The UWL Repository

Posted on by uwlopenaccess

Last week, the Open Research team held their first of a new series of PGR sessions on Open Research Skills. Among more general Open Access talk, the first installment looked using the institutional repository. It was a really enjoyable session and there was some great discussion and troubleshooting going on. If you weren’t able to attend however, here’s a quick post to give a bit of an overview to searching and depositing.

What is the Repository?

UWL Repository was launched in June 2012 as a digital archive showcasing the research, scholarly and enterprise output of University of West London staff and research students. All staff members and doctoral students can deposit material, subject to editorial process and anyone can search and access the materials that are uploaded onto the repository.

Searching the Repository

 

As you can see from the screenshot above, there are multiple options for searching. The homepage has a handy quick search bar and the webpage banner also has a site search for easy and continual access. This is best for if you have a particular repository item in mind and want to search via the author’s name or the title of the work.

The tabs on the right can allow for a more exploratory search, clicking browse items will allow you to narrow a search down by year, subject area, school, authors, or type of item.

Depositing Works onto the Repository

For depositing works onto the repository, you need to login with your regular network login details to access the repository. After you have logged in, you will be taken to your ‘Manage Deposits’ user area, which will display any items you have already deposited, and will allow you to add new material. Click on ‘New Item’ to create a new repository record.

Depositing is simple. You will be asked to provide bibliographic details about the item being deposited, provide the full-text of the item where permitted, and agree to the deposit license. After depositing, your item record will go live immediately and the Open Research Librarian will check for any errors or add any extra detail that may be missing. We have a useful video guide that provides more detailed overview of the process that you can view here. 

What can I deposit?

All kinds of research, scholarly and enterprise outputs can be uploaded to the repository (both published and unpublished) provided you have permission. Items submitted for publication and still under review should not be deposited – please wait until the item has been accepted for publication. The version that we require most of the time is often referred to as your author’s accepted manuscript (AAM). Text-based works (including articles, conference proceedings and book chapters) as well as visual works (images, videos), and other materials (e.g. sound recordings, compositions, slideshows) can be deposited. You can also deposit pre-prints of your works and we recently added a facility for adding Data Management Plans, which you can read more about here. 

If you’d like anymore help or guidance, as ever the Open Research team are ready willing and able to help you out! email us at open.research@uwl.ac.uk.

Also, please do join us at our next PGR session (open to all, not just PGRs!) It’ll be taking place on the ground floor of Rami Ranger at 12pm again and this one will be on:

Wed April 10th: Open Access to research: why, when, where and how? Why do we want research outputs to be open? when should outputs be made Open Access? where can open access materials be found and where and how do you make yours open? Including: Copyright (Creative Commons); Green and Gold open access; preprint servers;  Academic.edu/ResearchGate.

See you there!

 

Predatory Publishers — steer clear!

Posted on by uwlopenaccess

 

(Thinkchecksubmit.org)

If you thought that academia’s ‘publish or perish’ culture couldn’t get anymore exploitative, you’d be wrong. Sadly, predatory publishers exist to make money off of academics trying to disseminate their works without providing any kind of quality checks or editorial services. The publication fee is often exorbitant, despite a total lack of input on the publisher’s end.

Jeffrey Beal, Librarian at the University of Colorado in the US, coined the term ‘predatory publishers.’ Up until 2017, he also maintained an eponymous list of predatory journals until his institution was sued by Frontiers Media. It was taken offline as a result, but you can still refer to Beal’s List here.

Beal was unequivocal in his criticism of how predatory publishing has harmed the Open Access movement, writing in 2012 that:

When e-mail first became available, it was a great innovation that made communication fast and cheap. Then came spam — and suddenly, the innovation wasn’t so great. It meant having to filter out irrelevant, deceptive and sometimes offensive messages. It still does. The same corruption of a great idea is now occurring with scholarly open-access publishing (Nature).

The email analogy is a good one, especially as this is primarily how predatory publishers target academics. Watch out for emails from publishers that are overly effusive and promise speedy publication!

Publishing in predatory journals could have several negative consequences for authors and their research:

  • Works publisher in low-quality predatory journals can be harder to find and cite. Your hard work and important findings may be disregarded by the wider scientific community. A lot of citation databases also don’t index low-quality journals, so it may be difficult for others to discover at all.
  • Loss of work. Predatory publishers ultimately have no interest in the author’s actual output and so will have no scruples about taking papers offline without warning or never actually publishing works in the first place. Bear in mind also that most legitimate publishers won’t allow you to submit a work that has been published before so you could waste a huge opportunity.
  • Diminishing scholarly integrity in the scientific community. Many predatory journals promise that works will be peer reviewed, but of course, this is not the case. As a result, works of low-quality or misinformation are brought into the scientific conversation, distracting from legitimate sources.

To avoid predatory publishers, check for basic spelling and grammar errors in their communications and website as an obvious giveaway. Take a look at their archives to see if there’s consistency in terms of research area. Also look out for clearly outlined Article Processing Charges and review processes. Note how communicable the publisher is, if you can easily get in touch with them and if they keep normal working hours for the country they state they’re based in.

These are some red flags to be mindful of, but you can use ThinkCheckSubmit.org, to check out a step-by-step guide to evaluating journal quality. You can also quickly check if a journal is featured on the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) or a member of The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) by having a look at their respective websites.

Lastly, if you’re ever in doubt, just get in touch with your friendly UWL Open Research team! As ever, you can email us at open.research@uwl.ac.uk. We’d be more than happy to help!