Developing Open Access support at Imperial College London

1. Library
Services
Developing Open Access Support for
Business at Imperial
BLA Winter Conference 11 December 2017
Rosemary Russell & Heather Lincoln
Liaison Librarians: Business & Professional Development
Imperial College London

2. Open Access for Business Research
• How we learned more about the nature of business
research and open access
• What we have done to develop engagement and
advocacy
• Future work

3. What we were already doing
• PhD student staff committee participation
• End of year review meetings with programme teams
• Very short OA intros within:
• PhD library induction
• New BS academic staff session

4. How we learned more
• Literature review!
• not much out there
• Meeting with BS Research Manager
• really useful background info about BS research and funding
• Thesis publishing support email led to OA meeting with
PhD Programme Manager
• PhD students don’t know much/anything about OA…
• UK requirements/international differences
• Student queries revealed some key issues
• eg thesis/article publishing, embargoes

5. How we developed engagement and advocacy
• ORCID advocacy
o published info on VLE
• Teaching
o new OA session for PhD students Nov 2017

6. New teaching: Introduction to OA for PhDs
Content: how PhD students benefit from OA as consumers
and producers of research. Making students’ theses and
other publications OA. REF and wider OA environment.
Classroom activities:
1. Demo of Spiral, Imperial’s institutional repository. Focus on
Altmetrics page showing tweets, blogs and policy documents
citations
2. Imperial’s professional webpages
3. ORCID
4. SHERPA RoMEO

7. New teaching: Introduction to OA for PhDs (2)
Question at the end for OA freebies:
Q: What is the most important benefit of OA to
researchers?
A: “It increases your citations”
Observation:
Students were interested in influencing and contributing to
policy documents, and emphasising this point seemed a
good way to interest business students in the benefits of
OA. The enhancement to students’ careers inside and
outside of academia was important to them.

8. Future work
• OA session to be embedded into PhD induction
• Plus sessions for BS academics, post-docs…
o under discussion
• Roll out to other departments at Imperial
o science communication/humanities, STEM?
• Article…
= increased dialogue about OA!

9. Questions/thoughts?
Does this relate to your experience?
Rosemary Russell rosemary.russell1@imperial.ac.uk @rejrussell
Heather Lincoln h.lincoln@imperial.ac.uk @LincHeather
Liaison Librarians: Business & Professional Development, Imperial College London