 Mae name is Susie Cheek. I am Associate Director for Research and School而已 IP at the University of Bristol, an' I am also co-con Somehow accordingly along with my collid James Saunders at the University of Leeds of RLUK's collection strategy network. And I'm very pleased to be chairing this panel, which we'll be looking at the development of equitable knowledge infrastructures. So I'm going to introduce a yng Nghymru, Dominique Walker. Dominique is the publishing officer for the Scottish University's Press. Dominique is going to talk to us about how 18 academic libraries from across Scotland have established a not-for-profit publishing infrastructure, and she's going to focus on how library staff involvement is really essential to that SUP collaborative model. OK, so thank you very much and hello from incredibly rainy and gloomy Glasgow. So in this talk I want to provide a brief background to the Scottish University's Press and provide an update on our progress to date, but I mainly want to focus on how it's been the library staff and library staff involvement that's been central to the SUP collaborative model and how we're hoping to foster new skills across the Skirl community that's related to open access publishing. So SUP is a fully open access and not-for-profit publishing press. It's been coordinated through the Scottish Confederation of University Research Libraries and it is managed by 18 academic libraries that you can see on this slide. So why did Skirl libraries decide to develop their own publishing infrastructure? So all began with kind of an emerging shared challenge across our libraries around that transition to open access for research. So as we all know, libraries have been very heavily involved in supporting things like the compliance of changing funds to open access policies, supporting REF, managing our repositories, managing changes to subscription models. We've seen rising costs and access to materials, limitations placed on accessing ebook content, high costs of APCs and BPCs, you know the list is endless. So Skirl libraries do spend around £30 million a year providing access to electronic resources for learning and research and quite a large amount of that does go to a large profit making commercial publishers. And it's also just a very complex landscape for our researchers. So we saw a clear need for a more equitable, straightforward and cost-effective model that would benefit our researchers and our institutions. And we are really keen to explore alternative approaches to academic publishing that are computing the needs of the academic community at the centre. And ultimately, we really want to contribute to all of the wider global efforts to create a fairer and more equitable academic publishing model and ecosystem. So lastly, we wanted to create a Scotland-wide solution, so pooling our resources, working together rather than each institution starting up their own press. It also allows smaller institutions who may not have the resources to start their own publishing initiative to become involved too. And Skirl has got experience of managing a shared infrastructure, so they manage Sheddle, that's the Scottish Higher Education Digital Library. That's a collaborative procurement infrastructure that provides equity of access to digital resources for all Scottish students, staff and researchers, regardless of the AHEI they are at. So Skirl libraries did seem a good fit for developing a shared publishing model. So as a starting point in 2019, we asked our academic community in Scotland what they wanted to happen in this space through consultation that culminated in a proof of concept report. The report was very favourable towards the idea, so throughout 2020 a partnership was formed between the 18 institutions and because Skirl has existed for almost 30 years, members do have a very strong background in working together. So there were existing governance infrastructures that allowed us to move forward quite quickly with this. Member libraries agreed to fund the press through a banded subscription model, and this covers all of the fixed costs of running a press such as staff salaries and platform costs, for example. The management board of the press was created in 2021 with a representative from each library and a project plan was developed. And 2022 really was the year when things got going. We started to work through the project plan, we formed the SCP editorial board, developed our workflows, our financial model and technical infrastructures, and that allowed us to launch our first calls for content in early 2023. So there was no premade roadmap of how to do this. We had to ask ourselves lots of questions, things like what the costs, how can we find out the two costs of publishing, can we do things differently, how can we better support our researchers. And we did borrow quite heavily from startup culture and entrepreneurial methodology, with an emphasis on rapid and concurrent work and decisions always guided by the values of SCP, so aiming to be open and transparent and with an eye on that kind of inbox of being scalable and also sustainable. So I'll now look at our progress to date. So the first significant milestone I mentioned was the recruitment of the editorial board. That was achieved through an open call to our researchers at member institutions. We quickly mobilised this group, they developed the peer review policy and the editorial workflows. We also finalised our content strategy and our timelines, as well as the financial model. So while we did aim to keep as much of the work within the SCL network as possible, some skills we did need to outsource to a third party, and those things are very specific things like copy editing and type setting, because we did find from the proof of concept report that researchers still were very keen to have a higher quality, well designed book. So we sourced a local employee owned production company and this allowed us to set our production charge at three and a half to five and a half thousand pounds, including VAT. And this covers all the variable costs of producing the book and we have been able to keep them low due to the hybrid funding model. So all of this preparatory work provided the foundation for our call for content to be opened in early 2023. The first proposals that we received and progressed through peer review workflows in the spring and the editorial board then met to review the proposals and the first were accepted for publication. Our first manuscript were delivered in January of this year and now moving into the production workflow. So as the press develops, we wanted to retain all of the collaborative benefits, while also implementing a more formal structure that provides the necessary scope for growth and gives us the legal identity that is required for an operational publisher. So SUP is now established as a community interest company and this allows us to bring the existing governance structure into that CIC constitution embedding our not-for-profit status in our operating model moving forwards. And this has been a really major strand of work for us in preparing for the next phase for SUP. So currently we are publishing books and edited collections by researchers at participating institutions. However, we are conducting a content strategy review now looking to expand the infrastructure to gather other content types such as textbooks and journals. As well as expanding our offer to researchers at all UK institutions and to support this, we have recruited a commissioning editor who starts the role in April. And we're now looking forward to publishing our first book in the summer with an official launch event. So please do listen out for announcements. So central to developing our publishing infrastructure has been that sense of shared ownership of working together and developing new skills as information professionals. There's been a focus on working things out ourselves, exploring and questioning to understand what makes us novel. From the start, we've been really keen to use the skills and expertise that is already available across our network. So being Skirl owned and library led as a clear identity and an alternative to the profit making publishing models. As I mentioned earlier, Skirl member libraries have got a very strong background in working together. So it's developed a culture of cooperation and collaboration amongst our for our different institutions. And we really wanted an open and inclusive management structure so all of the participants have got a completely equal voice in all of the decision making and in the development of the press. And our management board are very engaged through them. We've got this constant sense checking, call setting and it's key to that sense of shared ownership that we are taking on board their different viewpoints and their different experiences because they come from a wide range of different types of institution. So while we provide central communication messages and materials, each institution is able to adapt them to their own local needs and they are responsible for the promotion of the press within their own institutions. They do have some ownership there. They've also agreed that all members will promote SUP books, regardless of the authors of creation. And we're also really keen to look at the way we can maximise our position within institutions, so things like the potential to use library spaces for book launches, for example. They're also really keen to look at ways to involve students and we are scaping out the potential to offer placements for things such as book cover design in the future. We then have our editorial board that's formed of 14 academic colleagues from across our member institutions. There are also two early career researchers on the board and it's really great to have input from the ECR perspective and they're helping us look at how we can support ECRs more generally. We also set up some mentoring sessions for them on peer review on request. And another key role for the editorial board is advocacy, so raising awareness of SUP as a new press is really essential. So we created an advocacy toolkit for the editorial board, which includes approaches for promoting SUP across their networks and also just encouraging wider engagement with open access initiatives at institutions such as rights retention policies. So the toolkit covers messages about SUP and includes some simple advocacy actions and it's available on our website if anyone's interested, I'll see if I can post a link to the chat afterwards. We also have our peer review network, so researchers can sign up to join the SUP, to join this on the SUP website and we use this network to source suitable reviewers for proposals. We've now had over 120 researchers sign up and this is really good for us as we've got a pool to draw from, but it's also helping encourage researchers to get involved with the press as well. So as you can see, we're really keen to involve all staff at our institutions. We are planning on running an anonymous feedback survey scene to try and capture some areas of improvement and just get a general sense of how SUP is being received by researchers, so the good and the bad, and that will help us develop our plans. So in order to support different areas of the press, we've established three SUP working groups, the management board, we're really keen to involve a wide range of staff from our libraries, so membership is open to all and we put out an open call to join. So staff are able to contribute to the development of SUP, but also are able to support their own personal development opportunities. So their training and development group, they recently delivered a training webinar for all library and researchers support staff across our institutions. And this went into lots of detail about how SUP works, all of our editorial processes and production workflows, and the aim was just to make sure that staff are all on the same page about SUP and are comfortable when discussing the press or answering questions from researchers. They also created a survey on the open access workforce landscape, which I'll discuss in just a moment. The research and policy group monitor the research and policy landscape and look at the practical implications for SUP. So for example, one of the things I looked at was the implementation of the UKRI policy for open access books. Then we have the communications group, which is another very practical group. They're looking at the development of the communication strategy, our communications materials, things like the website, blog posts and events. So again, lots of opportunities for developing skills here. So their training and development group recently circulated a survey to all 18 member libraries capturing the details of areas of working institutions that are being affected by developments in open access. So the purpose of the survey was to identify any training gaps that may exist at present or likely to emerge soon. What do we know about the impact of open access on staff workflows and roles? So some of the initial findings include that libraries are often the ones that take the lead on communicating open access developments across institutions. That a much wider knowledge and expertise around publishing practice metrics, discoverability research dissemination is now required. That the regrading of existing roles is quite common, acknowledging that roles have become much more complex in line with the open access environment. And also that a few new roles are being created, including a publishing librarian role at the University of Dundee that is being created specifically to support library-led publishing. Of course there are lots of challenges as well. Some key ones that came out were the increasing workload for smaller teams, financial pressures, recruitment controls and freezes. These are definite issues. So the training and development group now analyse the results in more detail and look at next steps, seeing what training needs there may be in the future. We're also working with some existing scale groups to develop into specific areas. So we're working with the copyright and legal team to develop an online copyright tool for our authors to use to find out what they need to do with third party materials in their books. And this is based on existing tool for staff that's aimed at using materials for learning and teaching. So it needs adapting to look at publishing. So it's a learning curve for this group as well. We're also working on our metadata workflows. We want to make sure that our books are very high quality metadata and are highly discoverable. And again, we can benefit here from our library expertise in this area. So our member libraries have agreed to take it in turns to catalogue our titles and provide mark records starting with St Andrews Library. And we're also planning to use the TOAT Open Metadata Management Platform to create and disseminate our metadata. So that's another kind of open infrastructure. And we're planning to work with the cataloging team at St Andrews to test the system. So again, this is going to involve new skills and training for the team there to see. So I just want to quickly talk about the platform that the books will be published on. So we decided on a local rather than an outsourced option. So since 2018, SCURL has coordinated a shared hosting service for online books and journals for member libraries. And that's provided by the University of Edinburgh Library, specifically the team that work on Edinburgh Diamond there. So for a very reasonable hosting fee, staff set up a site using OJS or OMP. They provide ongoing technical support and training and offer general publishing guidance. And all fees are invested straight back into the shared service. So this fits in very well with that, not for profit ethos. And also gives us some good control over the future direction of the platform rather than relying on the third party. The shared service users also meet quarterly, we share our experiences and discuss ideas for improvement. And it's really great to be able to pool our knowledge. And linked into this, the Open Research Scotland group are looking to start an Open Research Scotland journal using the hosting service and OJS. And they're really keen to get staff institutions involved with setting this up and joining the editorial board. So again, this is a really good way to improve staff skills when it comes to open access publishing. And then lastly, very quickly, I want to talk about the rise in institutional open access publishers that we've seen in the last eight or nine years. Just to show that SAP are not alone in what we're trying to achieve and there's a much wider move towards more equitable publishing models. It's been a real kind of new wave of institutional publishers who are trying to drive some change in the area. And you can see some of them on the slide here. And the fact the sector is growing at such a pace that in 2023 a group of these professors came together to form the Open Institutional Publishing Association. So that's a new community of practice aimed at not for profit UK institutional publishers who are born or striving for open access. And it's not just for presses, it's for hosting services or individual journals at institutions. And the groups looking at sharing our experiences, resources and best practice, fostering support, collaboration and networking opportunities, building partnerships with key players in the wider open access community, providing a collective voice for smaller institutionally affiliated publishers in the sector discussions. So making sure that we've got a voice and also advocating for the expertise and the value of institutional open access publishing. So the group is now open for membership. I'll post a link to the website in the chat. We recently won some innovation funding from UK SG. So we'll be holding a symposium on the future of institutional publishing in York on the 10th of June and we'll be announcing more on that very soon. So that's the end of my talk. Sorry if I've run over a bit. But I hope that I've shown that libraries can work at scale to deliver a high quality publishing solution. And I'll just stop sharing there. Thank you. Brilliant. Thank you Dominique. And just a really good example, I think of how we can put our values at the heart of our design decision making management structures when we're thinking through new enterprises and also keep that focus and attention on skills development when we're developing new strands of activity within our services as well. I can already see some questions coming through so please do keep them coming throughout the presentations. I will introduce now our second speaker who is Neil Stern. Neil is the managing director of OAPEN and co-director of DOAB. He's worked in scholarly book publishing for more than 20 years and is a member of the operas executive assembly and the vice chair of the open book collective and also serves on a number of advisory boards and committees. I'll hand over to you, Neil. Thank you very much, Susie. And good morning to you all from Denmark. I'm really happy to be here today to talk about how our infrastructures for open scholarly book publishing can help support publishers and libraries and research funders and also hopefully increase equity in open book publishing. First, just a few words on the OAPEN library and DOAB, director of open access books. We share the mission of increasing discoverability of peer reviewed open access books and also promoting and building trust in OAP book publishing. We are small independent not-for-profit organisations of Dutch foundations based in the Netherlands. Although I am working from home in Denmark, we by Dutch law cannot be sold or acquired. We are guided by the principles of open scholarly infrastructure and have performed our self-audit last year. I should also mention that we operate the community led open access books toolkit, which was set up in 2020. It comprises a lot of articles, small articles about all sorts of topics related to OAP book publishing. We have a large open access, a large editorial advisory board sort of representing all stakeholders. So it's a free information resource that anyone can use. The OAPEN library was basically created as a project by a handful of university presses almost 15 years ago and then launched in 2010. Then at the time of course the library was intended for these university presses to share their peer reviewed open access books. So peer review was a cornerstone for the library and open access of course. And then after the project ended it opened up so that any publisher with peer reviewed academic books could join. And many publishers have done that so we have several hundred publishers with over today 34,000 open access books. We provide the hosting so the full text can be any format that is compliant with this space, so PDF or EPUB or other formats. We then do the distribution and we also do preservation. We work with Portico and Clox. And one way that many libraries engage with our books are through library intermediaries like EPSCO, Ex Libris, OCLC. Of course all books in OAPEN library can be accessed for free by anyone at any given time without telling anyone. So there's an open API, all the metadata outputs are free to use. But if a library is using a library system like ELMA for instance, then in the knowledge base of that library system OAPEN can be activated as a collection. And we see really many, many libraries doing that. This is from Clarivate, the statistics we get back. And overall we see around 1.2 million counter conformant downloads from the OAPEN library per month. DWAB was launched 10 years ago more or less as a project from coming out of OAPEN because we thought maybe some publishers would have their own hosting solution and only need an index. So making a reference back to where to find the book. And the principles for joining DWAB, this is a free to use service for publishers once they have been accepted. And the criteria for acceptance are the peer review policy, their license policy, it has to be an open license. And of course their profile as academic publishers publishing monographs, edited collections and other long form formats. Today we have over 80,000 titles in DWAB and all the metadata is in public domain. We manage DWAB together with Open Edition, a French platform. And it's also based on the space repository just like OAPEN. So just in a nutshell you could say that DWAB aggregates of platforms like OAPEN, like Open Edition, JSTOR, Project Muse and so on. And of course also a long range of smaller publishers. There are over 650 publishers registered in DWAB. So we have, but these platforms work with DWAB on a trust based level. So we have what we call the DWAB trusted platform network. And I'll talk a bit more about that later because it's a fairly new concept that gives us also ways in which to engage with a wider community across the globe. A final thing about DWAB is the service which is the peer review information service for monographs that was launched a bit over a year ago. It provides publishers to give information about their peer review process. So not the peer review itself, but how they perform the peer review. So they can give this information in a standardized way. And then we capture the information in the metadata of the book so that anyone downstream can see what the process has been for quality assurance. And many publishers do use this service, but still it's only around 10% of the books in DWAB that have this information. It's free to use service for publishers, but we do encourage using it to increase transparency around the quality assurance process. So in a nutshell and in a very sort of schematic simplified overview, this is the machine room. This is the way the infrastructures operate. So as mentioned, we work with several hundred publishers. They provide us with metadata in a variety of Onyx formats, I would say our flavors versions. They give us the books. We capture them also in different ways. Then we normalize the metadata within OAPN. We push that downstream to search engines like Google Scholar and Paywall and many others and also through the library aggregators as mentioned. But also importantly, anyone can get all the metadata and the books for free by passing any system just taking directly what we have through our metadata feeds and through the open API. And I also want to mention what we announced together with CERN just two weeks ago, namely that as of the second quarter of this year, our service will be moving to CERN. This is based on a new collaboration agreement on open access books between CERN and OAPN. And I'm very happy to see a big institution committed to open science like CERN, engaging with a very small operation like OAPN to help make open science also be considered as something very trustworthy, reliable that will be here for a long time. OK, so now sort of focusing a bit on this panel's topic of developing equitable knowledge infrastructures for open access books in our case. It's something that has been on our minds for a couple of years, really how to make sure that the infrastructures that we provide are or support equitable open access books. We see that the usage of OAPN and UAB is really global. There's a lot of usage on the reader side, but do we see the same on the publisher and the author side? So this is something we have been looking into a bit more over the last one to two years. And I will share with you like three challenges that we see in the open access book landscape and some of the ways in which we are trying to address these challenges. So the first challenge is really that when looking at the data, the publishers in UAB, we see that there is a divide globally. So we see more global north publishers, publishers from Europe, North America, increasingly also many publishers from South America, but Africa, Asian publishers, there are less from those regions. So what we have been thinking about is that we should do more outreach. We should make sure that if there are publishers publishing initiatives in Africa, in Asia that fulfill the requirements of UAB, of course peer reviewed open access books, that they should be aware that we have this free to use service available to them. And so we have engaged in a project, the Open Book Futures project, which is sort of the second co-pim project where we focus on this. We have also launched activities in Africa to reach out. We have also, through the DOAB trusted platform network that I mentioned, enabled contact through these platforms to many more publishers and engage with these platforms about how we can make more use of DOAB globally. And we have also considered something like DOAJ has done successfully, I think, namely an ambassadors program. This requires some seed funding that we haven't received, we haven't found yet, but that could be another way to also promote DOAB more globally. This is an image from a workshop we did in Cape Town, together with the Open Book Futures project back in February, where we saw delegates from 10, 12 sub-Saharan countries really focusing on core issues relevant to that part of the world. And we are, of course, very happy to engage and find ways to make the use of DOAB relevant to publishing initiatives in Africa. So the second challenge I would mention is that the quality assurance and the period standards, of course, are really important. That's how we create our collections. But we should also respect the people with diversity, so really try to see how can we nurture the scholarly community, especially in the humanities, with many small niche disciplines, also in countries with languages that are not spoken by many. And so try to understand and be sensitive to these cultural differences and differences among disciplines. So, again, we have just planned and will next month have a conversation between these trusted platforms plus a few more organizations about peer-review practices, evaluation criteria, how do we make sure that we consider something like Biblio diversity when we evaluate publishers across the globe. Of course, it's also not only across the globe, it's also like internally in Europe, there are big differences between Northwest, Southeast and so on. We also should look at the quality of DOAB. DOAB is increasingly becoming a reference point for many institutions in their open access strategies. And maybe, I don't know, maybe libraries can help us sort of monitoring the quality of DOAB. This is something we have been thinking about and the toolkit is also a resource here to be considered. And finally, the metadata quality, of course, is very important and also technical capacity. So we work with very small publishers, sometimes it's just a few academics and other times it's very, very large. Taylor and Francis size publishers and anything in between. But many of the new university presidents or the new publishing initiatives, they sometimes lack technical capacity and we'd like to help them and we'd like to encourage also libraries to help them. So Dominic just mentioned the tot metadata management system, which is a nice tool, good tool for such initiatives to use. The monograph press, which Dominic also mentioned, is again a very good tool for presses to use, which actually we are working on integration between OMP and DOAB and OAPIN. And we can also see examples of how libraries can engage in this. We have a library working group where we have help from libraries to clean and make our metadata feeds available in mark format. And we are very thankful not only to this library working group, but also to all the libraries that support us, including 34 libraries in the UK. And without that support, we can't make the infrastructures operational. So I'm aware of the time. So I'll just just meet very briefly towards the end. Just a couple of words, if that's okay to see with on research funders. We currently conducting a project for the European Commission overseeing or understanding the landscape of policymaking across the Europe. We have collected data from 39 countries. We're building a knowledge base. It's available. We're connecting it to the toolkit. We'll come out with analysis before summer and recommendations in the autumn. And we have established a funder forum where we gather funders to discuss open access for books. And this, I think, is also a way of considering equity. UKRI, with their policy, has tried to address Diamond OA as an alternative funding model. I think this is a very interesting progress in funder policies. And as you will be aware, probably they have come up with this opportunity to support Diamond and non-BBCTO open access scheme. So this is the first step. I think many more steps will come, but it's just showing how funders can also play a role. And with funders we work a lot. We have collections that we work with for the funders. You can see here where we do collection management. We do reporting and we have done that for the last 10 years. So in conclusion, from our point of view, things that are needed still in this landscape to solve some of the problems around equity is funding. It's recognition of Biblio diversity, not one size fits all. We need to make sure that we support the scholarly diversity across disciplines and languages, geographies. And then we need to think of it in a global sense. So, of course, again, from our point of view, supporting what we do is helpful. But also thinking about other initiatives out there that can support this more equitable open publishing. And then, of course, the alignment of policies for funders, but also for publishers. And finally, collaborative efforts through projects and partnerships are really important to us. Thank you very much and Sarah for running over. Not at all, Neil. We're absolutely fine for time and thank you for sharing with us both your successes, but also the reflecting that you're doing on the challenges. And it's an important reminder at an event like this with so many institutions and so many countries present just how we position that conversation in a global context. And I think some of your final thoughts will certainly want to pick up on in our discussion at the end. I'm going to introduce our third and our final speaker. So we have Francis Marsh, Plant Sciences Librarian at the University of Cambridge and Lucy Woolhouse Genetics Librarian at the University of Cambridge. They're going to speak about a project which introduces technicians to the publication process and empowers them to recognise when their work should be credited. Thanks, Susie. So yeah, hi everyone. I'm Frankie and this is my colleague Lucy. We're talking to you from Cambridge today. We work in the biological sciences libraries team at the University of Cambridge and we're going to share some of the results and reflections on the workshops that we've been developing on fair attribution and publishing for technicians. So yeah, this session is all about equitable knowledge infrastructures and it's been really fascinating to hear from Dominique and Neil's about infrastructure for open access book publishing. Lucy and I are going to explore how we've been working around some of the barriers of the kind of research information systems like elements that we use at Cambridge. But how other tools like orchid and the credit taxonomy can help make knowledge infrastructures more equitable. But ultimately, we're going to talk about how actually our kind of education-led approach to making attribution fairer by empowering technicians with some of the knowledge and tools to change shared norms and practices. So we're going to start by giving some backgrounds and context for developing a workshop on fair attribution and give some detail about what we cover in the session itself. We'll give an overview of who attended the session, reflect on how they went and then share some of our plans for the future as well. So yeah, firstly, how did this idea come about? Well, Frankie was actually in a departmental meeting for professional services staff within the plant sciences department when the topic of career progression and staff retention was raised. And some technicians as part of this started discussing their varied experiences of being acknowledged or given a co-author credit in papers. Frankie immediately thought this was something that we could help with as part of our team in biological sciences and so brought the idea back to us. Once we started looking into it, we could see that this was an area that was not being covered elsewhere in the university. There is currently no standard practice in Cambridge for crediting the role of technicians in research who therefore experienced great disparity in their recognition and visibility in the scholarly outputs that come from Cambridge. We also found loads of training on a variety of areas that was directed at students, researchers and general professional services staff, but not very much at all that was aimed directly at technicians. So as part of our research, we became aware that Cambridge was a founding signatory of the technician commitment, which is an initiative that aims to ensure visibility, recognition, career development and sustainability for technicians across the UK landscape. We made contact with the technician commitment coordinator within the university who really liked the idea of this kind of training being available and gave us a lot of insight into the varied roles of technicians across the institution. It also fitted really well into the visibility and recognition themes and would help to push forward some of the work that he had already been doing in this area, so it was great to have his support throughout this process. Additionally, technicians are increasingly being recognized as a vital part of the research process within the wider higher education sector. The recently released initial decisions report for the next ref emphasizes team research and heightening the visibility of research enabling staff and technicians are also being consulted about being included more heavily in the next people culture and environment section for the submission. Funders like UKRI and in particular BBSRC are also encouraging technicians to apply for grants themselves and for PIs to include technicians in their grant proposals. Therefore, it seems technicians are inevitably going to be more involved in the outputs of research from those grants in particular and might even be publishing themselves. Next slide please, Frankie. So after all this background research and consultation, we came to the conclusion that since we already trained students and researchers on lots of these issues around the publication process and tools to help with recognition, why not extend similar training to the technician community? It sounds like technicians are going to be expected to participate in these areas, so they will need to know about them and libraries are perfectly placed to help with this. So we knew we couldn't fix all of these kind of really big issues of research culture ourselves, but we were keen to do something. And so our starting point was to think about adapting the content of our library's core research support training for a new audience. Initially we thought about a session on ORCID as a tool to engage technicians with this idea of attribution, but this really grew as we spoke to technicians and thought about their requirements. Having now run pilot sessions online and in person for the School of Biological Sciences, a workshop at the university's first professional services conference for technicians across the university, and most recently a tailored session for all of the technicians in the Croc Science Centre, we've eventually settled on a good structure for an in-person 90 minute workshop that aims to help start conversations about more equitable practices for authorship and acknowledgement. We introduced the basics of scholarly communications in the UK higher education sector, including this pressure to publish for academics, and we also talked about the open access landscape. We do explain what ORCID is and encourage participants to sign up for an IID there and then with a kind of live demo. We discussed the differences between acknowledgement and authorship, but then a good proportion of the session is discussion in small groups with guided questions about their experiences of fair attribution. And then after kind of feeding back from that discussion, we introduced the credit taxonomy to show how technicians work fits the expanding definition of authorship. And we finish with some tips on how to have conversations about these topics with their PIs or line managers. So, as Frankie said, over the last six months, we've delivered this session four times to a variety of participants with a total of 43 attendees overall. While three out of the four sessions were aimed directly at biological sciences technicians, the session we ran as part of the professional services conference did attract a much wider audience. In fact, we've managed to reach four out of the six schools that exist within Cambridge, only missing arts and humanities and physical sciences. Understandably, biological sciences have been the biggest audience closely followed by clinical medicine, but we've also had interest from social sciences and even from technicians based within the university library. So this indicates that the session has a wide appeal for technicians across the university. So one thing we were interested in looking at was the job titles of the people who attended our sessions. Technicians like librarians have widely varying roles depending on the area that they work in. As part of the advertising for the session, we did stress that you didn't have to have the word technician in your job title in order to come along as we were interested in the experience of anyone who identified as a technician. So while you can see that the most common job title of our attendees was research laboratory technician, other common titles included microscopy specialist and lab manager. And we had a good range of grades represented as well right the way from the sort of high echelons of biological microscopy coordinator all the way down to apprentice. So we think the workshops have been really successful. Everyone who filled out a feedback form said that they would recommend the session. Some noted that the opportunity to network with other technicians was really valuable. And for this reason, the workshops did work best in person. Participants really seized on the chance to share their experiences, so we needed to extend the timings from our initial one hour to 90 minutes. And then from these quotes, I think it's clear that lots of technicians are being acknowledged and given authorship, but there is no consistency of approach. So some participants shared their frustration at the lack of recognition for their work, the dismissive response if they raise the issue and others noted that technicians often don't even know that they're recognised in a publication. On the other hand, the majority of participants did say that they had some experience of acknowledgement or attribution and some reported a supportive positive experience. I think it was particularly interesting to note the difference between lab technicians who are integrated in a research group compared to core facilities staff who run services for things like microscopy and proteomics. Many of these core facilities do actually have a policy or kind of service agreement in place for acknowledging the facility and individual staff members, but they've got no oversight of whether this happens in practice or methods of following it up if it doesn't. So I think overall this participant quote sums it up, involvement in publications greatly depends on the people we are working with. Some are more receptive and keen to involve technical staff in the conversation about the research. And we think it's clear therefore that there is a need for some kind of university level guidelines similar to those already in place at other RLUK member institutions like Liverpool and Southampton. So engaging directly with technicians for this work has also highlighted the need to develop more equitable systems approaches to track contributions of everyone involved in research, not just those on academic contracts. So what is next in this project? We are currently working on a plan to make the session more widely available for technicians across the whole university rather than just within our section of biological sciences. We do have two more sessions planned for this academic year so far, which we've opened up to observers from across Cambridge University libraries as a whole as that's all the libraries that exist within Cambridge. So that other librarians and research support professionals can experience the session and hopefully begin to run it in their own areas. We are quite conscious that any expansion of this session needs to be sustainable. We are just two people and we have full-time jobs so recruiting more people able to deliver this session is essential across the university. And then another thing that's been really rewarding about working on this project has been the chance it's given us to meet and collaborate with new people from across the university. From the technician commitment coordinator to people in the office of scholarly communication and the research strategy office, it really has been a convergence of different people working towards similar goals. As part of this, our work on the session and the feedback from the participants have been informing the guidance on fair attribution being drafted by the technician commitment coordinator and providing evidence for the importance of having such guidance in place. This is now making its way through the various university committees as well as being consulted on by technicians and has recently been solidified as part of the Cambridge's technician commitment action plan for the next few years. While we can't claim any credit for actually drafting the guidelines, our work has helped to raise these issues more widely and ensure technicians voices are being heard as part of the process. So when thinking about progressing this project further, we also came up with some potential challenges that we wanted to share with you today. So if you have the answers to any of these, please do let us know either after the session or in the sort of Q&A. So firstly, technicians, as we've mentioned already, technicians often aren't told when they're acknowledged and acknowledgements aren't indexed or discoverable in the same way that co-author credits are. Given the potential future importance of this data for funders and ref reporting, how can we begin to log it accurately? There's also a danger of focusing too much on STEM and leaving out those working in technician roles across humanities, arts and social sciences. We need to do more work ourselves around ensuring that this session is either applicable to all or tailored for the different groups. But it can be difficult to sum up the collective technician experience when jobs do vary so wildly. Additionally, research infrastructure can create barriers to inclusion. We've heard quite a lot about research infrastructure and Frankie touched on this at the beginning of our talk. But yeah, one example from Cambridge specifically is that technicians are not automatically given accounts to be able to deposit into our repository through our elements tool in the same way that researchers are. So again, if technicians are going to become more part of this sort of research output and publication process, does that need to change? And finally, despite or because of the barriers posed by systems and infrastructure, we are keen to continue taking this education-led approach, empowering technicians to understand when they should be credited and giving them the tools to do so. But ultimately power structures do still exist, and what we've found is that technicians' experiences are dependent on the PIs and other academics that they work with. Until researchers themselves understand the changing nature of authorship and embrace tools like the credit taxonomy, the situation is unlikely to change. Hopefully having some guidelines in place in Cambridge will help with this, but should we also be thinking about how to train the academics on these issues and not just the technicians? So yeah, that brings us to the end of our talk. Thank you so much for listening. We're happy to answer any questions and hear your thoughts now, but would also be really pleased if you wanted to get in touch with us after today, whether that's because your library has also been involved in implementing fair attribution guidelines, or you're thinking about doing something similar. We are going to release the slides that we use in our teaching under a CC by licence, which they're not ready quite yet, but hopefully will be soon. And we've got a few references on this final slide, but I will stop sharing now. And yeah, thank you very much. Thank you. That was very interesting. And that one's very dear to my heart because it's a live conversation at Bristol about how we raise the visibility and recognition for all contributions to research and to shift that narrative around a researcher being somebody on particular terms and conditions. And it's an important discussion. Can I now invite all of our presenters to reappear and unmute, and I will move us into our Q&A session. I have been given permission by our RLUK organisers to overrun slightly because we have quite a long break, I think, after this particular session. So we will see how we get on with some of the questions we have for us. I'm just going to start. This feels like quite a straightforward question, but I suppose is a jumping off point for a larger question. So I think in your presentation, Dominic, you mentioned your work with early career researchers, ECRs. And there's a question about how you define an ECR, which might be an easier one to answer in a particular context, but I also wonder generally what the role is of early career professionals in terms of transforming a lot of the scholarly communications. Landscape, but challenging some of those traditional models, I suppose, that we've been talking about this morning. So I'll pass on to you, Dominic, first for that particular question and then if others have thoughts. So the definition first of the ECR was actually quite a tricky thing to come to because there are lots of different definitions of what an ECR is. So we saw some that are coming over within 10 years of being awarded their PhD and then some awards are only for those within three years of their PhD. And also, you know, it's not always kind of linear career as well anymore. You may have people that have lots of background and research that might be classed as an early career researcher. So we kind of went with the kind of UKRI definition, which is within eight years of your PhD, but we also were kind of keen for it to be self defined. So as well rather than being really strict with kind of a certain number of years. So I hope that opens that part. And yeah, we've been really keen to get early career researchers involved with the press. I think just being given more of an opportunity, I think they can be very good advocates for open access, very kind of keen and can speak with annoying networks. Also keen, I think some of the institutional run presses do have kind of schemes in place for ECRs. I think this one being released recently is the Trailblazers one at Salford. I can't remember, is it Bankafta? Sorry, I'm terrible. But I know that that's something that we've been thinking about at SEP is how can we make it easier for ECRs to publish their first book. And it's been really important, kind of having the ECRs on the board so that we can work with them, find out their experiences. But also we're thinking about almost doing surveys, doing another survey for ECRs or institutions to see what SEP could do to improve things for them in this area. But I don't know if anybody else. It's Salford, Lancaster and Liverpool. Thank you. Sorry. Thank you. I think that's a really great initiative, giving ECRs more of an opportunity to get their PhD published, for example. I don't know if anybody else wants to come in before I move on to another question. There's one here around research advocacy sort of beyond the walls of our institutions, I suppose, looking at public libraries. Again, I think specifically asked as in the context of SEP Dominique, but it's a good question, isn't it, about how the benefits of what we're doing extend. Beyond just higher education. Yeah, definitely. It's not something we've got on our kind of project plan. It's not something we've investigated yet. But we do have a really good relationship with SELIP Scotland. Skull have a good working relationship with them. So it could be something that we do scope out, something that we could work through with them. We've definitely heard from our researchers and our authors so far that they are very keen to reach that wider audience. And actually, especially reaching practitioners. So a couple of the titles that we're working on do have contributions from practitioners who don't have access to institutional subscriptions. So, yeah, that's been something that people are quite keen on when I've been doing stalls about SEP and researchers and talking to me as, yeah, they are keen to reach that wider audience. So working with public libraries is a really good idea. But yeah, not something we've looked into in depth yet. So I'm interested to hear if anybody else has looked into this area. Maybe I could just add one little thing. In the US, we have worked with New York University and Lyrasys to share the books in the OAPEN library through an app they have created called the Palace Project. It's called the Palace Project. So they basically provide books that are licensed off for free across public libraries in the US. And so really we're eager to get the OAPEN books onto that app. So that works quite nicely and it's a way of reaching a much wider audience, of course. Yes, it's increasingly, I think, becoming more of a priority, isn't it, thinking about how we can support but also what we can learn from the public library sector. And just one final question for you, Dominique, around that publishing library as a role that you mentioned. I think there's some curiosity about what that role looks like and what it does. Yeah, absolutely. And I'm glad I had a little bit of time to prepare so I could go back to the job description to remind myself as well. So, yeah, that was a role that was recently advertised and it really is to support library-led publishing and more non-traditional dissemination of research to wider audiences. So the role will develop services that support academics to embed research dissemination strategies through their research projects, making sure they're giving consideration to open access, non-traditional research publication, data transparency, public engagement, relevant factors in extending and reputable reach for research outputs. So they'll be doing things like creating training to promote the optimization of metadata, the application of DOIs and ISBNs, technical opportunities as well for increasing reach through alternative publishing routes. So lots of different parts there, but I thought that was a really interesting role to see because I don't think I'd seen a role quite like that before. So, part of their role is going to be helping with SEP as well, so I'm absolutely delighted to have somebody else. It will be working on SEPT. So, I thought that was a really interesting role and just goes to show the new kind of skills that are required in our sector. I've just seen Siobhan in the chat saying about her roles. Sorry. Oh, that's great. I will have to put you in touch. Definitely. It's interesting that balance is in it between what's new skills and what's actually transferable into new context or building upon or amplifying what we might think of as traditional information professional roles. And that role to me sounds like a real mixture of the two. Yeah, interesting. We have some questions and for Frankie and Lucy, I suppose they refer back to perhaps one of the very last things you were talking about in your presentation, which was whether you've got any pushback from perhaps more established members of the academic department you've been working with in terms of taking this inclusive approach towards accrediting different contributions. Would you like to take this, Lucy, or shall I? I think, yeah, so it's actually, we've sort of sidestepped that issue slightly by addressing all of this directly at the technicians rather than going through the academics to start with. So, yeah, the idea is that because the sort of mechanisms to enable this to happen consistently don't exist within Cambridge yet, our idea was to just educate the technicians about these issues so that they feel more confident raising them if and when they feel that they apply in their situation. So that's why we introduced tools like the credit taxonomy, which is increasingly being used by publishers to encourage people who are submitting papers to put people into those categories. I think as part of the advocacy we've been doing for it, we've also been raising this within our departments and library committees, but that is a newer piece of work that is happening. So, yeah, I don't know if you want to add anything, Frankie. No, not really just that like from the feedback from technicians in the sessions themselves, it's clear that some faculty and academics are really supportive of technicians getting credited and being listed as co-authors on publications where appropriate. But the practice really does vary, and there have also been people who've asked for the credit and received an outright no, and the conversation has ended, so practice does vary quite a lot. Hopefully that answers the question. It does, yeah, and in terms of the expansion of that work. Are you aware of or involved in conversations about or hopeful of more central university training, which emphasises credit taxonomy and makes it easier for technicians to get that recognition? We're definitely trying to centralise this training that we're offering to technicians. As we mentioned in the talk, expanding it beyond just the school of biological sciences out to the other schools across the university, and the credit taxonomy is obviously a part of that training that we're offering to technicians. I think it would be great if we have a look at where else, advocating for using this credit taxonomy to really emphasise equitable research cultures amongst academics and early career researchers postdocs. Like where else we can promote the credit taxonomy, and I think people do come across it because it is used widely by publishers, but actually thinking about how it can apply and in particular to recognising technicians, but also other potentially junior members of a lab, PhD students recognising everybody in a more equitable way would be really, really nice. So, yeah, that's definitely something that we could think about doing. Yeah, we've had conversations about trying to incorporate some of this in sessions that we run for researchers about writing for publication, for example, so it is sort of raised at that sort of early stage as well. And yeah, the conversations we've had with the research strategy office as part of the sort of fair attribution guidelines conversation. They hadn't heard of the credit taxonomy, so we sort of raised that with them and they are aware that the general authorship guidelines for Cambridge also need some revising. So it's possible that hopefully that will happen at the same time as the fair attribution guidelines so that they can work together, which will be nice. And how about librarians? Have you had much interest from librarians? I'm just thinking of the R&UK commitment to the technicians commitment and those AHRC, R&UK professional practice fellows and the research catalyst cohort. Is it something from among your colleagues where you're seeing interest and identification with that idea of a technician? I'm not sure about the identification with the role of technician for librarians themselves. We've actually had participants from the university library who are enrolled at the cultural heritage imaging lab, which does kind of photography and digitisation. So we have had library staff come along to the sessions and found it really useful to think about where they should be credited and acknowledged for their work within the scholarly outputs that they're supporting basically. I think there's also relevance for librarians who support kind of systematic reviews that side of things. I think that's also relevant. But the professional practice fellowships and research catalyst cohorts, definitely we're seeing more librarians in roles where they're directly involved in research and co-authors and co-PI's themselves. So I think librarians should definitely be aware and feel like this is relevant for them as well. I think one of the things with our conversations that we've had with various people involved in technicians support around Cambridge is more of a recognition that librarians do actually fall into that category just through us doing this work, which has been quite nice as well. The fair attribution guidelines, I think the idea is that it won't just be for technicians, it will be for any staff who are involved in supporting research, so that would include librarians if they fall into that role as well. I wonder Dominique or Neals whether you have come across this role within the organisations institutions you've been working with, that broadening of the concept of who's doing research and how we can involve other research professionals equitably. Certainly something I've heard of, especially through the Open Research Scotland group that I mentioned, which is a group that brings together lots of people working in the research side in Scotland. But it's just not something that I do know a lot about, but obviously need to learn about. And as we're in the very early stages of the press actually is something that we should probably have on our agenda is thinking about the roles of the roles of librarians and technicians and into research. So yeah, it's really good to hear about what's been going on. I think in book publishing you'd be familiar with a page of acknowledgement and you would thank all the people who have actually supported your work. But becoming part of the metadata as a contributor is probably less common, although technical support can be many things. So I once came across a very, a quite distinguished old author who was writing about classical philology and still writing in hand by hand. So he had someone actually typing. That's a kind of technician. I know that's very practical, but absolutely being acknowledged. So I think acknowledgements generally are something that are present, but not in a systematised way properly. So yeah, I think it's exciting work. A question for you, Niels. Can you say something as to the extent of that shift that you see happening from commercial publishing to open access approaches? The person asking the question is hopefully asking for a percentage indication. I don't know whether that's possible or whether you could just speak about it in broader terms. Well, it depends on whether the sun is shining, I guess. I was optimistic you want to be, but yeah, it's a great question. First of all, I think we should of course be mindful that open access and commercial doesn't have to be against each other. So you see a lot of commercial publishers engaging in open access. But as you, I understand also this question about what is the percentage of the total number of book published being OOA. And it is still a fairly low number. So I would say between maybe 8-10% probably of the total outcome. But it's quite rapidly increasing. Last year, DeltaThink did an analysis based on DWAB data showing that there is an annualized growth rate of around 35% for open access books, which is higher than for open access journals. Of course, it starts at a lower level, but it shows a lot of activity in the field. And I think you can see from all the different experiments on the publisher side that, you know, I think we've seen models, MIT Press, Michigan Press in Europe, what Dominic showed. The open book collective has a great model to encourage routes to open access that are not based on BPCs, which seems to be the preferred method of commercial publishers. So I think if these models are successful, and that, of course, to a large extent depends on whether libraries and institutions want to support them, then we can see more rapid growth. And then I think it can happen quite quickly, actually. But it's still a smaller part. And of course, DWAB is not the full set of everything published open access, although it's a comprehensive index. So finding out these numbers is actually something we have struggled with a lot. And the project dimension Pellomira has a part of that project is also about addressing the issue of getting good data on good quantitative data. Yes, very difficult. I would have thought to arrive at a number that you feel really represents all of the activity that's happening in this space. And it was great on your last slide, Dominic, to see that flourishing of different models, different presses and some library presses as well. Yeah, exactly. We're really keen to harness the power of collaboration through that as well of the different UK institutional presses working together. And one of our key areas that we're actually, we've got a working group that we're going to start on is advocacy within institutions for this type of publishing. Because it is quite hard to kind of, well, it's OK, especially for SEP within the institutions. But getting to that kind of top level of management, getting our message heard, getting it across, that's definitely one of the big challenges. So I mentioned that we've kind of tried to do this advocacy toolkit within SEP. But it's tricky, I think, because a lot of researchers are still keen to publish with kind of their preferred publisher. So changing that is one of the things that we are looking at and what we can do together to change it. So I think one of the things we're going to do with OEPA is we're going to kind of create a web page that shows what we can offer. You know, we're really trying to highlight, you know, kind of a lot of our books are award winning, for example, you know, we're trying to highlight these things, get that message out at institutions. So yeah, hopefully working together will speed things up, I hope. Yeah, I think that's a great note for us to finish on. The more activities, the more people involved, the more opportunities there are.