9.2 Opening up Research: Librarians as Leaders and Collaborators for Change

This paper will explore six key themes to show how librarians contribute to the advancement of open science. It argues that these developments are prerequisites for success at scale and draws on examples from practice. Finally, it identifies critical success factors for libraries to consolidate a central role in the production and dissemination of open scholarly communication. The key themes are: Leadership Culture; It is important that libraries contribute strategic leadership across administration, education and research. Examples of this include; assessment of staff roles; collaborative approaches to the inclusion of open science in curriculum development; the contribution of the library to open institutional data e.g. research outputs and equipment available in open data format; Research and Service Networks; Support for open science requires networks that bring together a range of experts. The growing role of service triage and consultancy to support data management planning and metadata for discovery will be explored. Libraries are often the key nodal service, placing libraries at the heart of triage.

Change Agents: There is focus on three groups as key agents. PhD students are involved with co-design and delivery of training through the Doctoral College; Early Career researchers working alongside embedded librarians in research groups; Senior academic champions who participate in high level Steering Groups.

Discipline and Inter-disciplinary Led Innovation: This will show how use of open lab notebooks in Chemistry is informing the development of central service models for take up of identifiers. It will also show how interdisciplinary research such as sociologists/computer scientists is informing new methodologies and innovations in open scholarly communication. Pathways to Impact Libraries support the full curation life cycle from data collection to discoverability. The new UK EPSRC Policy Framework on Research Data has seen libraries lead on the development of integrated services to support storage and access to research data. Regional, National and Global Engagement: With the emergence of global initiatives like the Research Data Alliance, UK regional groups N8 and Science and Engineering South and pumpprimed initiatives such as the Jisc Data Spring, joining up policy, practice and standards is the next critical success factor. Libraries are already leading outwith institutions to support global frameworks for normative open science.

Wendy White is Head of Scholarly Communication at the University of Southampton, where her work includes leading the coordination of cross-service initiatives to support the management and discovery of all types of research output. She chairs the University Data Management Steering Group, the Open Access Group and is a member of the Research and Enterprise Executive Committee. She has been involved with a range of projects relating to innovations in open access, repositories, research data and digitisation. She was Principal Investigator for the Jisc-funded institutional DataPool project (2011–13). This built on involvement with other projects; KULTUR (2007–09), looking at curating and sharing research outputs for the visual arts community with the Visual Arts Data Service, as Co-Investigator on IDMB (2009–11), which developed a 10 year strategic roadmap for research data management at Southampton, as Advisory Board member for the ESRC-funded RESTORE projects (2010–14) improving access to research methods materials. Current activity has involved steering a Jisc-funded ORCID pilot and contribution to the collaborative E2E Open Access project exploring metadata requirements. She has ongoing involvement with a number of national initiatives; through the EPSRC-funded IT as a Utility network, she has worked on embedded placements for disciplinary librarians in research groups. She is a member of the Russell Group Open Data Working Group, was a member of HEFCE’s REF Data Collection Steering Group and for many years was a member of the SCONUL Working Group on Information Literacy.