Remaining Engaged in Research and Outreach

Lizzie Driscoll is a PGR in the School of Chemistry and a winner of the Royal Society of Chemistry’s 2021 Inspirational Member Award. In this post she shares her experience of outreach and science education and how she has balanced this alongside her research.

If you can’t explain your research to a non-scientific audience, do you really understand your research?

My name is Lizzie, I’m on the final hurdle of my PhD studies within Chemistry (the viva to go!), and I’m going to discuss the Birmingham Battery Bunch’s outreach efforts, the highs, the lows and how this “procrastination” paid off (a comment made when this work was awarded an Institutional award for these efforts – hurtful at best).

I’ve been at the University since 2013 – I’m now a Research Fellow in the School of Metallurgy and Materials with Prof. Emma Kendrick. In starting my PhD, Dr Ruth Patchett joined the School of Chemistry as the outreach liaison officer – and with the support of Prof. Peter Slater (Pete; my PhD supervisor) our battery outreach work started with a Jenga set to explain how Li-ion batteries work – this involved approximately 20 hours of painting the set in my own time.

Lizzie takes her Li-ion battery Jenga sets into schools.

The changing Open Access landscape

In this post, Mike Dainton, Head of Scholarly Communications Services, brings us up-to-date on the Open Access landscape – an essential area of knowledge for anyone hoping to publish their research. For a basic introduction to Open Access, see the Library Services webpages.

The announcement of Plan S in 2018 heightened discussion about Open Access (OA) amongst research communities.  A key tenet of Plan S is to cease using public money to publish OA in journals that also charge a subscription fee to libraries (so called ‘hybrid journals’).

It is acknowledged that flipping to Fully OA will take time, so an interim option for publishers is the ‘Transformative Agreement’ (TA). These should allow libraries to move spending from subscriptions to OA. Typically, an upfront fee provides read access and covers the cost of OA publishing, across a publisher’s complete journal portfolio. We’ve entered into many such agreements over the past year, significantly expanding options for all researchers, including PGRs, to publish OA. You can find further details here.  Currently, Wellcome funded authors must abide by a Plan S aligned OA policy and a new UKRI (UK Research and Innovation) policy will come into force in April 2022.

Join The Conversation

What is The Conversation?

Launched in Australia in 2011, and then in the UK in 2013, The Conversation is an independent source of informed opinion from the academic and research community. The Conversation is funded by universities, research institutions, corporate bodies, foundations and reader donations, enabling it to be free for readers and authors.  And PhD students may write for The Conversation!

In a post-submission “lull”?

Travel photo created by bedneyimages – http://www.freepik.com

Congratulations!  At long last you have submitted your completed thesis to Research Student Administration (RSA), perhaps after attending a Thesis submission event.  What happens now?  Patter describes this period of time as “hand-in limbo”.

First of all, take a break.  Away from your thesis, and away from your research.  This well-earned holiday is both a chance to reconnect with yourself as more than just the author of your thesis, and to reconnect with family and friends that you may have been neglecting recently.   Importantly, this also gives you a new perspective on your thesis  for when you return to it to prepare for the next milestone in your journey, namely your viva. 

After your break, here are some practical tips on how you can fill the post-submission lull productively. 

Sending your research out into the world

On Wednesday 19 June 2019, there is a deadline for PGRs hoping to graduate in July to complete all the requirements for the award of their research degree.  Among a few other things, this includes submitting an electronic copy of your thesis to the University of Birmingham eTheses repository.

International Open Access Week is coming up!

Once per year, open access advocates (such as myself) get excited about International Open Access Week (this year running from 22 – 28 October).  This event highlights the movement working to make research outputs freely available for re-use, to raise awareness for issues around making outputs available and answer questions that you might have.  If you’re not sure why you should care about this, Suzanne Atkins summarised the benefits of Open Access to PGRs in her blogpost back in October 2016.

Planning your assault on publication

Yesterday afternoon, I found myself advocating a publication strategy to a friend and PGR.  The conversation quickly moved away, but I now find myself thinking about the process of putting together a publication strategy, and how PGRs who have yet to publish can find the answers to many of the questions that creating their personal publication strategy will raise.

A publication strategy is a plan (or campaign!) which sets out the content, target outlets and timescales for research publications by an individual or research team.  A clear publication strategy is crucial to maximise research impact and support academic/research career development and can also be extremely helpful in clarifying questions around authorship and research strategy in group situations.  Since a publication strategy is highly specific to individual circumstances, there’s no one way to approach this, but this post sets out some key questions to get you started.

Why should I be interested in Open Access?

So, you may ask, as a PGR why should you be interested in Open Access (OA)?

Well, there are several reasons why OA is relevant and important to researchers, particularly in the early stages of their academic career. Open access in its most simple sense, where research can be accessed without payment barriers allowing anyone to read or download it, offers huge opportunities for researchers to make themselves and their work more widely known.