It’s nearly the end of a busy year for the Library Research Support Team. There is an overview of our activities on our web page (specifically our Team Remit) but the bulk of our work is in the area of open access: supporting researchers in meeting the requirements of the university and REF open access policies (and any additional funder policies), administering our grant from UKRI for Gold open access, administering the university’s e-theses collection and supporting the uptake of ORCiDs in our research community.
In 2018 we have:
- Checked over 1980 records on RIS and chased up any that needed files uploading in order to be compliant with the REF and university Open Access policies (Engineering does this work in-house but we cover the other 6 Colleges/Schools).
- Answered over 300 queries by email, phone and in person. Most of these are on open access, ORCiD or RIS. Contact us at iss-research@swansea.ac.uk
- Revamped our website and moved content to new LibGuides; published 20 blog posts and lots of tweets.
- Run 17 sessions on open research topics including two Open Research Cafe events supported by a grant from SURF and co-organised with Rebecca Kelleher.
- Processed 50 applications for the UKRI Gold open access fund, totaling around £65k
- Processed 66 new PhD theses for the new E-Theses portal and added a 1000 older theses as part of a retrospective digitization project
This is in addition to work supporting copyright, bibliometrics/Scival, the Postgraduate Skills programme and participation in the wider Welsh/UK Scholarly Communications community.
Open Access Success
Thanks to the diligence of our researchers, we are currently seeing excellent levels of compliance with the REF/university open access policy. In 2018, we saw 3290 new full text downloads appear on our repository Cronfa, with a further 939 waiting for the publisher-imposed embargo to end before they become open access. We are now encouraging authors to take advantage of book chapter self-archiving permissions and we have over 100 of our more recent chapters available for download now.
Changes in the team
The team is seeing some changes at the end of the year: Penny Lauder (Scholarly Communications Assistant) has already taken on an additional part-time role as Impact and Engagement Officer on the EPSRC-funded CHERISH digital economy centre, celebrating impact of their many interdisciplinary projects; Anna Zasheva has increased her hours in the team to cover. Sam Oakley (Research Librarian) will be leaving at the end of 2018 to take up a new post at the University of Glasgow; Susan Glen will continue 2 days a week in the role of Research Librarian until the post is filled on a full-time basis.
We wish all our researchers and readers a happy and successful 2019!