Monday 23 March 2015

Booking open: Uncovering researcher behaviours and engagement with Open Access, 20 May, Oxford Brookes University

Booking is now open for 

Uncovering researcher behaviours and engagement with Open Access: a Joint JISC OA Good Practice Pathfinder Workshop for the Making Sense Project and the O2OA Project

on Wednesday 20 May, to be held in the recently opened John Henry Brookes Building, Oxford Brookes University 

Follow this link to book a place

Background 
Last April the Hefce report - Policy on open access in the post-2014 Research Excellence Framework (2014/7) highlighted the need for behaviour change if researchers are to engage with the OA agenda. One year on, what have institutions done to encourage behaviour change?  

Do you want to understand researchers better? 

Do you want to learn new techniques to embed culture change and improve your services? 

Come and hear about how you can use ethnography and behavioural change analysis to understand your researchers, analyse your current practices and achieve the behaviour change required. 


 At this workshop, participants will: 
  • Learn about techniques and methodologies to investigate researcher behaviours 
  • Share their own experiences and learn from others' strategies for implementing open access 
  • Gain practical experience of analysing and interpreting OA problems using intervention mapping 
  • Be equipped with a range of tools to apply in their own institutions 
Target Audience 
Librarians, research managers and administrators involved in implementing open access in their institutions We also welcome the participation of researchers who are able to share their thoughts on what OA means to them. 

Programme 
9.30 Registration 
10.00 Welcome. Professor Alistair Fitt, Vice Chancellor, Oxford Brookes University 
10.15 - 11.15 Researcher Behaviours and Attitudes – evidence so far. The Making Sense project and the O2OA project . 
11.15 - 11.30 Break 
11.30 -12.30 Groupwork - OA – Understanding what needs to change and how  

12.30 – 1:30 Lunch 

1.30 - 1.50 Introduction to Intervention mapping - Julie Bayley, O2OA Project Manager
1.50 - 2.50 Practical intervention mapping
2.50 - 3-30 Tools and techniques for effective understanding and communication

3.30 Q&A and close

Tuesday 17 March 2015

Making Sense: Project Update March 2015

Open Access Base lining

Having launched CIAO - Collaborative Institutional  Assessment of Open Access in November last year, we now have evidence that a number of institutions have already used it and have fed back comments. So far there have been 193 clicks on the link to CIAO and Zoe Clark from Edge Hill University has sent this feedback:
'When I first saw CIAO I was delighted as it is just what  I needed to establish where we needed to go with OA. So it is an excellent guide in that respect as I was worried there were areas of OA I may be blissfully unaware of, so CIAO re-assured me which areas needed to be covered. I sent a copy to the Head of our Research Office, and we then met to go through it. It was a really good document to have in the meeting, as it meant we did not need to define for ourselves what we needed to do, we just needed to work through CIAO to see what progress we had already made, and what we still needed to do. It made the meeting really straightforward – and we were able to agree what progress we had already made with OA and identify areas that needed more work.'   (Zoe Clark from Edge Hill University)
Following on from this, we launched MIAO My Individual Assessement of Open access in February 2015 which is a self-assessment tool aimed at researchers so that they can gauge for themselves what they know about Open Access and how do they think their institution is supporting them with Open Access. We haven't had any feedback from this yet but there have been 93 clicks on the link.

Having a Design team available within Learning Resources has helped us immensely in creating attractive outputs. As we now have a series of outputs and there will be more then we now have some feline project branding.

Interviews
Highlighting how universities work in different ways, we decided early on in the project that here at Oxford Brookes, having recently completed 90 interviews for research data management that we wouldn't conduct any more interviews straight away but both Nottingham Trent University and Portsmouth University were keen to conduct some interviews to get a sense of researcher  attitudes to open access. For Nottingham Trent, it was an opportunity for their newly formed dedicated research support team within the library to get to know their researchers and raise awareness of their services. The team  managed to conduct 50 interviews across faculties which were recorded, transcribed and are now being coded.

Learning from each other - preparing for our workshop on 20th May
At the end of last week we set aside two days to talk about our results so far and planning for the workshop on 20th May. To me this is all about the value of being part of a pathfinder project and so having the excuse of discussing with colleagues from other institutions what they are doing to support open access, why are they doing it that way and what can we learn from this. On the second day we invited Julie Bayley along from Coventry (O2OA  pathfinder) , who has extensive experience of behaviour change with health, and we are collaborating with her on 'intervention mapping for OA' which we will be sharing at the workshop.

Looking ahead
The programme for the our workshop will be announced on 20 March. Intervention mapping is being tested with Portsmouth University and coding continues at Nottingham Trent. At Oxford Brookes, the first ethnographical interview has been conducted and the feline family is expanding as we  develop our cultural probes for the longitudinal study of researcher behaviour around the publishing process.