UKSG conference blog post report

As promised, here's a follow-up to my post on conferences and networking, talking about the content of the UKSG conference in more detail. I wrote the majority of this text for our staff development blog, but I think (hope?) it has wider appeal!

Last week I attended the UKSG conference in Harrogate as a first timer. UKSG is a three-day long conference looking at all things serials-related. In recent years this has meant a focus on research support and open access, which is why I was in attendance. As you can imagine with an intensive 3-day conference, there is a lot of information to take on board. I’ve tried to pull out some of the things that struck me as main themes at the conference, especially ones that my team and I have a specific interest in (many of these themes are therefore quite research support focused).

•     The changing role of libraries

It was widely recognised that the job of libraries is changing, and the work they do now will not be the same as the work they do in ten years’ time. Stockholm University gave a good example of this. Whilst they still aim to ensure that individuals have access to what they need, they now also aim to make sure that the work done by individuals at the university is available to the rest of the world. It’s important to Stockholm to ensure that the information flows in both directions.

Both Stockholm University and Utrecht University Libraries were also very clear that they don’t try to bring users to the library/ website – they simply want to provide them with the tools to access the info they need. Whilst Stockholm stated that their EBSCO Delivery Service is just one tool among many, Utrecht have gone one step further and taken away their library catalogue completely. Their users use Google and Google Scholar, so this is what they’ll support. However, a warning came from the audience here: Google is a commercial service. It can be removed at any time. Bill Thompson from the BBC stated that it would be best to support open-source initiatives, which have a community behind them, instead of a corporation, as these services can’t just be removed. But can we really dictate what services our users should use in this way?

•      The purpose of scholarly communication

For me, Michael Jubb’s breakout session on the future of scholarly communications was a great reminder of the reasons why scholarly communication exists, and what it is trying to achieve. He stated that whilst how we go about communicating this information has changed, what we’re fundamentally trying to achieve hasn’t.

The four original (and still relevant today) purposes of scholarly communication were to register research findings, review and clarifying findings before publication (still achieved through peer review), disseminate new knowledge and preserve a record of those findings. The Royal Society states that research today should be accessible, intelligible, assessable and usable.

•     How we communicate research

However, what has changed is how we communicate research. For some researchers though, it hasn’t changed enough. In many ways research papers were felt to be archaic. David de Roure, an academic at Oxford University, felt that it is not just the article that is the outcome of the research; it is also the collection of social research objects we exchange. The research is the group of objects that we have a social discourse around.

Ernesto Priego took this one step further by suggesting that publishing is where content goes to die. Perhaps proving his point, his slide stating this went viral on social media almost instantly. If he’d published this point in a journal article, would anybody have noticed? Ernesto felt that research should be the beginning, not the end, of a conversation. Instead of being encouraged to publish against one another, researchers should be encouraged to read, and to talk, to each other. The aim should be for collaboration, not competition, and a culture of sharing should be developed.

•     The importance of re-usability, not just open access

Whilst there is still a lot of debate around open access and how far we should take it, there are a group of people who believe open access to research papers alone just isn’t good enough. Whilst they acknowledge that openness brings risks and an inherent lack of control, they believe that things are no use if they can be found but aren’t reusable. Bill Thompson (from the BBC) went so far as to state that open data should be used, reused and distributed by anyone for any purpose. PDFs are an issue here, because they are difficult to use for re-use.

Even HEFCE (Higher Education Funding Council for England) recognise the importance of re-usability. Whilst not mandatory for the post-2014 REF (Research Excellence Framework), HEFCE have stated that they will give credit to institutions that enable re-use rights and text mining on the research they produce.

•     New challenges in open access

It was recognised that open access is providing us with a number of new challenges. Some of the newest challenges mentioned were around research data and open access monographs.

The sheer size and volume of datasets (sometimes as many as 6 million data points) in the digital age

Enjoying the sunshine in a Harrogate park during a lunch break

means that you can no longer simply include all the evidence/ data you need to reproduce research in a research paper. There are also massive challenges in making this amount of data open and accessible. In addition to this, there is still a culture of people wanting to hold on to their data            

In contrast to this, almost everybody in attendance seemed to be in agreement that monographs should be made open access. But, again for the post-2014 REF, HEFCE stated that whilst monographs should be OA, the business models are too immature, and the lead times for publishing monographs are also very long – it’s already too late for the next REF. However, credit will be given to institutions that do make monographs openly available. There are already projects looking at this very issue. One example is Knowledge Unlatched, a project which is getting libraries to share the costs of making books open access. The library pays a title fee with a fixed cost, and books are then made open access with a Creative Commons licence.

As well as all of the above, there were a number of breakout sessions around article processing charges (APCs), the HEFCE Open Access policy, research data management and bibliometrics (and other things!) that left me full of ideas, questions and studies that I can take back and use in my day-to-day work. I found UKSG to be an incredibly useful, if rather intense, conference.

OR2012: Being there when you can't be there

This was my first real experience of 'attending' a conference without actually going to the event. In previous years I have been aware of the Open Repositories conference, but because it's always taken place in a foreign country attending it has never been a realisitic option. This year OR2012 took place in Edinburgh, so I was paying more attention to the build-up than in previous years. Initially I was planning to attend in person, but being 7 months pregnant meant I was less than keen to spend a week at the other end of the country.

So whilst a colleague went for a couple of days in my place, I still wanted to know what was happening. Which inspired me to look online to see what was going on. During the week, the best ways to keep abreast of what was happening (at least for me personally) were to keep up with the Twitter feed and read the live blog posts. These are both social media platforms I'm used to using, and not having to learn a new platform was a big bonus! I have to say a big kudos here to the conference organisers for putting all this together, along with a bunch of other social media options. Not all conference organisers are so proactive.

I was amazed, and quite pleased, to find that doing a search for #OR2012 on Twitter, and following the comments as they appeared, turned out to be my preferred way to follow the conference. Because it works like a conversation, you get access to the parts of a conference that you'd usually miss out on by not being there - namely the conversations around the talks, rather than the talks themselves. You can usually catch up with the talks themselves via e-mails or future blog posts after the conference has taken place, but not attending conferences means you miss the immediate reactions from attendees. With Twitter, this doesn't happen on quite so significant a scale. You can even ask questions of the attendees, and get immediate answers (I have to admit that, for me, this was a step too far for my first experience like this, but I like that you can. I did retweet some of my favourite tweets though)!

Interestingly, it was the live blog posts that I found least useful. I'm a relatively avid blog reader, and tend to find posts helpful and a good way of keeping very up-to-date with the latest developments. But live blog posts take away the element of reflection, and/ or explanations of how people have put certain things to use, that I find to be their most useful qualities.

Of all the OR2012 live blog posts I've read so far (there are a lot and I still have 5 or 6 to read from the last couple of days), I did find the one on Name and Data identifiers (a Weds 11 July session) most useful. I think this was primarily due to the fact that I already knew most of the information, having read about it previously - and, in one case, participated in one of the projects (if nothing else, the post acted as a reminder that I need to chase that particular project and see where things have got to, because I've heard nothing since March...). But when it came to the final talk on creating citable data identifiers, which I have less knowledge of, I still got a little lost. I found a more reflective post, written by a UKCoRR member after he left the conference on the Wednesday, much more readable and meaningful.

One final thought on keeping up with conferences in this way - make sure you give yourself the time to do it. My decision to keep up with this conference online was pretty last minute, and it took up a lot of my working week. Luckily I was able to do this as it wasn't a particularly busy week at work, but if something major had come up I would easily have fallen behind with what was happening. Just because you're not travelling away from the office, this doesn't mean you don't need to ensure you have the time to 'attend' it. Obviously this is less of an issue for a day-long event, but OR2012 is a big, week-long conference - the biggest annual one for repository folk that there is. Because of that, there's a lot of information to take on board. Just keeping up with tweets alone took up a significant part of my day, especially mid-week (when the majority of the talks happened). All this is proven by the fact that I still haven't finished reading all those blog posts yet!

23 Things for Professional Development: Thing #12

Social media isn't really a new thing for me, but I've certainly started using it a lot more since I began taking part in CPD23. I already blogged, but didn't have a blog focussed on my professional activities. I was aware of Twitter, but only signed up after being prompted to do so as part of the CPD23 course. I neever would have heard about, or got involved in, Library Day in the Life, if I hadn't started the CPD23 course or signed up to Twitter.

I guess it goes without saying then, that I really see the benefit in being part of an online community (or two)! The major benefit for me is that collaborative working space, where you can share ideas and hear about developments in the library world much faster than you would do otherwise. This in turn leads to soome good opportunites for networking and learning about other types of libraries. For me, the blogs maintained by staff working on repositories is an especially important part of social networking, because I get to stay up-to-date with what people working in my field are doing, and learn from all those Repository Managers out there about the best (or at least good!) ways of doing things. One other thing social media has been great for has been keeping in touch with all those library workers who I used to know years ago, but don't really get to see anymore. So I learn a bit about what school librarians, college librarians, corporate librarians etc. are doing - and I'm able to stay in touch with some old friends at the same time.

All of this isn't to say that I don't see some hurdles when using social media. For those who embrace it, it's great. It really does foster a sense of community and is a great opportunity. But for those who have never used it before, or feel a little "on the edges", it can be rather daunting. It feels as if everybody knows everybody else, and where do you begin? I found the only way to overcome this was to just jump right in, but that's a scary prospect when you're new to it all. I can fully understand that for some this can be far more offputting, and result in you feeling less a member of the community, not more. You know you're missing out on something, but it's difficult to join in.

The other disadvantage is, perhaps unsurprisingly, time. It can take a long time to check all those really interesting looking links on Twitter, to read all those blogs written by people who really interest you, and to make sure you're visible and watching all the right places. I have to admit, buying a smart phone really helped me here. For ages I'd been saying I couldn't see why I would want one, but as I became more involved with social media, I really started to see the benefit. Now admittedly it's a new toy (only one week old, and therefore rather shiny), but I'm so, so glad I bought one...

Oh, and as for adding a new contact on a social media platform, I've been doing this regularly on Twitter since I joined a month or so ago. Admittedly my numbers are still fairly low, but I'm happy to build them up steadily over time as I find people I truly want to follow. But I did think I'd try and add somebody new for this Thing, so had a hunt and found two new people I wanted to follow (I say "new" people, I've known them both in real life at some stage for one reason or another). Although if you're a Twitter fan and want something fun to follow, I can recommend @madeupstats. It's silly, but it's fun.