Wednesday 2 December 2015

Taking advantage of open access week to increase engagement at Nottingham Trent University (NTU)

Here Sharon Potter, one of the Research Support Librarians at NTU writes about what they did in OA week.

NTU OA Poster
NTU OA Poster

As anyone working in a UK university knows, open access week falls at an incredibly busy time in the academic cycle. Nevertheless, we wanted to take advantage of OA week as our open access advocacy plan stresses the need for a multi-pronged communication strategy. Within open access week we wanted to explore how well drop-in sessions could act as a supplement to the more formal sign-up sessions we provide as part of the wider Researcher Development Programme at NTU, so decided to run our standard one-hour session on open access and IRep (NTU’s institutional repository) followed by a two-hour drop-in slot providing researchers with the opportunity to ask questions around open access and upload their  documents into the repository.  With the offer of coffee, Kit-
Kats, and help from their friendly Research Support Librarians, we had good attendance
at our two largest sites.  The drop-in sessions were facilitated by three Research Support
Librarians who were kept busy from start to finish.  The range of help varied from a few
researchers asking general questions around copyright issues, to requesting help in
registering to use our online submission form and uploading documents. There was a
definite increase in IRep engagement after open access week, and one of my colleagues
was embedded into the research seminar slots for one of the Schools she supports as a
direct result of the OA week activities. Was it a success?  We think so!
Find out more about OA at NTU

Here at Oxford Brookes, OA content was promoted  on our institutional repository RADAR via OA teapot cat and a new twitter account was created specifically for open access @BrookesOA .


Our monthly biscuit bar for Learning Resources staff was hosted by the Scholarly Communications team during OA week providing an opportunity to update staff  on latest developments.
Find out more about OA at Oxfored Brookes

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