OA Week Competition winner: Misha Jepson, Glyndŵr University

We are pleased to announce Misha from Glyndŵr University as our OA Competition winner!!

Misha’s engagement story described the use of advocacy to both gain the attention of an institution’s senior management team and to effectively put across the benefits of a repository to an institution. The story showed the importance of the ‘Elevator Pitch’ advocacy technique in grabbing opportunities where you can to get your case heard. It also showed how aligning the use of the repository with the institution’s strategic aims can embed the system within an institution’s structure.

A copy of Misha's winning story is available here.

RAE data available for download: JISC MERIT project

A new resource which may be of interest to those who are looking to use their institutions’ RAE data to populate their repository and/ or other publication management systems.

The JISC MERIT project has just launched its RAE submissions database which contains data on every UK institutions’ RAE submission.

The database offers faceted searching on the citation data held by: institution; Unit of Assessment; output type; author. The results of any combination of these searches can then be exported and saved to Excel files.

From what I can see the database only holds citation data. It does not seem to offer full-text, links out and/or DOI look ups.

Open Access Week Competition

The week of Monday 18th - Sunday 24th October has been allocated as Open Access Week across the globe. Now in its 4th year, this dedicated week aims to promote 'Open Access as a new norm in scholarship and research'.

To mark the occasion we at the WRN are running a competition for partners with an Open Access theme. We are looking for your best repository success story. Whether it's a story of success convincing an academic researcher to interact with the repository, or a tale of success regarding a deposited item that ended up proving the wide-reaching audience of the repository.

Entries can be as long or as short as you want and we are looking to put the best stories together in a blog post and perhaps even in a new advocacy learning object!

The competition is open from now until the Friday before Open Access Week (15th October). There will be a prize available for the winning entry.

Good luck!

Learn about other Open Access Week events, contests and resources through http://www.openaccessweek.org/.

Repositories and CRIS article

An article has been published in the latest issue of Ariadne about the Repositories and CRIS event we ran in Leeds in May this year. ‘Learning how to play nicely: Repositories and CRIS’ is available from http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue64/wrn-repos-2010-05-rpt/.

The full contents of the journal issue, which may also be of interest, including articles on e-books, Library 2.0 and data management is available from http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue64/#main-articles.

Annual growth figures now available

Just a quick post to let everyone know that I have now collated our latest batch of statistical data which means we now have growth figures covering a full 12 month period. Overall, we have seen a very healthy 43.73% growth in the number of items within our repositories over the past year - well done all!

UKCGE Report on PhD Theses Confidentiality

Interseting report from Tina Barnes, UK Council for Graduate Education looking at the issue of confidentiality and embargo requests on PhD theses: http://www.ukcge.ac.uk/Resources/UKCGE/Documents/PDF/Confidentiality%20of%20PhD%20Theses%20in%20the%20UK%20(2010).pdf. Report based on a survey conducted in March 2010 with refelctions to previous 2005 survey on the same topic.

Barnes reports that the most commonly cited reason for an embargo is the protection of 'commercial interests.' However, the number of requests has not increased since the first survey in 2005 despite the progression of open access and e-deposit. This, it is claimed, is due to e-submission and repository deposit not yet becoming standard practice within UK HEIs.

The report also comments on alternative approaches to the e-presentation of embargoed theses such as 'embargoed appendices.'

New IPR discussion papers

Two new IPR discussion papers have passed under my nose in the last couple of days that others may find of interest:

Korn, N and Oppenheim, C. July 2010. JISC IPR and Licensing White Paper: A Discussion Piece. Version 1.0. http://cloudworks.ac.uk/cloud/view/3553

British Library. Driving UK research: is copyright a help or a hindrance?- a perspective from the research community. http://www.bl.uk/ip/pdf/drivingukresearch.pdf

Both of these pieces question current IPR and copyright practices and the detrimental effect they may be having in the digital age and to current research and research practices.