Filming in the Sir Duncan Rice Library – Wednesday August 7

On Wednesday August 7 there will be a film crew present in the Sir Duncan Rice Library, filming on the Ground Floor and possibly elsewhere in the building.

It is expected to take place between 10 am and 12 noon.

Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience caused.

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Potential noise disruption in The Sir Duncan Rice Library this week

The Library are installing new Self Service machines within the Sir Duncan Rice Library this week and this may cause some short disturbance to visitors.

This work will happen between Monday August 5 and Friday August 9.

This is vital work to upgrade the machines that allow users to borrow books from the Library. There may be some drilling while this happens. This work will be taking place across most floors of the building, at different times throughout the week.

If you are unable to find a machine to borrow books you can take the items to staff on Floor 1 of the building.

We apologise for any inconvenience caused by this but have timed this important work during the summer holidays to minimise the disturbance to our users.

Use Jisc Library Hub Discover to search all UK University and National Libraries at once

We announced earlier this summer that the popular COPAC and SUNCAT services from Jisc would be changing from July 31 when a new single service, Jisc Library Hub Discover, would launched to replace and improve upon their services. That change has now taken place and the new service is available.

COPAC provided a single point of access to the catalogues of over 100 UK National, University and specialist research libraries, while SUNCAT focused upon the serial or journal holdings of these institutions. Jisc Library Hub Discover will bring these two services together on one platform, allowing researchers to access a more complete view of the UK and Irish academic, national and special library collections than has previously been available. This change will simplify and reduce the time spent searching across the rich collections held across the UK and Ireland.

For more information see the detailed FAQ page available on the new site.

Library Guides available to help with your dissertation or project

As taught postgraduate students here at the University of Aberdeen are currently working on their dissertations or projects we would like to remind them that there are a wide range of Library Guides available on our website to help them better understand and use the high quality resources, across all subject areas, available from the Library Service.

Some guides focus on specific resources, such as Ebook Central, an ebook collection of over 180,000 titles across all disciplines, while others provide an understanding of the Library resources available in a subject area. We have guides that can help you with referencing your dissertation or project correctly; others that show you the best way to use Primo to find the information you need, and further guides that will demonstrate how to track down that vital piece of legislation in the legal database, Westlaw .

The Library Guides are all available on our website and you can browse them either in an A-Z listing or by broader subject areas, so please do have a look to see if they can assist you.

In addition to these online resources please remember that Library staff are also here to help you locate any materials that you may need, so please do come and find us in any of our three libraries.

Need help with Referencing? The Library is here to help

Once you have researched and begun writing your dissertation or project you must remember to correctly acknowledge the sources of any information which you refer to, as this allows readers to trace the original material while also ensuring that you avoid potentially committing plagiarism.

To help you with your referencing, Library staff have prepared several online guides with useful examples. We have a generic guide on Referencing and Citing as well as others focused on specific referencing systems or subject areas:

Please be sure, though, to also refer to any specific referencing guidance which you may have been provided by your department. You can also see advice on avoiding plagiarism on the Student Learning Service’s website.

If you are looking for a tool to help you organise your references and also produce your bibliography, then why not create a free account with RefWorks, an online reference management tool that the University of Aberdeen subscribes to. For more information and instructions on how to create an account please check our quick library guide to RefWorks.

If you need any help with referencing your dissertation or project please do contact Library staff.

Eleni Papadakou & Ewan Grant

Open Access Publishing Briefing: cOAlition S releases new version of Plan S and Aberdeen launches a Scholarly Communications Service

Background

Plan S was launched in September 2018 by cOAlition S (a global coalition of research funders) in order to effect a decisive shift to Open Access (OA) for the research that they fund. Despite a number of initiatives in recent years, these have been at the national level and different approaches have made them hard for researchers to understand. They have not provided sufficient incentives for researchers, institutions, funders and publishers to make all the changes necessary to make a full transition to OA. Members of cOAlition S include the European Research Council, UKRI, Wellcome and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Plan S has two primary objectives: to recognise the importance of open research (often referred to as open science, but intended to apply more widely to academic research) and ensure that funder policies require and support it; and to address longstanding and substantial financial pressures caused by the combination of year on year journal subscription increases and the emergence of article processing charges (APCs), known as Gold OA, as the preferred option.

The release of the first draft of Plan S in 2018 caused concern amongst researchers, publishers and universities as the proposals had the potential to be very expensive, and to create unintended consequences. There were particular misgivings in relation to the possible impact on small and society publishers, the implications for research outputs in other forms (particularly monographs), and the potentially significant expense associated with moving to full Gold OA by removing ‘hybrid’ journals (where both subscription and OA options are offered). The University of Aberdeen emphasised these risks in its response to the consultation.

Revisions

The revised proposals respond to key concerns from the community. In particular, they address the need for more time by extending the timeline by 12 months to 2021, so research outputs resulting from funding calls from 1 January 2021 will need to comply. Additionally, publishers now have until the end of 2024 to make the transition from subscription business models to full OA.

Additionally, the revisions address the following points:

  • More options for transformative arrangements are supported, making it easier for publishers, libraries and Jisc (as negotiating agent) to work together on sensible and affordable journal deals;
  • Plan S is clearer about its support for a variety of models for OA, and stresses that Open Access does not have to be accomplished through individual APCs;
  • The technical requirements expected of repositories to support the Green route to OA (deposit of final accepted manuscript in a local repository) have been made less stringent. However, where Green OA is selected, manuscripts must be made available immediately, with no embargo;
  • A commitment by funders to value the intrinsic merit of the work and not consider the publication channel, its impact factor (or other journal metrics), or the publisher. This is in line with the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), which the University of Aberdeen is now considering adopting;
  • Monographs are excluded and will form a separate process (still to be announced);
  • While the default reuse licence option remains CC BY (the most liberal licence), funders can permit a more restrictive when it can be justified. This responds to the concerns of a number of publishers and researchers about reuse permissions. The proposal is very clear that copyright should remain with the author or the institution, and should not be signed over to a third party.

A rationale for the revisions is available on the cOAlition S site.

Next steps

It is expected that cOAlition S members will make their own decisions on the way that they choose to implement Plan S. UKRI announced in April that there will be a public consultation later this year as part of a review of their OA policy and have previously indicated that they do not feel bound to implement it exactly as it is written.

On 31 May 2019, The Wellcome Trust announced that they will align their policy with Plan S and as a consequence have extended their own deadline by 12 months in the same way. This is helpful both in terms of allowing more time and by reducing the issues caused by multiple funder policies with differing implementation dates.

The University Library will continue to work with Jisc and other research libraries to engage funders and publishers as policies continue to evolve.

Digital & Information Services, in conjunction with Research & Innovation, are pleased to announce the launch of a Scholarly Communications Service which will provide support and advice in relation to all aspects of scholarly publishing. Questions and comments about this briefing, and any other related matters, are very welcome at scholcomms@abdn.ac.uk.  

Simon Bains

University Librarian

simon.bains@abdn.ac.uk

The Sir Duncan Rice Library open on Sundays this summer

From this weekend The Sir Duncan Rice Library will be opening on Sundays allowing students and staff even more time to use the library’s fantastic resources.

The new Sunday opening hours will be introduced as a pilot over the summer months, and will see the doors of TSDRL open from 11am – 5pm until the start of the new academic term, when normal service will resume. Library staff will be on hand to help at the Information Centre (floor 1) and the Welcome Desk (ground floor). The Exhibition space will also be open during this time. 

There are to be no changes to the Sunday opening hours at the Taylor or Medical Libraries. Visit our website for full details of the opening hours at our Libraries.
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