred by some and so are likely to continue. Plan S Various policy initiatives are happening, such as Plan S , which involves some national research funding organisations supported by the European Commission and the European Research Council (ERC) as cOAlition S. It aims to move us to full and immediate Open Access to research. On 5 November last year, two large funders - Wellcome Trust and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation - endorsed Plan S. Preprints and Post publication peer review Some fields such as mathematics and high-energy physics (arXiv from 1991) have, for a while, embraced a thriving preprint culture where results are made available for debate bef...

Selection of recent print theses. Here at the David Wilson Library, University of Leicester we still have a print collection of theses. However, we don't expect people to access the print copy in this day and age. We make the PDF copy of a thesis openly available to download (where possible) via our Leicester Research Archive , alongside other research publications from the University. We have also digitised and made available the majority of our theses back to the 1920s. In fact theses are the most popular and most downloaded items in the Leicester Research Archive! You would never get this many people looking at, or reading, a printed thesis! Here's Our Top 25 Most Downloaded Theses (For the period 01/07/2012 to 31/07/2018) Dept/School Title Author No. Downloads 1 School of Education Social and psychological factors in learning English as a foreign language in Lebanon. Yazigy, Rula Jamil. 15776 ...

During the next year we'll be starting to offer more training and advice on traditional publication metrics and atlmetrics. In the meantime there is already a wealth of altmetric data available to University of Leicester staff and researchers. Almetrics refers to the the alternative ways your research is being referred to. For example, has it been tweeted, blogged, cited in Wikipedia, picked up by news outlets or mentioned on FaceBook? There are various companies and platforms that are offering data or ways of collating this data. This post will focus on two: PlumX and Altmetric . Please be aware: Altmetrics is still a new and emerging field and not all research outputs will have altmetrics data. Altmetrics in Literature Databases You will see the PlumX Metrics icon appearing when you search some of our databases e.g. Scopus and EbscoHost. For example, this Richard III paper by Turi King et al . - you can see the PlumX Metrics option on the right of the page: ...