Spotlight on …

Welcome Dorothy Willa

Meeka Moessner and Leonard are happy to share the news that Dorothy Willa Moessner Sullivan was born on 8:07pm Sunday 6th March 2022. Weighing 3784g, length 47 cm, she is a strong, healthy, beautiful little girl.  Congratulations Meeka and Leonard!

March OSC Newsletter

Read it here + subscribe to receive future issues.

Research Assessment Project

Ginny Barbour continues to progress the Reimagining Research Assessment project.  A draft issues paper was submitted to University Research Committee in March 2022.  The paper presents some of the issues and challenges with the current system of research assessment, particularly the reliance on the ‘journal publication’ as the universal research output, the resulting disadvantages experienced in the Humanities and Social Sciences (HASS) disciplines, and disadvantages experienced by researchers who are not well established (e.g. Early Career) or who have experienced breaks in their career.

Bouquets 🌺🌺🌺🌺🌺🌺🌺🌺🌺🌺🌺🌺🌺

We were given a sneak preview of the new Thesis module in Pure.  It is still under development so is only available on the Dev Server version of Pure.  It looks really good. Once this module has been integrated with the thesis submission workflow and user testing has been undertaken, it will be released on the production server.  At that point, the processing of new theses by the AIRS Team will be done in Pure rather than in the ePrints software.  The ‘connector’ will then pass the records through to  QUT ePrints – unless an embargo has been requested on the full-text citation and metadata – in which case, the thesis and metadata would remain just in Pure until the embargo period has expired. 

QUT Theses

• Rani consulted with the Academic, Liaison Librarian, and Learning Designer for Indigenous Studies units KKB191 Am I black enough? Indigenous Australian Representations and KKB192 Smash the Act – Indigenous Australian Politics. They worked together to redesign these units for a better learning experience, ensuring the material was copyright compliant and taking into consideration any Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property protocols were adhered to.  
• Katya, Sarah Howard and Catherine Haden presented to library staff about Pressbooks and QUT’s membership in the new CAUL OER Collective. Staff are encouraged to join the Pressbooks and Open Educational Resources teams sites.  
• Katya presented to the ASCILITE OEP SIG on the QUT Pressbooks pilot. Kate Nixon and Katya’s paper on the pilot can be found here, and the recording of the presentation here: The use of Pressbooks to facilitate the adaptation and development of Open Textbooks – YouTube 
• Katya attended the CAUL OER Collective Community Day, a terrific event with over 200 attendees and a wide range of presenters, including authors, librarians, and CAUL representatives. Recordings of the day will be made available shortly. The DIY Open Textbooks grants were launched on the day. News of the grants has been distributed to Liaison Librarians and relevant staff.  
• Katya and Rani met with the new LMS+ Project team to discuss copyright compliance considerations for Canvas.  
• Katya and Rani held the first Copyright Considerations for Researchers session on 22 March. 25 registered to attend, with HDRs, professional staff, and Liaison Librarians attending. Feedback included “Thanks Katya and Rani. Great session” “It was an excellent session” “Thank you, very informative”

Coming up in April: The Copyright Clinic, an online drop-in session for researchers, students and staff, will be launched in April.  It is anticipated that we will hold these clinics monthly.  

• Katya and Rani launched the new resource on Copyright Considerations for QUT Readings and QUT Blackboard, created together with the Curriculum Design Studio. News of the resource appeared in the LTU newsletter and CIESJ eNews.  
• There are still no outcome from the Copyright Tribunal ☹
• Universities Australia is in discussions regarding the Screenrights Agreement, which is due to expire on 31 December 2022 .
• Access to course materials for non-award students is increasingly becoming an issue. Input on copyright issues has been provided to Majella Pugh + Sarah Howard.
• The March Copyright Interest Group newsletter was sent.

23 Scholarly Communication Things

• 23SCT was launched to the WORLD on the 7th March!
• For the month of March we had 578 visitors with 1533 page views. The majority of visitors came to it from Twitter then Facebook, Google and LinkedIn. There were 19 entry points in total, including Technische Universität München, Library OPAC.
• The University of South Australia contacted us about using the Open Educational Resources chapter in their Information Management degree. As the resource has a CC BY SA licence, it was a courtesy email rather than asking for permission.
• Future plans: Promote the resource monthly via Twitter – Highlighting different chapters with special emphasis at various times to coincide with special days/weeks in the year. E.g. Open access week will have posts from the relevant chapters.  

Publication Metrics

• Tanya presented two new workshops as part of the Research Skills Program: Updating your researcher profiles made easy (12 attendees) and Finding metrics: Scopus, Web of Science and Google Scholar (14 attendees).  The workshops were presented on Zoom, and Catherine did a great job moderating.
• Tanya presented at the OSC Advisory Group meeting, providing a brief demonstration of three of the Library’s new subscriptions, The Lens, Overton and Policy Commons.
• Tanya presented at the CIESJ Promotion Club, using an excellent presentation put together by Stephanie, that showed examples of how successful grant applicants have used metrics to demonstrate their impact.  The CIESJ LLs had also developed a comprehensive resource list for academics to use to find evidence for their promotion.
• Following the Research Support Working Party planning day, a smaller working party has been working on a plan to streamline and improve coordination of library support for grant applications, particularly NHRMC and ARC grants.  The plan focuses on improving communication and collaboration both within the library and with other partners.
• Stephanie continues to progress the Altmetric Explorer API when meeting with Clem Wong from DBS
• The My Organisation module is again appearing in InCites, despite QUT not having had a subscription since 2019.  It is problematic that access is available to it, as the data is very out of date.  Maryann Loneragan is liaising with Clarivate to have the access removed, hopefully for the last time.
• There will be a new Elsevier representative soon. Steve Riddell, who has been our representative for the past 8 years, is moving on.
• Overton training is scheduled for the 19th of April.
• Tanya is in the process of organising training for :
  • The Lens
  • InCites
  • Altmetric Explorer
• Tanya and Catherine are developing and presenting the rest of the series of ‘Finding metrics’ workshops; and updating the Digital Workplace content in general

Research Data Management

• Philippa met with Vladimir Bubalo, Manager, Research & Scholarly Information Services at Macquarie University to discuss how they are using Pure for research datasets.
• As part of her involvement in the QCIF-led ARDC Data Retention Project, Philippa met with a Senior Developer from QUT’s Centre for the Environment to discuss adding more datasets from the Ecosounds repository into Research Data Finder in order to create DOIs for them.  After some consultative work that included Philippa and the ARDC, the group has decided to progress minting their own DOIs directly through the ARDC.
• Philippa attended the inaugural meeting of the Australasian DataCite DOIs Community of Practice.  This is a new group hosted by the ARDC that aims to provide support for current and future users of DataCite’s DOI minting service (QUT currently mints DOIs for datasets through DataCite).
• Philippa participated in a review meeting with the ARDC Program Leader for the Data Retention Program and other Queensland universities also participation in a Data Retention Project.  This meeting was requested by the ARDC because of the low rate of success for all projects.  Universally, it was agreed that, had libraries been involved in the planning stages of the project in order to set up projects for the required work to occur, there would have been higher success rates in achieving and exceeding project outcomes.
• Philippa attended the first Data Management Planning (DMP) Interest Group meeting for 2022, where Prof Matthew Bellgard from QUT’s Office of eResearch gave a presentation on QUT’s planned involvement in the second phase of the ARDC-funded Institutional Underpinnings Project.  It is intended that the Research Data Management and Primary Materials Checklist developed by the Office of eResearch be deployed at the University of Canberra, Charles Darwin University and the University of Southern Queensland.  This is in order to test this one part of the new framework that is the final outcome of this program.
  • As a follow up to a question asked at the meeting, Philippa prepared a briefing paper on machine actionable Data Management Plans (DMPs).
• Philippa attended the inaugural meeting of the Visible Research Software Interest Group.
• Philippa attended the quarterly QLD Research Data Management Roundtable hosted by the ARDC.
• Issue: Research Data Finder is at end of life and can no longer be supported. Philippa, Stephanie, Paula and Tracey met twice with the members of DBS who provide support to the in-house systems that are managed by the OSC (Joseph Stewart, Matty Kerwin and Ilona Graham), as well as their manager (Clem Wong), to provide some background information on the systems and discuss our priorities for 2022 in terms of maintenance and development.  From these discussions, it has become clear that DBS can no longer support the Research Data Finder service, as the platform upon which it is hosted (VIVO) is at end of life and DBS can no longer manage any necessary upgrades or enhancements to the existing application.  The underpinning storage software (CKAN) for RDF also needs replacing, as it is extremely slow to load (this is due to the interface being located on prem and the database on a cloud server, the second part of which is in line with QUT procedure).  The on prem interface could be relocated to the cloud server, however, this would be a large body of work to do and DBS does not want to proceed given RDF’s end of life status.  It was agreed after these discussions that an environmental scan of possible RDF replacements will be conducted by the OSC.  

Major Future Activities 

• Commence planning for an environmental scan of research data repositories in use at Australian universities.
• Collaborate with Cameron Rutter to develop a ‘Secondary datasets for research: Health data’ workshop to be run on 21 April.
• Collaborate with Graham Dawson and Aaron Liu (Faculty of Engineering) to develop a ‘Secondary datasets for research: Meteorological data’ workshop to be run on 24 May.
• Commence a Research Data Residency at Gardens Point campus some time in March.
• Deletion of 2015-2019 blank/empty plans in the Data Management Planning Tool.
• Update Guidance in the Data Management Planning Tool, including the FAQ and Help pages.  Ensure that new URLs for ‘Managing research data and primary materials’ webpages are updated and include the new Research Data Management and Primary Materials Checklist.