HDR Meet, Greet & Eat 

The Library hosted an on-campus morning tea for Higher Degree Research students (HDRs) in the Curriculum Collection Annexe on Tuesday 12 July 2022. Nicole shared a brief welcome to the group and students were able to meet each other face to face, speak with their Liaison Librarian, enjoy food and drinks, and win a number of prizes. It was great to see HDRs socialising and exchanging experiences. Liaison Librarians were enthusiastic about the opportunity to  meet with and assist students in a relaxed environment. Thanks goes to staff from Collection Access, L&R and OSC who worked together to make the event a success, and a special thankyou to Lyndelle, Marvin, and Sal for wrangling caterers and more and Mimy for the fabulous photos below. There were 28 HDR students and 9 Liaison Librarians in attendance. 

Draft OA policy

Ginny, Stephanie, Katya and Paula have been working on a revising our Open Access policy. QUT endorsed the world’s first institutional open access policy, QUT – MOPP – F/1.3 Open access for QUT research outputs (including theses) back in 2003. Since then, the policy has been updated regularly to incorporate new emerging global practices, with the last revision made in 2018.  In recent years, the pandemic was a catalyst for change in research culture and the impact of open access on the pace of discovery and the practices of how research findings are disseminated.

This revision of the policy includes the addition of relevant definitions, as well as some cosmetic changes to bring the policy into alignment with other QUT policy documents and to streamline text. The main change proposed is that the policy will now require all refereed research articles and published conference papers at the post-peer review stage to be made immediately available at the time of first online publication with a CC-BY licence.  It is expected to go to University Research Committee’s last meeting of the year.

June in Numbers

Research Skills

Research Data Management

• The revised Open Access policy (F/1.3 Open access for QUT research outputs (including theses)) has been sent for consultation and the revised version will be complete for a University Research Committee (URC) later in the year.
• The Read and Publish pages on Digital Workplace and the HDR space have been updated.
  • Read and Publish agreements – Staff – QUT Portal
  • Read and Publish agreements – Research students – QUT Portal
• Preparation for ERA has commenced.
• The SAGE HDR Publication Prize for 2022 is underway.

IFN001: Advanced Information Research Skills (AIRS) 

 Issues (from last month and emerging)  

• Tanya and Catherine provided a publication metrics report to the Centre Manager of the Centre for Biomedical Technologies.
• Tanya provided a metrics report to the Faculty of Science ADR for the Centre for Materials Science
• Stephanie, Philippa and Tanya attended a meeting with Stephanie Guichard from Digital Science to talk about the possible rollout of the API and to discuss possible upcoming workshops with different audiences at QUT.
• The Lens.org webinar was presented by Aaron from the Lens.  It was recorded and Tanya is in the process of editing the video (the session was very long) for use by Library staff.
• Overton session was presented by Toby Green from Coherent Digital. Tanya is editing the recoding and will then upload for use by library staff.
• Tanya and Paula presented on getting the most out of ORCID at the Scholarly Communications Community of Practice.
• Sandra and Tanya presented at the CIESJ Post Doc Network, to demonstrate how to find and use metrics, as well as other alternative measures of impact and reach.

Issues (from last month and emerging) 

• There are major delays in receiving the required spreadsheets in a reasonable time from RISS to update Altmetric Explorer.  RISS have agreed to proceed with the Pure API. 

Research Data Management

• On 19 July, the ResBaz Organising Committee met and the decision was made to postpone (hopefully not cancel) the ResBaz Qld 2022 event to a later time in the year, depending on Griffith University facilities availability.  Being an in-person event, the health and safety of the volunteers, teachers, helpers and attendees was the top priority.  More information will follow as it comes to hand.
• Philippa wrote a briefing paper on the new Data Availability and Transparency Act (DATA) Scheme for Library management in late June and has since provided Library management with a list of suggested users to fulfill the roles required of nominated QUT staff in Dataplace, the government portal for managing data access requests.  It has been suggested that Philippa Frame fulfill the roles of Organisation Administrator and Data Coordinator.  Over the next two months, Philippa will be attending a number of information sessions run by the Office of the National Data Commissioner to learn more about how QUT can become an accredited Dataplace user.
• An ABS Contact Officer Community of Practice meeting was held in early July.  The ABS reported that their annual review of DataLab user charges was completed in July and that, as a result, there will be a number of changes made to the way that researchers are charged to use the secure online research environment, including waiving the previous annual project fee for existing projects, waiving the fees for using SAS and using >1TB storage.  The ABS is still negotiating an extension to the current arrangement for 2023.
• The QUT servers that house Research Data Finder, CKAN and Data Management Planning Tool have reached end-of-life and can no longer support these applications.  DBS is applying to IT Security for exemptions to the shutdown requests to allow more time to migrate the applications to new, cloud-based servers.  It is anticipated that there may be some down time in the future, to allow this work to proceed.
• Philippa was invited to UQ Library to participate in a workshop run by the ABS, for UQ researchers and Qld ABS Contact Officers on 13 July.  This was a great networking opportunity and Philippa was able to see firsthand what sort of training is on offer for registered users of ABS products, in order to decide what would be most suitable for QUT researchers.  Philippa’s proposal to host the ABS for a workshop for QUT researchers and relevant Library staff was successful and she is now organising for the training to occur (hopefully) in October.
• A second Research Data Residency (at Gardens Point) was held in July.

• On Sunday, 24 July between 11:48pm and 11:59pm, the dmp@qut.edu.au managed email account received ~220 emails.  This was reported to DBS, who concluded that the emails were a result of an SQL injection attack from someone that evening.  19,000 requests were sent between 11:00pm to 12:00am that evening, trying to log into the DMPT.  It was determined that they were not successful, but the attack caused the site to send the ~220 error emails.  Once the Tool is migrated to a new server, these attacks will be automatically blocked.  

Major Future Activities 

• Progress environmental scan of research data repositories in use at Australian universities and commence scan of identified open source and commercial solutions.
• 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.
• Attend: Technology Taster – Introduction to Zoom, ARDC Data Repositories CoP, Accreditation of Data Service Providers (ONDC), and Preparing for Canvas staff forum.