 And we are very pleased to be joined by Stephen Gray, who is the head of research support at the University of Bristol, who's going to be talking to us about Virtual REC Reading Room. Hello, I'm Stephen Gray and I'm the head of research support at the University of Bristol Library. I want to talk to you today about a journey that the library has been on for a while now to build a 3D digital platform to showcase some of our unique cultural heritage collections. If you're having trouble imagining what I mean, here's an example on the screen at the moment. This is a purely digital virtual space and you can visit in virtual reality, we're in a headset or in browser as a kind of a computer game experience. So why would you want to do this? Why would a library want a three-dimensional digital virtual space to show some of its content? We know from 2D digitisation that providing digital access can help us to protect fragile original collections. Digitisation can also open up collections to new audiences, potentially international audiences for lots of collections. But maybe more importantly, it supports new types of use of those collections. So we've already started to do projects where we co-curate collections with members of the public, for example. We can use this kind of virtual digital space to bring together collections that are geographically dispersed around the world. And we're starting to believe that this is a good way to generate new knowledge, but the truth of it is we don't really know the potential of these kind of spaces, but we believe that it's going to be very exciting in the future. I'd like to illustrate this by presenting two of our recent projects, the Blandford Collection and the Uncertain Space. The Blandford Bequest is a collection of antiquities held by the University of Bristol's Departments of Anthropology and Archaeology and Classics and Ancient History. It was donated to the University by Dennis Blandford, a retired Classics teacher and alumnus of Bristol. And it includes Greek and Roman artifacts, terracotta figurines, pottery, glass bracelets, and other jewelry, metal pins, roof tiles, and even some textile fragments. The collection was left to the University as a bequest by Dennis Blandford in 2014, and we've been using it as a teaching and study collection ever since. The artifacts within the collection are not particularly accessible because they don't have a dedicated storage display case that students and staff can easily access for handling and research purposes. So we wanted to find a way to make the collection more accessible not just to our own students, but actually to the broader public. This became particularly acute during COVID when we didn't have access to anything in person and everything had to be digital. So we wanted to find a way to allow our students to continue to work with the collection, but through a digital medium. So we had this problem where no one could access the building because of COVID, and our first idea was to take photographs of all the artifacts in the collection. We soon realized that whilst this would work for 2D items, it was a compromise for 3D objects. So we started to scan a few dozen objects. This turned out really well, so we carried on and put about two weeks into the work, three people working for two weeks, and we managed to scan around 600 of the objects. Once we had them all scanned, we had the challenge of actually granting access to the digital copies of the objects. And our first idea was to put them into the research data repository, data.briss. We did this and they're still available online for anyone to use, but we realized that just putting 3D objects within an online platform wasn't really enough. Those people who were not used to using 3D models, either in the teaching or research, still weren't using the objects, still had a technological barrier to using the objects. So our next idea was to put the 3D scanned objects into a virtual reality environment and allow anyone to download the VR environment for free and to work collaboratively within the space. I wanted to give you a view of the inside of the virtual reality environment, and this is it. As you could see, it looks like an old library. Hopefully this is engaging for the user, but the main reason is to give a sense of scale to the objects. When they're floating in a void, it's really hard to tell how big something is. So this is the rostrum, and the rostrum has an overview of the Blandford bequest and also has what metadata exists for this collection here on the clipboards. So let's say I wanted to see the Byzantine oil lamp with stub handle, which is BB1048 and is in box B. I would just dial up box B here on the rostrum and here it is. I can be as rough as I like because of course these are just digital sockets of the objects and at the oil lamp I think is this one here. Every object has its item number somewhere on it, and I can see that this is in fact BB1048. The resolution is pretty good. It's much higher resolution than you'd usually find within virtual reality, but it's not the full resolution we scan the object at, and if you were to look in the Databricks repository and download this object you would get a much higher resolution object. So you could say that the whole virtual reality experience in one way works like a glorified catalog. It allows people to check the thing that they thought they wanted is in fact the thing that they want. I'm here on my own at the moment, but I could invite other people to sort through objects, arrange things, group things, make lists within virtual reality, and so we could work in here collaboratively. We completed the Blandford project two years ago, and at the end of the project we realized we'd learned quite a lot. So the first thing is there's a huge potential audience out there and I think the experience was downloaded something like three and a half thousand times in the first six weeks. We don't know very much about the audience and that's something that we're still working on. We don't know, for example, how satisfied they were or even really in what ways they were using the collection, but there's certainly an audience out there. Virtual reality isn't for everyone and we soon realized that even those people that are fans of virtual reality often don't have access to a headset. So for example, for teaching, if we want this collection to be used in the university we usually have to provide headsets as well. For the Blandford project we were tied to a particular commercial platform, the Steam platform, and the experience will be around I hope for as long as the Steam platform will be around, but there's no guarantees there. So it's a vulnerability. For this particular project we didn't involve any users at all or even consult users. That was mostly due to the practicalities of conducting projects during lockdown, but for the next project I'm going to present to you, you'll see that was a very different story. The environment that we put together for the Blandford project wasn't reusable. It wasn't put together in that way. It wasn't intended to be reusable. If we wanted to, for example, present the same kind of environment with a different collection, the whole experience would have had to have been rebuilt from scratch. So you could see from these points we really didn't have longevity in mind. That wasn't a name. The aim was to do something iteratively, to get something out there, to publish something which fitted a particular purpose at a particular time. But the next project I'm going to present to you was built from the ground up with longevity in mind. The Uncertain Space is a virtual museum for the University of Bristol and it's quite unusual in that it's a museum first and virtual second. So it's got lots of the same things. It does lots of the same jobs as a real world museum, but it happens to be only digital. The Uncertain Space was funded through AHRC capability for collections funding and it was our attempt to widen the audience to some of the University of Bristol special collections. We'd had some experience of providing virtual reality access to various objects and pictures before and this was our attempt to do that in a more sustainable way, in a way that wouldn't stop at the end of a project but would carry on and that's the Uncertain Space. The project had two main outcomes. The first was the virtual museum, but we realised that it would be quite boring to release an empty museum to the public so we had to create the first exhibition at the same time. So as well as the museum, we had the first exhibition which is called Secret Gardens and was co-produced with a group of young people. The Secret Gardens is basically focused on the public artworks of the University, but it includes objects, artefact, 3D scanned objects, scanned images, audio visual clips from all kinds of University collections, all coming together around the central theme of environmental awareness and identity. The second phase of the project was to actually digitise the content that the young people had selected. It was a different types of process depending on the different types of object they're interested in. Audio visual clips were digitised in the theatre collection. 2D images were digitised both in the theatre collection and special collections and we had quite a lot of activity around 3D scanning. So 3D scanning the public artworks and the objects which were to go into the exhibition. There was also a phase of recording the young people's reactions so they'd visit each of the public artworks and we'd record their immediate reactions to being there in the presence of the artwork and they're all included in the virtual exhibition too. One of the things that came through when we were doing the project is that putting together a virtual exhibition is very similar to putting together a real world exhibition. So the young people and the curators who look after the objects worked with Simon Fenn who's a real world exhibition designer and until this point had only worked with real museum exhibitions. But I think he found that there was a lot of commonality between designing a virtual exhibition and designing a real one. One of the big differences between the uncertain space and other virtual exhibitions that other organisations and museums galleries have put together is that it was always thought of as being sustainable. That this is a space first and foremost and it would have different exhibitions, a rolling programme of exhibitions that would happen in the space. The secret gardens is the first exhibition. We're already putting together a programme of different exhibitions which will happen in the same space. We've now completed the initial setup phase of the uncertain space and we have some lessons that we learned along the way. The first one was to plan your publication route early on. There are lots of options, none of which are perfect when it comes to sharing 3D virtual environments. But it's important to know which one you're headed for before you start. What we certainly didn't want was experience that we could only use locally. We wanted something that we could show on local headsets that we could have in headsets in our reading rooms, but that we could also share on the internet to access that much wider audience that I've spoken about. We knew this time around that we wanted to build in preservability and interoperability and we didn't want to get tied to any particular hardware or software because the technology advances so quickly and becomes obsolete so quickly. We used standards like OpenXR so that we could build experiences which would work on more than one type of virtual reality headset, for example. We also compiled a list of our significant properties for our virtual experiences and this would be familiar to anyone who's used significant properties for things like document digital preservation or maybe audio-visual preservation. It's the idea that rather than focusing on a particular software hardware at a particular time, you look at what the item does and you make sure as you try and preserve it into the future that it continues to function in the same way. If anyone's interested in this, I'm more than happy to talk to you about the digital preservation aspects of virtual spaces. I haven't really spoken about the technologies which underpin the work that we've been doing and it's a whole other presentation in its own right, but if anybody wants to catch me afterwards and talk about the technological decisions that we've made and why we've made them along the way, I'm happy to speak about that. So what I would like to mention and I'm very grateful for is my own current AHRC RLUK professional practice fellowship. It's allowing me to take lots of the techniques I've been discussing and focus in on a particular community. I'm working with a group of autistic adults and we're putting together co-producing a virtual reality environment which I'm very much hoping will be available published later this year. I also have to thank Ed Fay and the senior management team in the library at the University of Bristol for supporting this work and believing that it's got potential. I think it's very early days and we can't yet say what that potential looks like, but I can already see some peer organizations doing similar work and it would be excellent if we could come together and build a community. So with that in mind here are my contact details and lots of the work I've been discussing can be accessed via the hyperlink here. Thank you very much for listening to me and I look forward to the questions. Thank you very much Stephen, that's a really interesting and already raising thoughts and questions in my mind and I'm so pleased that you mentioned the AHRC RLUK Fellowship Scheme and we're very pleased and proud to have you as one of the fellows on that on that scheme. I'm sure that that's going to produce a lot of really interesting work as we move forward. We're going to go on to our next speakers and we're going to cross the country from Bristol to Cambridge where we have Augustina of Mathedereth Garcia and Alexia Sutton from the University of Cambridge. Augustina is ahead of Open Research Systems at Cambridge and Alexia is the Open Access Service Manager. Hello I'm Augustina Martinez and today I'll be presenting jointly with my colleague Alexia Sutton. In this talk we will provide an overview of key projects as part of the Open Research Program being developed at Cambridge. The focus will be on those concerned with the implementation of services to support scholarly publishing and more innovative approaches to early publication and open peer review. In terms of what we will cover today, first I'll give you some backgrounds on the wider Open Research Program before delving into the different projects and then I will also give you a high level overview of the key areas being developed as part of the infrastructure roadmap in particular. Then I'll hand over to Alexia who will tell you all about the preprint service as well as introducing the community led journals project and then I will talk about the Diamond Open Access pilot project that we are currently undertaking as well as telling you a bit about some upcoming work we have around supporting innovation and new publishing models through using our repositories. In terms of the background to the open research infrastructure work, open research developments form part of a research portfolio at the university involving many units not only the libraries but in particular the infrastructure roadmap that we are developing falls within the research collections strand of work that Cambridge University Libraries are leading. In terms of the open research infrastructure roadmap, the vision for this program of work is to meet researchers needs across the full research life cycle, supply better integrated services that are underpinned by innovative and appropriate open systems and research infrastructure and to mention that the concept of open systems and infrastructure is really critical to us and the work that we do. In terms of the areas that the program covers, the first one is concerned with digital preservation. The libraries are undertaking a five-year full program of work to implement digital preservation services and systems to ensure long-term preservation of the research outputs of the university as well as archives and collections that the libraries are responsible for. The second big area of work is around enhancing research data management services provision and we want to gain a better understanding of researchers needs across the full research life cycle, particularly in a complex environment like Cambridge where all of the services are really fragmented in terms of providing support for research activities and then the third one is the one that is really of interest to the projects we'll be talking today and it's about the open research ecosystem and scoping future services and systems to support more open practices in our context of really rapidly changing scholarly publishing environments. Hello, I'm Alexia. I'm going to talk in the next couple of slides about the pre-print service that we've launched at the University of Cambridge. So in early March 2024 we launched a pre-print service for Cambridge University researchers. The purpose of the service is to provide a high-quality option for researchers who do not have a suitable, sustainable subject repository available to them. Apollo is underpinned by DeSpace, a widely adopted open-source repository platform. It is also a fortress seal certified repository and as such provides long-term digital preservation, persistent identifiers for the outputs it holds and machine readable metadata. So it provides a reliable and sustainable option for our researchers. The primary use case for the pre-print service are those researchers who do not have a subject repository available to them at all. The idea is that they would be able to use Apollo as their pre-print server. It would also be available to researchers who have concerns about the sustainability of their existing subject repository or those who would simply prefer to use Apollo instead. We haven't previously offered this service because we didn't have the technical infrastructure or capacity within the team to develop a non-essential service and staff it. However, following recent upgrades to both the University's repository Apollo and Elements and with COVID out of the way we felt that the time was right to revisit pre-prints. In addition, supporting early publication of research outputs enables open practices and aligns with community-led scholarly infrastructures in recent proposals such as Coalition S's towards responsible publishing. Services like this will allow us to engage with the wider scholarly community by participating initiatives such as Core Notify where authors could choose from a list of participating overlay journals or open peer review services and request a review of a pre-print that they have deposited in Apollo. The pre-print service that we have developed uses existing infrastructure specifically in the Cambridge context. This means using Elements and Apollo in the same way that we do for other output types. Researchers can complete an upload form and upload the file by Elements. This creates a ticket in our ticketing system. The upload is reviewed by staff and then deposited on their behalf into Apollo. The workflow which is outlined at the very top level on this slide is very simple and allows us to create new versions of a pre-print as needed by the researcher. The process as set up involves staff in the open access team creating new versions of pre-prints for researchers rather than the researchers depositing them direct into Apollo. This is something that we might come back to in at a future date. One of the limitations of the process is that we still need researchers to deposit their accepted manuscripts as they usually would on its own record and this is to ensure that we can retain the first date of deposit for REF audit purposes. The pre-print record and the accepted manuscript record would be linked together. This is the part of the workflow that is the most clunky and probably from a researcher's perspective the part that would not really be on par with other pre-print servers where they can simply keep uploading the pre-prints until it's finally accepted and they're all on the same record. But of course these pre-print servers don't have the same needs to balance reporting requirements for REF as an institution does. So the service is still really in its early days. It was only launched on the 11th of March. To support the launch of the service we worked with the research information team on the communications of the service and also its development. As we integrated this launch into pre-scheduled Apollo upgrade work we have been able to piggyback on some of the early downtime communications and supplemented that with updates to the SharePoint website and blogs. We've also communicated on Teams, email and by the OSC and library newsletters. In these next few slides we're going to talk about Diamond Open Access at Cambridge but before we go into the detail I wanted to briefly introduce a study that the Office of Scholarly Communication has been running to better understand the community-led publishing ecosystem at the University of Cambridge and this study feeds into Diamond Open Access project that Agasina will discuss in the next few slides. The purpose of the study is to better understand what is taking place at the University, what motivates those involved and to gain insights into how we can support these initiatives. In turn the results can inform us about the utility of alternative publishing avenues for researchers not only in Cambridge but all over the world. Through the study we identified 34 community-led publishing initiatives at the University, the editorial board members of 20 of the journals were invited to take part in the study and nine participated in semi-structured interviews. Something that became clear through the study is that the journals are maintained entirely by volunteer members, usually on a rolling basis and rely on limited financial and technical support. The journals are also across a range of disciplines. The transcripts will be uploaded onto Apollo following approval from participants and we're in the process of analysing the data and writing up a paper. As Alexia has mentioned the OSC is currently leading a research project looking at community-led publishing across Cambridge. Interim findings suggest that there is a healthy ecosystem of self-publishing at the University but that many of these journals require technical and publishing support for their main activities, particularly around preservation and discovery areas. So to provide support in those identified areas we are undertaking a complementary project that is looking at the development of a service for diamond open access journal publishing supported using open repository platforms. The scope for such a service is primarily student-led and academic-led publishing and only within the University is an internal service to begin with. The way we are approaching the project is by having first a one-year pilot in which we will engage with researchers and explore whether open platforms in particular we will be using repository platforms based on this space meet actually their needs around institutional publishing and can also be used as the basis for further development of a service in this area. In relation to the main aims of the pilot the community-led journals project has actually been very useful to the pilot as it has helped us identify and engage with potential pilot participants so far we are working with three confirmed Cambridge journals in the disciplines of history of arts, anthropology and architecture. So we will really be exploring the accessibility of this space open repository platform as one of the main aims of the pilot in particular in its latest version because this space has brought in advanced functionality that allows us to better represent journals content structures and content in the platform as well as allowing for visual theming customizations to tailor the look and feel to the different journals requirements and also it allows to or it supports a range of submission and content management workflows. Lastly another very key aim of the pilot is to gather insights about what it takes to transition from pilot to service and in particular we are looking at estimating resourcing requirements both in terms of service management and infrastructure and then looking at long-term access storage and preservation as well from the more technical angle. In terms of what work is being planned or has already taken place through the pilot we have now set up both a demo and production instances of the online journal publishing platform using pretty much a vanilla dsp7 instance with minor theming customizations to meet the look and feel of other library services that we offer. We are currently assessing and documenting the possible submission and content management workflows within the platform and this is to ensure that they meet the different journals requirements and then we will commence work with pilot participants to support key activities around exploring journal content structuring and pages design basically the visual theming that I was mentioning before and then defining and testing content submission and editorial management workflows in the platform. These key activities will allow us to assess whether journal teams can easily self manage submission editorial and content management activities through the platform. This is particularly important as the way we envision the service is to work in a self managed way where library provides the technical infrastructure and user support with some basic level of publishing support but most of the journal management actually lies within the editorial teams. Lastly I wanted to talk about upcoming work that we are planning in relation to supporting innovative publishing models through repositories. Repositories are increasingly playing an expanded role in transforming the scholarly publishing. New more transparent and equitable models of scholarly publishing are now gathering momentum and there is an increased community interest as I saw some of the projects like the community that journals are demonstrating in independent journal publishing and open peer review. Repositories together with external peer review services can offer a new model for the amount of an access publishing one that is actually flexible and based on a standard and interoperable technologies and it can also lower the technical unpublishing costs by distributing the publishing functions across the different services involved in the process. For us the launch of the preprint service in Apollo together with new technical developments in the underlying repository platform this space will make it possible to explore new roles for institutional repositories in the wider scholarly ecosystem. In particular what we want to do is to pilot a core notify implementation in Apollo to link repository content with peer review services or overlay journals. For us the main aim is to provide an easy alternative for researchers that wish to publish open access while at the same time support alternative models such as coalition SS publish review and curate that Alexia has mentioned before. So how does the publication process work when using core notify in repositories such as Apollo? Well first authors deposit and submit manuscripts in the repository and then the author chooses to submit a request for publication in a subscribing overlay journal or open peer review service. This request triggers for the repository to send a review or endorsement request to the overlay journal with a link to the repository manuscript. Next the journal assesses the relevance of the manuscript and agrees to review it and then this sends an acknowledgement notification of agreement to review to the repository from the journal. Then review processes take place and manuscript is accepted for publication. Then an announcement request or notification is sent by the journal into the repository with a link to the publication webpage and lastly then cross-linking takes place where repository will link to the journal's record and the journal will include a link to the manuscript in the repository. So at the moment this is work like you know very in pretty much very early stages um so the next steps for us are we are currently waiting for the technical implementation to be available later in the year in the year in the repository and until then we will be then gathering different use cases as well as exploring collaboration with relevant stakeholders within the university and externally and that will be the end of the presentation for us. Thank you. Okay thank you so much to August, Selina and Alexia. Really interesting and I love the fact that we're only two presentations into the conference but we're already seeing the vast range of activities that libraries are undertaking to support research. We're also beginning to see the commonalities because both presentations have talked about digital preservation, they've talked about audience engagement and they've talked about sustainability. So there's variation but there's also key themes coming out and we're only two presentations in. We're going to turn now to our third presentation for this session and we're pleased to welcome Sam Nesbit who is the open access librarian at the University of Sussex. Sam's going to be talking to us about the what's been happening within the University of Sussex in their support for open research and I'm very pleased to say that Sam is going to be speaking to us live for this session so welcome Sam. Hello Ron and thank you for the opportunity to speak here today and thank you to Augustina, Alexia and Stephen for some fascinating presentations so far. I'm going to pivot slightly and talk a little bit about how our research and open scholarship team has adapted to the fast-paced world of open research support. Detail some of the ways in which our support service has changed in the last few years. I'll cover how the team has grown, how our specialisms have been both enhanced and challenged by developments in the sector and how we might measure success in such an environment. I should note that this is very much a personal reflection and my title refers to the feeling I had when I first started as an open access librarian in March 2020 back in the midst of time. As you recall there was quite a lot going on in the world around that time and to me and my perhaps a blink of view new to the sector the basic idea of open access and its mechanisms seem to be a no-brainer. I remember myself saying more transformative agreements please ignorantly are pining into a Zoom screen as the world crumbled around me as well as thinking I'm sure this Reff open access policy thing can't be that complicated. Well the the open goal of OA seemed to me just that an easy chance to grab at the time. If you fast forward four years I've done a lot of learning the scales have fallen from my eyes and it's not just the jaded worn face you see before you that has changed. Open access publication my area of work has been subsumed into the broader open research agenda and in the variety of meanings practices and aims being discussed in this environment presents a series of challenges I think to quote unquote traditional library work and the skills we thought we needed to do it. And so how have the goalposts moved? Before I get onto that first some context here is the obligatory slide about the institution and its numbers we have around 19,000 students and about 2000 research students and staff and I give these numbers to contextualize the size of our team which is currently made up eight people and the cohort they serve many of you will have smaller teams many of you will have larger teams but I think that we can all agree that despite the sunny picture that you might see on the slide now libraries in higher education are working in slightly gloomier times more stretch times and so I would like to emphasize at this early stage that when I talk about resource and development I'm very mindful that not everyone will have had that affordance but I would also say that we're not immune to those self-same pressures and we too have come up against our limits in terms of resource recently. So what are we talking about when we talk about open research? The two presentations prior to mine have given two very very different conceptions as well which is really really helpful it's a slippery term but we tend to think about it at Sussex as opening up practice identifying and improving the composite parts of the research life cycle with a focus on reproducibility and research integrity a kind of transparency as ethical mode all of this is limbed very beautifully I think by products like Octopus and its breakdown of these stages and kind of de-emphasizing the final narrative product although that's still very important. We also see it as about cultural change there was a talk at the open research week run by Edgel Essex and the Liverpool universities by K and Rachel at Glasgow give a wonderful keynote talking about the kind of what it takes to change research culture and institution and here at Sussex we really much foreground opens part in that cultural shift and research culture includes must include the mechanisms for both academic and professional services reward and recognition and so the carrot's not the sticks leading us forward I suppose so given this vast remit this expanding remit what does the library currently offer and how has that changed? I don't imagine some of the changes or complications I'll mention here will be new to people exactly but I'd be certainly curious to hear of people that had similar experiences or whether Sussex is somehow operating in a bubble open access remains part of this expanded picture of open research certainly but even that has become much more complicated I think with every new transformative or transition agreement comes new levels of often labyrinthine bureaucracy and procedural admin and here I must pause to give a shout out to the absolute champions at JISC for their stellar work in negotiating with both perhaps might be called rapacious profiteering and disgruntled librarianship so it's amazing the work that you guys do so anyone from JISC in the audience thank you very much to give a sense of how this is expanded we had two transformative agreements in 2020 when I started and we now have 19 agreements many of which meet that transitional or transformative definition likewise there were complications in open access finance that have arisen just when we thought we had a handle on managing our UK our block grant along comes the monograph pot and the various different complications that come with stage one and stage two etc and then the explosion of really encouraging to see rights for attention policies across the UK and all the legal scrutiny and advocacy that goes along with them and so so much has changed in in my small area of open research open access publication in as little as three years our involvement with the technology that supports open research again as as described very well by by Christina previously at Sussex here is our engagement with that has increased to we had the implementation of a new Chris system we had the fallout of a technical crisis during the ref submission we had the subsequent very very hands-on repository migration and all of this required a technical capacity that historically we would have perhaps ceded to our IT services department or to our wonderful but small library systems team and both of those were involved but we had a real hands-on approach to those things our teaching offer in open research encompasses open access publication and things like copyright very much looking forward to the workshops on Friday by the way and now an introduction to open principles and practice but we've needed to reflect on what's being taught in the schools perhaps outside our view and how that might differ and so using these sessions is kind of active knowledge exchange with the different kind of cohorts that we might attract and lastly policy not just the development of our rights for attention policy at Sussex but our ability to decipher funded policy to try and to explain the difference to researchers between transformative agreements transition agreements and transformative journals was enough to make them lose the world to live as almost as much as I did and I don't see that changing anytime soon given these transformations or transitions are coming to an end open question mark and so who does all this our services is notionally split across three distinct but overlapping areas and our name check I'm wonderful team because I know they might be watching a watch party in Sussex so for research support we have Maggie Tom and Jack open publication is both our open access service and our nascent open press and it's Henry Katrina and Stuart and for our repository in Chris Systems we have Sally Stuart Maggie and Jack you'll notice that those names are repeated we have staff that work across different areas it's not a huge team but it's not as small as some historically it's been between three and five people and I know that size of team will be very familiar to lots of people watching now but the growth of open research in its remit is directly responsible for that increase here at Sussex um likewise our research data management team is an extra member now and we certainly expect that to be a growth area too interlinked with our work so given all these changes and the new demands that we found on our skills the question becomes how do we roll with the punches how do we adapt even thrive or perhaps more formally what will library support for open research look like in the next five years even in a an ever-changing field like open research it often behovers management to think in the medium or long term we can be quote-unquote dynamic agile operate on the fly but not everyone works that way and it's not always the most helpful but we do expect our service our support service to change uh iteratively and be able to suddenly pivot towards what our stakeholders require but also towards new areas for exploration and the aim at Sussex I think is to ensure that the team feel confident certainly but also excited for the challenges to come and trying to embed a culture of continuous learning is a major focus we've got new members of the team as well to which to whom for whom rather these challenges might seem more intimidating and exciting and the idea is to kind of leverage the skills they already have and make sure that the excitement is the is the main focus and so to that end what's next at Sussex this slide reflects some of the more exciting challenges we face and for which we're actively planning um we're looking to develop our open publishing offer and are currently recruiting an editorial manager to oversee this development and you can see some of our flagship titles on the right here we have an open research technologies hub that provides a kind of central location in the library for teaching on and the use of open hardware as well as the space a kind of petrol space really for all manner of open research teaching um it's it's staffed mainly by one person and I'll give Andrea shout out now who works in biological sciences the purest embodiment of open research practice and principle that I've ever met he's absolutely wonderful um he's also helping us do the open science community incubator course which is a 14 week program um that he's essentially undertaking with our occasional help um and that seeks to build a community of open research practice and the real focus is making sure its researcher led um and represented with different disciplines and career stages but certainly with library involvement uh especially in the area of advocacy um we've seen some amazing stuff from Stephen this morning on opening up collections and how you might frame that um we'll certainly be investigating the technical opportunities uh afforded by things like that probably not anything quite as fancy as that but we'll certainly be looking to Bristol uh for for conversation I think um we'll also kind of focus on more traditional notions of collections in terms of our subscriptions and the repurposing of budgets there again a motto that I seem to have in the back of my head since I heard Dominic at Salford say it was the aim is to enable not acquire and I think that's a great way to approach these problems and finally with policy along with other institutions with so-called rights retention policies we'll be monitoring progress with us um and working with partner institutions to provide help and guidance where we can I think I received just like most of you with a mixture of dismay and excitement that monographs are indeed involved in the REF consultation and so I wonder if there's space for investigation there all the wishes to say we're going to be very busy but I hope you'll agree there's a lot of exciting work to be done there uh and the question becomes then who will do it it's going to be the same team uh it's going to be the same wonderful team that we've got that I've already described with the addition of one extra post in terms of the open press and I sincerely hope a flourishing open science or scholarship community made up of champions across different levels um I also would note that our newish data analyst in post sprang to mind when again listening to K and Rachel at Glasgow talk about exploratory data use I'm sure I wasn't the only person to write down the words write reports nobody asked for and we're certainly keen to exploit the data we have access here to see what what patterns emerge and how we can approach these problems and so finally going back to the original side about what success would look like in terms of open research I think our exposure to and and collaboration with working researchers across disciplines will mean that our own processes might come under scrutiny and that should perhaps be welcomed um we also stand to learn a great deal in both technical skill and contextual understanding I think the more we partner with external institutions we're part of the eastern art consortia now or the OIPA the Open Institutional Publishing Association the more we can contribute to culture change outside our institution that said I think it should start at home and I had a fascinating exchange with a colleague yesterday who questioned why so much talk about research culture was a historical that didn't really take into account in institutional history or character as if research culture capital r capital c was somehow the same everywhere objective and I think he's absolutely right we'll need to focus on what Sussex is and was and try and embed this change according to me accordingly rather ensuring that open research practice and commitments are reflected in the institution's priorities and thusly in reward and recognition and so my hope is that as a colleague said to me yesterday open research becomes the university's what digital became to collections librarians or archivists not scary anymore in fact accepted exciting business as usual um and so in summary we we think the library has a key part to play in the development of open research at Sussex it's going to take a lot to to skill our team and to continue with that development um but for now I'll just end this kind of personal reflection with it with a simple invitation to anyone in the audience if colleagues from other libraries feel similarly where they are or if any of this is resonated or piqued interest please do get in touch we'd love to talk to you and in the spirit of openness and collaboration that the Sussex values seem to promote so thank you very much for your time thanks very very much Sam that was a brilliant explanation of the complexity of this space and the the range of areas that we're all having to deal with I'm going to invite all of our speakers to join us now if you could switch on your your video and microphones and we'll go through some of the the questions there's still time to put more questions into the Q&A um there's already been um some discussion within the Q&A and some of the questions are being being answered but I will want to pick up on on some of those that and perhaps go a little bit more depth um if I start Stephen with you there's some been some questions about about funding and um you've explained how you know there's been a variety of funding um there but I just wondered if you wanted to say more about how what the business case is for some of this activity um you've you said right at the beginning I think that it's it's not entirely clear yet what the research usage use will be um but how you know it's it's what what how are you persuading people to where to fund these things uh yeah so I think one of the one of the comparisons I make is with the dawn of the internet where it was not clear for a while there what a website would do for your organization I think it's similar with virtual digital environments I think drawing that comparison kind of helps put things in perspective I mean maybe it may be a flash in the pan but I sincerely doubt it now I mean virtual reality for example has been around for maybe 10 years in its current form and it's being used more and more I think we the older the technology gets the easier it is to make that case that somebody should fund it um but I also think it's quite diverse the use is quite diverse so I mentioned widely audiences and I think that's a kind of a noble fundable activity but also new uses doing things with collection that you couldn't do before so I suppose what I'm talking about is collections as data in a in a spatial three-dimensional way I think also that's quite a strong fundable idea but basically we only get funding from those organizations who are willing to fund innovation I think at the moment yeah yeah and the other thing I was struck by was your comment about digitalization as being a tool for preservation but then also the reliance on specific vendors and I think one of the one of the examples you gave you weren't entirely sure how long that would exist for necessarily but then you said you had some thoughts about digital preservation of virtual spaces I wonder if you could if you wanted to expand a little bit on that how long do we have so I think that's one of the pieces of the jigsaw that's been missing from these kind of interactive game type environments for a while now and I think for good reason because it's very difficult and it's inherently built on technologies most of which are commercial so you always have that obsolescence built into doing anything like this and it's baby steps in terms of preservation and interoperability I think but we're making those steps big big change for us is embracing significant properties model when it comes to these 3d environments I think part of it is lessons learned you've only got to do a couple of projects which then shuffle off and inaccessible to kind of learn the hard way that you shouldn't really be putting lots of time and money into something which has only got very very slight longevity built in so yeah we're kind of producing all these things to the way they work the job they do and looking to preserve that rather than looking to preserve any particular hardware software okay brilliant thank you if I can turn to Cambridge now again actually the question of preservation so there was a there was a question that came through which you've answered about engagement with legal deposit but I think there was a very interesting question about long-term preservation of of scholarly outputs especially in in some of these smaller academic led journals which perhaps don't have that access to infrastructure so I think in your answer you said the report will focus well we'll touch on preservation but again I don't know if there's something you'd want to say now about about that um unfortunately no okay sorry the two people who um are writing the report aren't aren't here um and so I I think I think that there's certainly um a strong need to address address it in the report that that that is being written um but in terms of the like the details of what of what it's going to contain oh well we'll see uh Akistina do you have anything else to add yeah yeah yeah no in terms of the preservation yeah yeah so for example for the diamond um journals platform we're actually going to be exploring in addition to our actual preservation system that is being developed as part of the the libraries program that I mentioned the wider program we are also going to look at clocks as well in terms of preserving all of the content on of the journals in the platform so either way we we think with with the journals actually we have the good opportunity to explore clocks as well whereas with the internal digital preservation system we are looking more at the scholarly works in Apollo in the repository but more so as well all of the other things that I mentioned uh like the archives and all of the other libraries collections and that are that are relevant as well so yeah we will be exploring those two options okay great thank you and there are sort of um um issues about um infrastructure if you like what one was um a question about whether or not dspace provides uh inbuilt editorial workflows to support diamond or is that something you've had to add it does um uh it does by default um it's it's important to bear in mind that um we are kind of focusing on on sort of DIY do-it-yourself journals which means the repository is a more general system that is is designed to fulfill a range of use cases therefore some of that functionality of review workflows in particular managing reviews of content uh and the different stages of the publication they are there but are not perhaps as professional as as as one and as the ones available in those platforms that are specifically designed for journal publishing the more commercial ones for example so what we've done with the pilot is actually explore the different range of options and working with the participants because some of them would like to actually perform the peer review and anything outside of the platform and they will use just the platform for publishing the content but for other journals they want to actually do they want to do everything in in the repository and we are exploring the different options but yeah out of the box this space in particular in the latest version it has support for those uh review workflows and in fact we've been using it using them for a while uh in the repository where actually when we review open access publications we get or data there is already functionality for for the workflows and the review in there and a might as a follow-up question there would be um if there was one if you had a magic wand and you could generate some piece of national or international infrastructure which would support these this type of activities is there anything missing that you think we really need x be it a preservation solution or workflow solution or or are you are you content with the tools that you have well I think with with these tools it's about actually the kind of the network building and the fact that some of the within the kind of the scholarly work publishing environment there are different stages and different systems that take part in the whole process so that's why when I was mentioning uh in particular the planesis towards responsible publishing projects and their model for publishing review and curate and basically delegating the different publishing functions to the different services that are best placed for doing that for example publishers for peer review and offering ethics and and transparency checks those kind of things and then the content can be managed by the institutions for example as well preservation yeah but yeah some central there's been a number of initiatives in the past to try to centralize things like for example there was a project with disk for the national repository for data management and it kind of turns out that you know it's it's more like looking at at a more decentralized things where the different institutions play play a part in those yeah I think it's a question of scale isn't it and deciding what needs to be done essentially what needs to be done in a distributed way and I think for all of all of the presentations we've heard today there was that question I mean we don't necessarily need everybody every member of our UK or every research library in the world or they won't be able to make that sort of investment in time and and and and resource to do everything that we've heard from from your wall so are there are the ways in which we can help by doing some of that collectively and then just focusing on what really needs to be done locally or you know working out what their best balance is I think is an interesting question certainly for us as a membership organization it's an interesting question to think about that if I could turn to Sam for a couple of so many asked about the open hardware lab and what's what's what's in it and what how do you use it is that something that you you're you're looking after or part of yeah well we're certainly part we collaborate with with Andre and the hub I've just put a link in the chat there to a blog post for UK RN that he recently published that describes some of the work they do it's basically the most enlivening in a wonderful place to go because you can get into a talk about what you're doing in the library and then it scales out to embedding technology hubs across the world incredibly impressive work that one of the more local projects that they're focusing on is a recycling project that would recycle plastic bottles at the institution into the filament that's used for 3d printing and so what they're doing is building 3d microscopes is one option one example rather and then sharing you know the the code and various different structures be able to do that and they partner with trend in Africa and places in Nigeria as well about building microscopes there and so Andre is very good at giving presentations about how these things can be piloted everywhere else so it's going to very much open research in practice because it's based in the library we then get into conversations and use that space for more practical teaching sessions we do he's running a python for beginners to which lots of library staff are going so there's lots of different stuff that goes on there and it's a really useful hub okay brilliant thank you and thanks for that link that's really useful um I'm sure you'll have seen this question uh from Rebecca I don't know how how keen you might be to answer it about whether you view transformative agreements as as feeding the problems of commercial publishers uh expanding control over the research process or as as as providing um countering solutions um and if so how is that something you would like to I could I could not for my personal opinion uh yeah I suppose that the reason I mentioned that that ridiculous statement I made in 2020 about more of these please is because I've I've suffered the consequences of more of them um uh I think they do feed the problem um I understand why they exist and I understand why reason institution have signed up to so many but um absolutely concur with what I think is the sentiment in Rebecca's question that it does um concentrate the problem um it certainly concentrates the money and uh or for all the talk of walkaways that we've seen over years here we are still with massive deals for the massive publishers and the same profits are going to the same places but again it's not representing Sussex just the person of opinion um so uh perhaps best to have a conversation about that offline yeah um perhaps for for international colleagues um our our friends at JISC have just published a significant report into inter-transformative uh agreements and um the the you know a review of where we are with them and the the headline perhaps is that they're they're not transforming particularly quickly so journals are not moving from subscription-based to to open access in in anything like a a reasonable um timescale uh which then begs the question of what we do about that and what sort of models we'd like to see and and that's an issue that we'll come back to over over the rest of the of the of the conference um the other thing um we've mentioned rights to retention um and this again for for for colleagues outside of the UK this is something that's happening a lot within our universities um we are now moving to to a position where um universities are putting in policies which ask their um researchers to retain the the the rights to deposit papers into um into local repositories and therefore not to give full rights or copyright over to to to publishers I think I could be wrong but I think all three institutions represented here um have rights to retention policies in place now and the vast majority actually of our UK members do uh this that's a that's an introduction to the question which is is saying whether or not you you you're seeing any um changing research behavior yet or is it is it too early it's still quite early for us but I suppose we ours uh didn't really necessitate a change in behavior and that we still exit we still ask people to do the same thing is to deposit their accepting manuscripts what we then subsequently do with them um and so it was kind of it was very much a soft launch of our policy because we didn't mandate the inclusion of the statement in the in the manuscript it was very much the prior license prior obligation granting us an exclusive license and so we haven't seen changes in behavior exactly but when we've talked about the policy and it's um it's how it can help people achieve compliance etc potential inclusion for REF we've gotten a very good response um but because it's only only been licensed October last year um we're kind of gathering together data on it um but we've already calculated the kind of the rough potential savings we've made from not spending uh money on APCs for things that we've made open via the green route and even in this last six months that's sizable um uh it depends you can make those calculations sound bigger than they are uh obviously um because of press transparency and whatnot but so I think it's a difference it's working it's fantastic and we've had very very little pushback um so I'm I'm very encouraged the I think that is very encouraging and and my anecdotal contribution to this is that um for those institutions that have gone down the rights retention route there has been it has been remarkably uncontroversial on campuses so there doesn't seem to be you know it's not something that's been imposed upon upon researchers they've this even to have welcomed um it um I I wanted to go back actually uh to Augustina and Alexia because I missed the question about infrastructure which is about um whether it's from Martin Wolf and Liverpool about whether overlay journals are being indexed in in in databases like Scopus I guess also other databases like DOAJ and such like and and are you working to to to help the academics to get their journals into into these um significant pieces of infrastructure that's a very good question so I don't know the answer for the one about the overlay journals but uh we are certainly exploring um indexing in uh DOAJ for for for some of the journals we will be piloting with but no I'd like to find out actually about overlay journals because I know it's it's relatively kind of newish and uh probably not so many is the answer but uh it's worth actually exploring I don't know for sure okay yeah we I think people will be interested to to know how what the process is how easy it is um and and and because clearly these are these important um databases that it's it's it's good to get um the the titles into I wanted to um sort of end on on a a a more uh a more philosophical philosophical question which I'm going to throw at you all um which I haven't given you notice I'm afraid but I apologize but what struck me in this in this conversation is that there's a lot of new activity that you're all undertaking new roles for the for the libraries and and new ways of working with with researchers and and I and I wondered to what extent the activities that you're undertaking what you're what you're doing are um are reactive so researchers are coming to you they're coming with needs and you're saying this is what we're going to do and how much of it is proactive it's it's the library community identifying well what we see as being problems what we see as being gaps and then offering solutions to the researchers I suspect and I don't want to preempt your your your answers but I suspect the the real answer is it's a mix of both but um I don't know again I'm going to throw that out to you um and I'm going to be a very unfair I'm going to ask Stephen if he has some some thoughts on that first I think that yeah both of those yeah mix 5050 I think but the both of the uh projects that I presented the first one was driven very much as a support need from the library and the second one was as preempting some of that and putting something in place hopefully efficiently and and a bit of cost saving before the need was properly identified and I can't go without mentioning the the my own professional practice fellowship which is kind of funded by ROUK and HLC and that's very much about leadership within research so I think that that's the future if you like I think that's the direction of travel is trying to preempt some of those use cases before they become critical and address them as early as possible resources allowing yeah but also I was very struck by your comments about you know we're not entirely sure yet about what the research impact it will be of doing some of these things and I think that's that having space in which to have that to explore in that way I think is really interesting thanks so moving over to Cambridge Alexia obviously you know I mean some of some of that activity is is being driven by by researchers who've already set up their journals but you know some of it is also providing solutions perhaps that the researchers don't know about yeah certainly I mean the thinking about the pre-print service I mean you know the primary use case for that are actually people who are not pre-printing they don't have the culture of it and so yeah so that is proactive we're trying to identify an opportunity there that we can provide and enable and facilitate like a change in practice and like you say and then there are other people within the university who who already have needs but perhaps they haven't been articulated you know in terms of the the infrastructure that they're trying to work with with their diamond open access journals and it's not really quite working for them but not necessarily hasn't been articulated to us so those I think are proactive but certainly you know there's there's always a case of reacting as well so I do think it's a mix yeah how I so I'm gonna it's a little follow-up question there about about those communities that have not been used to to to work with pre-prints how respect how responsive or otherwise have you found people well it's very early days I think it's going to take work to you know go to the departments talk to them and you know have open access briefings that specifically talk about then oh I think we might I think you may froze Alexia or is it just me no I think we've I think we've lost you momentarily but I think we've we've we've got the the the message that work is work needs to be done obviously no don't if you want to yeah I wanted to spend a little bit as well because we've actually we've been talking recently with people involved in the area of policy development and it was quite interesting that they mentioned pre-prints as well and they mentioned whether they could deposit the pre-prints in the Apollo and it was quite it was quite timely because you know we just launched the service like a week ago only so it's a mix but I think Alexia was mainly what she was mainly saying around the advocacy going to departments is something like you we really need to do proactively first we've had some positive responses from some of those disciplines where traditionally they don't they don't do pre-prints too much but then there's been as well some some issues raised by them like for example scoping and and you know problems around those myths around like publishing early and and someone kind of spoke here scoop your work and things like that so that is where you know things like persistent identifiers DOIs for pre-prints really can assure them to try to demystify those those myths otherwise. Now that's a great point and it's really interesting how those myths continue within different academic disciplines so you can you can you can dispel it in one place but it doesn't mean to say that it has it's gone from another that's a great point. Sam do you have some some thoughts on that general sort of reactive proactive split? Yeah I mean much like the previous speakers I would say it is a mixture of both I suppose kind of distilled into the example of our open press and it came off our pilot textbook wasn't a biological psychology textbook where an academic had decided that they wanted to try and do it themselves and where could they go for help and they came to us we then jumped at the chance and it kind of drove forward this this trial year we had with this open press now it's very much us advocating for alternative publishing modes and going out to our authors and seeking input from them and so we've kind of taken it and run with it and I think that tends to be the model we favour at Sussex we're trying to be more exploratory but again given the resource restrictions that I've described at prevalent everywhere I think it's finding that balance but and that's why we've got such an emphasis on community I suppose is that we can learn what kind of things we might explore and might be proactive in following from the wonderful researchers at our institution so it's listening and enacting I suppose for us. Okay great I think there is just sorry there was one more I've just it's just been pointing out there was one more question that I missed a specific question about open peer review and DOI DOI's Augustina do you want to to take that? Yeah I was going to say that that is that is a really good question because when I was talking about open peer review as part of the core notify where flow and things like that it was more actually in that case the reviews being somewhere else like in an external service but certainly we've explored as well the possibility of having open peer reviews in the repository too and that is certainly possible and yet DOI's can be minted like for those reviews like you do with with a little scholarly works so it's a good use case too.