We were very fortunate to have five very good lightning presentations at members’ day.
Nancy Pontika at the Open University started us off by talking about some research she had started around the future of scholarly communication professionals. Over an eighteen month period (March 2015 – September 2017) Nancy has collected job adverts relating to open access. The aim of this research is to identify the most important skills required in the jobs advertised in our field, educate the new comers in the field and identify how our profession is evolving. Nancy hopes to write this up in to a paper.
This was followed by a presentation from Sarah Barkla from the University of Oxford on how they have been working to reduce the amount of time repository staff spent on ‘non-core’ review/processing tasks. Sarah described how staff from other areas had taken on this work and the challenges and opportunities that has brought.
The next presentation was from Beccy Shipman and Simon Cobb from the University of Leeds on the processes they have put in place to deal with ‘in press’ items. Beccy and Simon have produced a handout UKCORR_CrossRef-Instructions and a presentation UKCORR_in_press_2018_v3.
This was followed by a presentation from Helen Cooper and Nadia Pennell from the University of Kent on a project looking at engaging academics who produce items other than books and journals with the repository. Areas they have been looking at include a services statement, policy, metadata, guidance and language that is used.
The final presentation was from Alison Sutton who is a member of the UKCORR Committee and has taken over from Stephanie Meece in the ‘ Scholarly Communication Education and Training Group’. This was set up following a discussion at the 2017 UKSG conference. The group has spent the first year gathering evidence around skills required for these roles, training offered (or the lack of it) and the approaches taken by different organisations. The group are now looking at developing some resources.