Category Archives: Library
Doing your PhD: books for research students and supervisors
Never mind your subject interest, did you know that the library has a number of books about the PhD process itself? Check out some of these texts.
For research students:
Elsevier takes down papers from Academia.edu
Over the weekend there has been a burst of activity in the social media as authors respond to a flurry of take-down notices sent by Elsevier to Academia.edu on Friday. Elsevier have asked for some 2800 final published versions of their papers to be removed from the social networking site.
LearnTech news: technology for research
The monthly LearnTech newsletter has just arrived in my mailbox and although its focus is learning and teaching, I can see a few items that might also have an application in research. They are all described on the LearnTech blog:
Finding and using PhD theses: free webinar
Sara Gould, Development Manager at the British Library writes:
“Using doctoral theses in your research: a guide to EThOS
EThOS http://ethos.bl.uk is the national database for PhD theses, managed by the British Library. It’s a fantastic resource for researchers, with over 100,000 UK theses freely available to download and use for your own research, and another 200,000 available to search and scan on demand.
Join us for a free webinar to learn how EThOS works.
DOIs and Enhancing the Learner Experience in Higher Education
I mentioned in a previous post that the University had recently registered with CrossRef to allow us to allocate Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) to published articles.
Our first use of these has been within Enhancing the Learner Experience in Higher Education (ELEHE), the university’s first open journal. Each issue of the journal now has a DOI, as does each article within the issue. For example:
- ELEHE Volume 4, Issue 1; DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14234/elehe.v4i1
- Stoncel, D and Shelton-Mayes, A. (2012) Students’ views on higher education learning environments for professional teacher education, Enhancing the Learner Experience in Higher Education, 4(1), pp.3-16; DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14234/elehe.v4i1.45
Open Access Button – breaking down paywalls
Launched on Monday, the Open Access Button is a great new tool for finding open access copies of research articles and at the same time raise awareness and gather evidence of the impact of paywalls on scholarship worldwide.
How it works:
British Library Doctoral Open Days
It’s that time of year again… the British Library are once again advertising their open days for new doctoral students. This is your opportunity to learn about the British Library’s unique research collections and how to access them.
This year the dates and subjects on offer are as follows:
Finch report: progress review published
In June of last year the Working Group on Expanding Access to Published Research Findings (or ‘Finch Group) published the ‘Finch report‘, describing ways and means of increasing access to UK research outputs. Amongst its recommendations it controversially argued that the sector should adopt the ‘gold’ route to open access (OA), where necessary paying article processing charges to publishers to ensure immediate access to research publications.
Within a month the Department for Business, Information and Skills (BIS) had announced its support for the Finch Group’s recommendations and Research Councils UK (RCUK) had published a new open access policy. Both parties quickly followed through with financial support – BIS made available £10 million to pump prime the system whilst RCUK announced a block grant scheme to support 107 organisations over the following two years.
Interlibrary loans: online requests now available
Submitted by Georgina Dimmock, Head of Academic Liaison, LLS
Library and Learning Services has launched a new online interlibrary loan form, making it quicker and easier for you to apply for and receive Interlibrary Loans. Using the new form you can submit online requests for books and journal articles for your personal use. To use the form, just follow the Inter Library Loan link from the Library catalogue and login with your usual library account details (user name and four digit PIN).
‘Hunting down permissions’: fair use, copyright and academic publishing
I was particularly intrigued by the Slate article Executors or Executioners? by Joseph Thomas, the frustrated would-be author of a Shel Siverstein biography, not only because Silverstein is currently among my daughter’s favourite authors but also for the discussion of the chilling effect that ‘playing it safe’ with copyright can have on fair use and scholarly publishing.
UON Graduate School Blog 