Kia ora kotou,

I’ve attended three library committee meeting so far as the staff representative, so I’ve now got a bit of an idea of how it works, and what its for.

It meets once a month, and has representatives who represent their faculties, as well as having UCSA and postgrad student’s association reps as well.   Mike Grimshaw chairs at the moment, he is a philosopher and sets an environment that encourages discussion (and occasionally discursion).

The first thing is that its a positive group.  People love the library, and that’s reflected here.  The library management is well respected, and in general people think we’re doing a pretty good job with what we’re given.  We can always improve things though, and the committee is keen for any suggestions about that.

The big issue – the one that’s taken a lot of time – has been about opening hours.  The student’s association ran a survey during study week last semester, and got a really large response for more study space.  IT was really well run, and I was impressed at the professional approach they took to gathering the data.  We’re still working on what exactly we are going to do as a response to that for that.  I raised the point that those who work extended hours in the library have a big responsibility, and have to be able to deal with a wide range of tasks and potential problems – its not a matter of hiring a student to stand behind a desk!

Another big thing, but it didn’t generate much discussion as it was presented so well, was the work done by the team at Macmillan Brown on their collection policies.

Keep an eye on Anne’s Librarian’s report – she posts it here every month.   I know a lot of you submit material for it, and it does get read.  It has a lot of good information on how the Library is performing.

If you’d like to talk about particular things you see in the minutes or think should be discussed, I’d love to catch up.

• Cambridge maths professor Timothy Gowers describing the UK Open Access policy as a ‘disastrous failure’ for relying on article processing charges.
• Scholarly communications officers from MIT and Yale emphasising the importance of institutional repositories for the future of academic publication.
• The emergence of second generation research data management services from Australian university libraries, with integrated planning, storage and sharing.
• ‘Layer journals’ becoming mainstream, reusing Open Access articles from repositories.

• Paying for APCs – no one has enough funds to cover the demand, and the administration of them is really difficult (eh, Peter H?).
• Research Data Management.   Some Australian libraries are showing the way, but must support is still pretty ad-hoc.
•  The upcoming NZ ORCID hub is a first in the world, and lots of people are interested in seeing how it works out.  We’re testing it at the moment.

Something that surprised me was how differently repositories are treated around the world.  Ours is very much about unique material (theses and journals), and providing green open access.  In Australia, they play a much larger role in their version of PBRF, the HERDC.  They are not nearly as interested in getting the actual articles, but just the metadata.  In the UK, because they must provide open access, repositories are much stricter about collecting as much as they can (and still only manage 50%).  In the US, disciplinary open access repositories like the Arxive are more important.

I’ve booked Poutama at 1pm tomorrow (Tues 20th) for this  – what looks to be really interesting – presentation on Open Access and metrics.

Webinar #3 – AOASG Webinar Series 2017 – Measuring what matters: metrics, incentives and openness

Presenters:

David M. Nichols – Department of Computer Science, University of Waikato, New Zealand
Michael B. Twidale – School of Information Sciences, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA

As researchers wanting to advocate for open access, we decided to explore openness from the perspective of designing metrics. Doing this made us realize that metric design is a sociotechnical problem, involving considerations of what is easy to count, what is important to count—and what to do when these are different. 

In the paper Metrics for Openness we proposed several metrics to describe different facets of open access and open research. We discuss measures to represent the public availability of articles along with their archival location, licenses, access costs, and supporting information. These various measures provided valuable insights into the design space of metrics and inevitable trade-offs.

The simple act of measuring current practice can be a powerful incentive to alter that practice: we suggest authors could start with calculating their own Practical Openness Index. A further benefit to quantifying concepts relating to the openness of published research is to provide a basis for management and policy decision-making.

Tuesday 20th June, 2017 – WA 9am-10am – AEST 11am-12noon – NZ 1pm-2pm

Institutional Repository as Swiss Army Knife: Good Enough Academic Publishing

Next week I’m off to Brisbane for a conference about repositories, and I’m going to be delivering a 7 minute talk about our ‘lightweight publishing model’.

Please come along and help me refine it at 3:30 on Thursday in room 210.

Anton

Kia ora koutou,

I’m running a “Staying Safe with Copyright” workshop on Monday, June 19 at 2pm.  It covers some copyright basics, and how you can use innovative ways to protect your work and stay safe when you are using others’.

its usually a good, interactive session.

http://canterbury.libcal.com/event/3371026

I’ve booked a ticket for the webinar below, and I’ll book a room for us to watch it together.  The room will be dependent on the mad rush of people fascinated by the topic.  (Its a great topic!)  (And Richard’s great.  He plays keys in a band. he’s like Brian Cox, but not as sniffy)

Webinar #2 – AOASG Webinar Series 2017 – In their own words: academics talk about open access

Presenter: Richard White – Manager, Copyright & Open Access Vice-Chancellor’s Office, University of Otago

What is the open access ‘culture’ in your organisation? We didn’t really have a good idea – though we had read a lot of research on this carried out in other parts of the world. So, knowing that antipodean researchers are likely to have their own strong views, we did a survey. And they didn’t disappoint: the results were at the same time expected and surprising. This talk will present some of the (anonymous) quotes from our nearly 500 respondents and invite attendees to reflect on the OA culture in their own organisations.