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.

Next week is Peer Review Week 2018

Peer review is an essential part of maintaining quality in scholarly publishing.  It’s not a perfect system, but it’s the best we’ve got at the moment, and therefore various organisations including publishers, ORCID, Publons, and Sense about Science are getting together to celebrate all things peer review in Peer Review Week 2018.  This year’s theme is diversity in peer review.

The One and Only – ORCID for researchers

In today’s research climate, the scope for information about you and your work to be displayed and connected is huge.  Historically, publishers and libraries took ownership for distributing and curating works, but roles are blurring in today’s world, where indexing and curation of online content is largely done algorithmically.  The picture is further complicated by:

• the range of research output types (“online-only” articles, blog posts, slide decks and datasets) and other research activity;
• difficulties in author disambiguation, exacerbated where people have common names, perhaps change names after marriage, move institutions, or are affiliated with more than one institution.

Vicky would like to make it clear that she is not a fan of Chesney (despite knowing all the words).

How can we ensure that researchers’ profiles are correct, full and up to date? 

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.