Workshop: Conceptual and Methodological Issues in Sustainability Research
Submitted by Dr Sandy MacDonald
The above workshop will be held in room C226 on 18th November from 2 to 4pm.
About the speaker:
Dr Mohamed Saeudy is lecturer in Accounting and Finance at School of Management and Business, Aberystwyth University. Dr Saeudy is a qualitative researcher in Social and Environmental Accounting. His research interest centres on how financial and accounting practices may help business institutions to be more sustainable. His work has focused on developing organisational lenses to understand accounting for sustainable development practices in different organisational settings e.g. small and medium size businesses and higher education institutions. His current work explores the accounting for sustainable development practices in the banking sector. Furthermore, his research interests focus around the main impediments and motivations of organisational sustainability. Dr Saeudy has spent many years working in the banking industry in Egypt and UK. He had also held a research and teaching commitments in accounting and finance at the University of Derby. He also led and taught the Green Accounting and Sustainability Modules at Keele University covering the topics ranging from accountability processes to sustainable business strategies and policies.
If you wish to attend please let Debbie Christopher know.
OA and the research lifecycle 7: disseminating your research
In deciding whether and how to provide open access to your published work you need to consider:
- The nature of the research output
- Your funder’s open access policy
- The availability of funds to pay article processing charges (if necessary)
- Your publisher’s open access policy
- The availability of an open access subject or institutional repository
OA and the research lifecycle 6: writing up
In terms of writing up, the preparation needed for open access is not dissimilar from that required for other types of publication.
A major consideration is whether you have made use of third party copyright material, i.e. material that you did not create or for which you are no longer the rights holder.
There are a number of useful websites which cover this topic, for example the University of Exeter’s Third party copyright page or Taylor and Francis’ Using third party material in your article, but the bottom line is that, unless you qualify for an exception to copyright, you will need the rights owner’s permission to use third party material in your open access work. If you were publishing your paper in a traditional journal, the publisher would make sure that you sought the appropriate permission; if you are making your work open access yourself (for example by uploading your thesis to NECTAR) then it is your responsibility to ensure you do not break the law.
OA and the research lifecycle 5: collecting and analysing data
If you anticipate that your research data will be re-used in future (either by yourself or others) there are a few things you need to think about as you collect and analyse your data.
Ethical data sharing
“Much research data about people—even sensitive data—can be shared ethically and legally if researchers employ strategies of informed consent, anonymisation and controlling access to data.” (UK Data Archive)
The UK Data Archive (UKDA) and its sister service the UK Data Service are great sources of useful information on the creation and management of data. The UKDA’s ‘consent and ethics‘ web pages cover the key principles of research ethics that have a bearing on data sharing; the legal context of data sharing; all types of consent and how to get it; and the anonymisation of quantitative and qualitative data. They usefully provide sample consent forms and information sheets for various types of research project.
Another useful source is the Australian National Data Service’s guide to publishing and sharing sensitive data.
OA and the research lifecycle 4: conducting the literature review
As a librarian, when I need to conduct a literature review I go first to NELSON, to interrogate the library’s subscription databases. From there I may try the individual databases that are most relevant to my subject (Web of Science, Emerald and so forth), and after that to CORE, to pick up the open access literature.
The advantage of using CORE is that it usually returns a number of results that haven’t appeared elsewhere. This is not only because CORE’s coverage is immense (just under 25 million open access articles) but also because the content it harvests is not restricted to the peer reviewed journal literature: CORE also has research reports, books, conference papers, theses and a host of other grey literature.
Do you own or work with rabbits?
Submitted by Dr Wanda McCormick.
Have you 15 minutes to spare?
Can you help us with our online survey?
We are currently trying to find out information about handling methods used by people who own and work with rabbits. Little research has looked at the different methods of handling rabbits and your answers to our questions will help add to our knowledge and to future guidelines that may be developed.
If you own, show or work with rabbits please fill in our Rabbit handling survey.
For further information contact: Wanda McCormick or Clare Ellis
OA and the research lifecycle 3: bidding for funding
Open access to published work
Many funders, especially those awarding public monies, now make it a prerequisite of funding that all published outputs should be made open access. You should make it clear in your bid how you intend to comply with this requirement.
The main issues you need to address at the bidding stage are:
- Does your prospective funder have a policy on open access?
- If so, have they opted for ‘gold’ (made OA by the publisher) or ‘green’ (deposited in an OA repository) open access to published outputs?
- If ‘gold’, are they willing to pay article processing charges (APCs)?
- Do they require open access outputs to be released under a particular licence (e.g. CC BY)?
- Are you and your collaborative partners willing to comply with the funder’s OA requirements?
Workshops coming up: “Creativity in Research” and “Influencing, negotiating and networking”
We have a treat for all our postgraduate research students and early career researchers on 4th November, in the shape of excellent trainer, broadcaster and consultant Dr Adair Richards.
Adair will be running two workshops, in the morning Creativity in Research, and in the afternoon Influencing, negotiating and networking.
OA and the research lifecycle 2: producing the research proposal
Your research proposal is likely to address a range of issues arising throughout the research lifecycle, some of which are covered by the other posts in this series. To avoid repetition, in this post I will focus on some of the things to consider if you plan to engage with open access in a collaborative project.
OA and the research lifecycle 1: identifying a new research area
Open access to published work
Whether you already have an idea for a new research area or are uncertain where to start, gaining an overview of the current literature is critical. Fortunately, not all of this is hidden behind paywalls. Thanks to those researchers who have been willing to disseminate their work through open access repositories and journals, there is now a substantial quantity of research available freely to all.
Much of this is harvested by CORE (COnnecting REpositories). CORE’s mission is to “aggregate all open access research outputs from repositories and journals worldwide and make them available to the public” (About CORE). CORE currently indexes nearly 25 million open access articles.
UON Graduate School Blog 