World Digital Preservation Day 2022

World Digital Preservation Day, organised by Digital Preservation Coalition, is an international event to highlight the importance of digital preservation. This blogpost has been written by St George’s Archivist Juulia Ahvensalmi, Research Data Support Manager Michelle Harricharan, and Records Manager Kirsten Hylan. You can engage with the day and find out more about our work on the Museum and Archives Twitter account using the hashtags #WDPD2022 and #SGULWDPD2022. If you are interested in learning more about digital preservation at St George’s, or would like to get involved, please contact digpres@sgul.ac.uk.

‘Data for All, For Good, Forever’ is the theme of this year’s World Digital Preservation Day, demonstrating how digital preservation allows ‘digits to flourish’. What an apt theme for a university that has been transforming health and medical care since 1733! Whether it is developing the earlier practices of variolation into vaccination (introduced by Edward Jenner in 1798) that eventually eradicated smallpox or transforming health practice though our pioneering work in infection and immunity, population health and molecular and clinical research, for St George’s data has always been for good, for all and, with proper care, forever. This post will consider how by preserving records and data regardless of format that are held in the archives and currently being developed by our staff, we are not only ensuring we maintain our history, but that St George’s continues to contribute to ground-breaking medical research by allowing digits to flourish.

Postmortem Examinations and Case Books

St George’s, University of London (SGUL), is a specialist health and medical sciences university in South-West London. The Archivist, Research Data Support Manager, and Records Manager work together to advocate for digital preservation, winning funds for a digital preservation system, and identifying areas that hold records that require a long-term storage solution. As a medical school we have created many unique datasets that contribute to scientific knowledge and the teaching of medicine.

The Postmortem Examinations and Case Books were created by St George’s, University of London and St George’s Hospital between 1841 – 1946. The records contain case notes including medical histories and pathological findings, and detail social and cultural changes, medical advances, and historical events, including epidemics and the development of anaesthesia and antiseptics. The postmortem books were an integral teaching tool for students of surgery and anatomy at St George’s. Through a project funded by Wellcome, the casebooks were conserved, digitised and catalogued in 2018 – 2021. They now have a life beyond teaching; they are a genealogical, sociological, and historical resource freely accessible online, enabling researchers to broaden their and our knowledge of diseases and treatments that act as building blocks for current and future researchers’ work.

St George’s Post Mortem and Case Book 1846, and a catalogue entry for the case of Thomas Roles, PM/1880/236 displayed on the SGUL Archives catalogue.

The Cambridge Cohort of Open Spina Bifida

Our research data repository holds several valuable research datasets. One such dataset is The Cambridge Cohort of Open Spina Bifida which comprises of 9 reviews of 117 individuals born between 1963 – 1971 with open spina bifida. Spina bifida occurs when a baby’s spine and spinal cord does not develop properly in the womb, causing a gap in the spine (NHS, 2020). Most babies born with spina bifida can have surgery to close the opening in the spine, however, their nervous system will have already been damaged which can lead to a range of health problems. Some may also have learning disabilities.

The Cambridge Cohort of Open Spina Bifida is a unique spina bifida data resource that provides detailed data on the health and quality of life of individuals born with spina bifida. The resource is rare in that it includes a detailed neurological examination at birth, and follows up on participants throughout their lives, with 99% follow-up to the mean age of 50 years. The earlier reviews were conducted at home and school at the mean ages of 4 and 9 years and included clinical examination. Later reviews were based mainly on questionnaires (completed by patients and/or carers) and clinical records. The Office for National Statistics provided information on deaths to August 2017.

The data provide a full, comprehensive picture of the lives of people who received surgery for open spina bifida within 24 hours of birth until either they died (which a third did before the age of 5) or the end of the study in 2017. With a 99% follow-up, it represents a remarkable achievement in research and contribution to an area where not much had previously been known. For each of the participants, and their carers, participation in the research was a means of sharing their experience for good, for all those living with spina bifida – present and future, with the hope of improving understanding and treatment of their disease.

For the researchers, the study was an ongoing endeavour of love, started by a clinician, researcher and mother who passed the work on to her daughter on her retirement. Her daughter painstakingly continued her mother’s work, treasuring the study and the research as much as her mother before her. The dataset was passed to St George’s to share and preserve for the future – for all, for good, forever.

Oakeshott, P., Reid, F. (2021) The Cambridge cohort of open spina bifida. Figshare. DOI 10.24376/rd.sgul.14438780. Available at https://doi.org/10.24376/rd.sgul.14438780

A podcast with Prof Pippa Oakeshott, where she discusses her 2019 paper based on this data ‘Walking and living independently with spina bifida: a 50‐year prospective cohort study’, can be viewed on the Developmental Medicine and Child Neurology YouTube account.

Exploration of Disease Past and Present

What do these two resources, one containing information dating back to 1841, the other published in 2021, have in common? Both are maintained in a digital format, both add to our knowledge of a specific subject, and both have purposes that will evolve over time.

However, the everchanging technical landscape means that digital records essential for medical research are at risk. The importance of our digital records means there is a need for digital preservation to ensure these records remain accessible in order to protect our knowledge and investment, and ensure that future generations of researchers have the opportunity to access the knowledge contained within.

The historical records also provide a link between the past and present, and show the medical advances made over time. In 1865, a seven-month-old baby called Harriet (or Elizabeth) Garton was admitted to St George’s Hospital with a congenital meningocele, a type of spina bifida in which a sac of fluid protrudes through a gap in the spine. The only treatment available at the time was injection with iodine; it was not until 1895 that the first successful surgical operation was described. Although the iodine initially appeared to decrease the size of the tumour, little Harriet developed bronchiolitis and died five days after her third admission to the hospital: the doctor treating her blamed the disease on the ‘inclement’ weather when the child’s mother brought her to the hospital. Although the treatment was ultimately unsuccessful, the trial was seen as significant enough to discuss at length in an article published in 1866.

Illustration of the case, published in St George’s Hospital Reports, Vol 1 (1866) by Timothy Holmes, SGHMS/6/1/1; and the digitised post mortem case notes of Harriet Garton, infant, 10 Apr 1865, PM/1865/107.

Capturing and preserving our digital data allows us to place formal research datasets like the Cambridge Cohort of Open Spina Bifida alongside our understanding and treatment of the disease in 1865. It allows us to compare perceptions and innovative treatments over time. In 1865 surgery for spina bifida was not possible; now, it is part of standard care, with some surgeries even happening while babies are still in the womb. Our post-mortem examinations and casebooks include a number of cases of spina bifida and meningocele in infants aged between 3 days and 1 year, demonstrating how quickly babies’ health deteriorated without surgery in the past. Opportunities for future research includes exploring the genetic basis of neural tube defects like spina bifida and the use of stem cell technology as potential therapies.

Data for All, for Good, Forever

By actively managing our records and data and applying preservation tools and activities we can maintain the record and data’s ongoing viability. Key to achieving our goals is St George’s information management professionals including the Archivist, Research Data Support Manager, and Records Manager advocating for, and working with the owners of records and data to identify and actively manage their outputs.

The steps we take now to protect our digital records will ensure their longevity and the ability for researchers of the future to continue to access the knowledge held within. St George’s, University of London’s mission is to pursue excellence in academic medicine, healthcare and science, informed by a global outlook by creating and sharing knowledge. By identifying records for digital preservation, we ensure their availability for good, forever, and that the data contained within is available to all.

Focus on Figshare: using ‘collections’ and ‘projects’

This post has been written by Liz Stovold, Research Data Support Manager and Information Specialist, Cochrane Airways.

What is Figshare?

Figshare provides the infrastructure for the St George’s Research Data Repository. The repository facilitates the discovery, storage, citing and sharing of research data produced at St George’s. It is possible to store and share a range of research outputs in the repository including datasets, posters, presentations, reports, figures, and data management plans. Each item that is published via the repository receives a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) which makes it easy to cite, share and promote your work.

What is a collection?

One of the features of Figshare is the ability to create a citable collection of individual related items. You can choose to publish a collection publicly, or opt to keep it private. Collections can be added to over time and republished as they are updated with new items. There are several advantages to using collections, such as the ability to group themed research outputs together in one place, and to showcase a portfolio of work.  

Here at SGUL, Cochrane Airways – a research group based in the Population Health Research Institute – decided to create a collection of the posters and presentations that they have produced over a number of years. A Figshare collection enables the Group to showcase and cite their research dissemination activities and share with funders and other stakeholders. It also provides them with one place to store these outputs instead of saving them across a variety of shared and personal drives.

What is a ‘project’?

A Figshare ‘project’ also enables researchers to group together related items, but it differs from a collection in that it allows multiple collaborators to contribute and to add notes and comments. You can choose to make your project public or keep it private. The project itself doesn’t have a DOI, but the items within a project can do. A project can contain a mix of publicly available data and private data visible only to the project collaborators.  

Cochrane Airways are piloting a Figshare project to store, share and publish reports and other documents that have been produced as part of their priority setting work. A project hosted on Figshare allows them to collate the output of their ongoing work, share documents within their group, and publish documents with a DOI as and when needed.

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Could a collection or project in Figshare be useful for you or your team? Contact the SGUL RDM Service at researchdata@sgul.ac.uk to discuss your needs, or see SGUL Research Data Management for more general information and guidance.

Libraries Week 2019: Celebrating Research Support

Libraries Week takes place between 7th – 12th October 2019. This year’s campaign is focused on celebrating the role of libraries in the digital world. Over the course of the week we’ll be introducing you to different teams within the Library and explore how they use technology to support our community.

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Today’s post features a contribution from our Research Support Team and will be highlighting:

• How the Library supports our researchers with making their publications and data findable and accessible online so it can be used by others
• How we work to preserve these important digital research assets for the future.

So how does research take place?

This diagram gives a birds-eye view of what researchers are doing at various stages of their work – how ideas are tested, what is recorded, and how results are written up and shared.

Once shared, the research can be used by others – for example, other researchers, policy makers and health professionals – to further medical knowledge and clinical practice.

How is the Library involved in the research process?

The Library is involved in supporting SGUL researchers throughout their research process, from the early stages when they apply to medical and other funders to make a case for grant funding for their research projects, right through to the long-term availability and preservation of the research that they produce.

Meet the Research Support team

Michelle Harricharan, our Research Data Support Manager, works with our research teams to help them to create, manage, share and preserve high quality digital data that is findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable (FAIR) – and in line with funder and publisher data policies.        

Jennifer Smith Research, Research Publications Librarian and Jenni Hughes, Research Publications Assistant, help researchers understand how they can make their research papers freely available online via our publications repository, SORA, and advise researchers on the fast moving world of open access publishing.

We all are available for face to face meetings with researchers, we provide guidance on our webpages and blogposts, and can be contacted by phone or email (see below).

The Library also procures and manages a range of software systems to help provide our services to researchers.

How do we use technology to support our users?

Making research papers freely available

The government allocates funding to universities based on the impact and reach of their research out in the wider world. As part of the next assessment by the government, known as REF, any research papers SGUL wishes to use as evidence of our research impact will need to be freely available online.

Our researchers can track and record their publications in our Current Research Information System (CRIS), which uses Symplectic Elements software. The CRIS captures and records detailed information about the research publications, such as how often their research is picked up and referred to by other researchers, and allows researchers to upload their publications to be made open access in our repository. Publications information from the CRIS is also transferred into researchers’ public profiles on the SGUL website.

The CRIS links to our institutional database for publications, St George’s Online Research Archive (SORA) which is hosted and supported by Cosector. This repository uses open source software, and information about the papers in SORA is picked up by indexing services such as Google Scholar, CORE, and Unpaywall,  and many of our researchers’ papers are also freely available in the big medical databases PubMedCentral and Europe PubMed Central.

Both systems show Altmetric scores, which visualise how many times the research has been referred to in traditionally non-scholarly places such as news media, social media, public policies and so on.  

Having the research findable and accessible in so many places helps ensure there are as few barriers to reading and re-use as possible. To date we have over 3,700 papers freely available online via SORA – with downloads currently averaging 3,600 per month from all parts of the world.

Research Data Infrastructure

In 2016 the university partnered with Jisc on the Research Data Shared Service project. This allowed us to establish the foundations for a state of the art digital data infrastructure at our Library.

In mid-2017 we launched our figshare-based research data repository which is a digital archive for discovering, storing and sharing research data (and wider research outputs) produced at St George’s. Since its launch we have shared some 45 outputs from a range of SGUL research and collected hundreds more that are publicly available via PLOS. To date, our 45 public items have been viewed more than 20,000 times and downloaded almost 4,000 times, a testament to the contribution open research can make to enabling public access to high value digital research.

Together with Records Management and Archives, we are also in the process of implementing a digital preservation system, Preservica, to ensure continued access to our valuable research data assets (as well as our unique institutional records). Digital content are fragile; they can quickly become inaccessible as the hardware and software to open them become obsolete. By continually migrating digital files to their latest formats, Preservica will ensure that our digital content remains accessible and usable for the long term.

Get connected, get creative and learn new skills

The following websites are a useful starting point if you would like to know more:

Understanding Health Research
If you are trying to make sense of health research, this website was funded by the MRC to guide you through some steps to help you read scientific papers and think about the value of the evidence or conclusions made.

Open Access Publishing
A course for those who wish to understand more about how to publish open access – some of the terminology that is often used and funder expectations are explained.

Jisc Research Data Management Toolkit
A curated portal with up-to-date resources on research data management, data sharing and preservation.

If you have any questions about open research, get in contact with the team using the information below:

CRIS & Deposit on acceptance: sora@sgul.ac.uk
Open Access Publications: openaccess@sgul.ac.uk
Research Data Management: researchdata@sgul.ac.uk

We look forward to hearing from you.

Michelle Harricharan, Research Data Support Manager
Jenni Hughes, Research Publications Assistant
Jennifer Smith, Research Publications Librarian

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If you are interested receiving updates from the Library on all things open access, open data and scholarly research communications, you can subscribe to the Library Blog using the Follow button or click here for further posts from us.

The Changing Face of Peer Review

To coincide with Peer Review Week Sept 16-20, this is an overview on current developments in peer review, with some thoughts on the future, and information on how Library Services can offer support to our researchers.

What is peer review and why is it important?

Peer review is the process by which scholarly work is submitted to the scrutiny of other experts in the same field. It’s thought to date back to the seventeenth century¹, but has become increasingly standardised since the mid twentieth century². It’s now an important part of the scholarly publications process, helping to assess and improve research papers before formal publication. A report published last year by Publons³ (part of Clarivate Analytics) found that peer review was overwhelmingly valued by researchers. There are different models of peer review, such as blind review (where authors and reviewers may not be known to each other) through to more open models of reviewing (see below, fig 2 in the Publons report)³.

Why is there a “peer review crisis”?

Peer review is far from perfect, however. Research that contains errors or fraud isn’t always picked up, and reviewers aren’t always objective: unconscious bias can affect peer review⁴, and even double blind reviewing isn’t always completely anonymous, especially in smaller fields where reviewers are more likely to be able to identify authors based on topic or writing style. Peer review also often goes unrewarded: reviewers are not usually paid for their work, and researchers may not cite this work as part of their scholarly profile when applying for jobs or promotions.

Recent research in PLoS One has also suggested that some reviewers can lazily accept low-quality manuscripts, bringing down the overall quality of research⁵.   That the website Retraction Watch exists highlights that peer review does not always fulfil the functions expected.

How is the open research agenda changing peer review?

Open peer review refers to a variety of different models that broadly support the principles of open research. The features of these models might include:

• Named, identifiable reviewers.
• Reviews that are published alongside the final article.
• Participation by the wider community as opposed to just a small number of invited reviewers, whether on pre-review manuscripts or on the final version.
• Direct discussion between authors and reviewers.
• Reviews taking place on a different platform to publication⁶.

The different models have in common a desire to improve the peer review process, making it more transparent, accountable and accessible⁷.

Recent research has found that publishing peer review reports doesn’t compromise the review process, though only 8.1% of reviewers were willing to publish their identity alongside the report⁸.

Peer reviewing data

Data sharing has exploded in recent years. It is becoming commonplace in the academic publication process in light of the huge volumes of data being created in research and the challenges of irreproducible research. But while data sharing is becoming routine, peer review of data underlying publications is not always common.

Leading the way in data peer review are data journals. Data journals specialise in publishing descriptions of high value scientific datasets or analyses/meta-analyses of existing datasets. Submissions to data journals are peer-reviewed.

Other journals are quickly catching up. Peer reviewers may be asked to appraise the data underlying any publication, not just data-focused papers. Journals may have their own guidance for assessing datasets but PLOS provides some very practical criteria:

1. Is the data accessible?
2. Can you tell what you’re looking at?
3. Does the data you see match the data referenced in the manuscript?
4. Does the presentation of the data make sense?
5. Does the data itself make sense?

The SGUL research data management service can help you to prepare your data for sharing and peer review. Contact us at researchdata@sgul.ac.uk for more information.

What might drive developments in the future to improve peer reviewing – for researchers, and for science?

The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment of 2012, commonly known as DORA, and to which St George’s University of London is a signatory, sets out a statement of intent and some guiding principles around a move away from a narrow set of metrics such as journal impact factor as a measure of assessment. Acknowledging that researchers may undertake a wide range of scholarly activities, and produce outputs other than journal articles, could lead to better recognition of and reward for peer reviewing.

In 2017, the DOI provider Crossref announced that they would now support registering peer reviews as well as other types of research outputs⁹. Other services such as Publons and ORCiD^10,11 also offer ways for researchers to track and get credit for their reviews, where these reviews are openly available¹².  

Given the known problems with peer review, and the growing number of manuscript submissions, it’s no surprise that as noted by Nature¹³, publishers are starting to employ Artificial Intelligence to try and improve those processes that can be automated – without taking away from decision making by human editors. For example, Frontiers journals have announced the use of AI to help with quality control and reviewer identification¹⁴.

While as the Publons report finds, “the scholarly community lacks a robust measure of review quality”, more openness of the peer reviewing process, and wider use of identifiers to link reviewers and their reviews, could enable more analysis and agreement of what constitutes good peer review.

In conclusion, new technologies, publishing models and funder mandates present opportunities for the scientific community to improve the peer review process – a process which at its best allows researchers to engage in a constructive dialogue to improve research and the communication of research findings.

Queries about open research?

Contact us

CRIS & Deposit on acceptance: sora@sgul.ac.uk

Open Access Publications: openaccess@sgul.ac.uk

Research Data Management: researchdata@sgul.ac.uk

We look forward to hearing from you.

Michelle Harricharan, Research Data Support Manager
Jenni Hughes, Research Publications Assistant
Jennifer Smith, Research Publications Librarian

If you are interested receiving updates from the Library on all things open access, open data and scholarly research communications, you can subscribe to the Library Blog using the Follow button or click here for further posts from us.

References

1. Tennant JP, Dugan JM, Graziotin D et al. (2017) A multi-disciplinary perspective on emergent and future innovations in peer review [version 3; peer review: 2 approved]. F1000Research, 6:1151 (https://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.12037.3)

2. Ware M. Peer review: benefits, perceptions and alternatives. Publishing Research Consortium. 2008; p. 6. http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.214.9676&rep=rep1&type=pdf [accessed 12/09/19]

3. Publons (2018) Global state of peer review https://doi.org/10.14322/publons.GSPR2018 [accessed 12/09/19]

4. Meadows, A (2018), “Eight Ways to Tackle Diversity and Inclusion in Peer Review” The Scholarly Kitchen. Available at https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2018/09/13/eight-ways-to-tackle-diversity-and-inclusion-in-peer-review/ [Accessed 12/09/19]

5. D’Andrea R, O’Dwyer JP (2017) “Can editors save peer review from peer reviewers?” PLoS ONE 12(10): e0186111. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0186111 [accessed 12/9/19]

6. Ross-Hellauer, T (2017), “What is open peer review? A systematic review” [version 2; peer review: 4 approved]. F1000Research, 6:588 (https://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.11369.2) (https://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.11369.1)

7. Ross-Hellauer, T (2017), “Open peer review: bringing transparency, accountability and inclusivity to the peer review process”, LSE Impact Blog. Available at https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2017/09/13/open-peer-review-bringing-transparency-accountability-and-inclusivity-to-the-peer-review-process/ [accessed 12/09/19]

8. Bravo, G; Grimaldo, F; López-Iñesta, E; Mehmani, B; Squazzoni, F (2019), “The effect of publishing peer review reports on referee behavior in five scholarly journals”, Nature Communications 10:322 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-018-08250-2

9. Lin, J (2017), “Peer reviews are open for registering at Crossref”. Available at: https://www.crossref.org/blog/peer-reviews-are-open-for-registering-at-crossref/ [accessed 12/09/19]

10. ORCID Support (2019), Peer Review https://support.orcid.org/hc/en-us/articles/360006971333-Peer-Review

11. PLOS Blog (2019), You’ve completed your review – now get credit with ORCID  https://blogs.plos.org/plos/2019/06/youve-completed-your-review-now-get-credit-with-orcid/ [accessed 16/09/2019]

12. Tennant, JP (2018), “The state of the art in peer review”, FEMS Microbiology Letters, Volume 365, Issue 19, fny204, https://doi.org/10.1093/femsle/fny204

13. Heaven, D (2018), “AI peer reviewers unleashed to ease publishing grind”, Nature 563, 609-610 (22 Nov 2018) http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/d41586-018-07245-9

14. Frontiers, Science News (2018) AI-enhanced peer review: Frontiers launches next generation of efficient, high-quality peer review Dec 14 2018; https://blog.frontiersin.org/2018/12/14/artificial-intelligence-peer-review-assistant-aira/

Preprints in the biological, medical and health sciences: some questions answered.

The open research movement is about disseminating scientific outputs widely and openly as soon as possible. One of the ways that researchers can rapidly share their work with a wide audience is by posting a preprint to a preprint server. The practice of sharing and commenting on preprints has recently been described as ‘science in real time’¹

What is a preprint?
Why post preprints online?
Before you post your preprint, what should you consider?
Where can I post preprints?
Where are preprints indexed?
How do I find out about preprints?
Can SGUL researchers record and deposit preprints in CRIS/SORA/SGUL Data Repository?
The future of preprints
Queries about preprints or open research?
References

What is a preprint?

The preprint is the original version of your work, before peer review and before acceptance by a journal.

Why post preprints online?

• Publishing your research as a preprint means that you can get your work out fast. From 2021, the Wellcome Trust² will require that any research they fund that is relevant to a public health emergency be published as a preprint, in order to disseminate findings on such important areas as quickly as possible^3,4.
• Your work will be citeable and shareable as soon as it’s posted, allowing you to demonstrate the work you’re doing to funders, colleagues and potential collaborators.
• Immediate feedback from your peers can help you improve your manuscript, as well as opening up potential avenues for follow up work or collaborations.
• By publishing your findings as a preprint, you can publically establish priority by date stamping your findings and making your preprint part of the scientific record.
• Preprint servers (examples below) allow for disseminating hard-to-publish but important work such as negative/null findings.
• In fields where posting preprints to preprint servers is commonplace, these can become a one stop shop for getting a quick overview of the newest developments in the field – a piece in Nature⁵ highlights how biorXiv can be used to help researchers stay abreast of what their colleagues are working on.

Before you post your preprint, what should you consider?

If you are posting as a step prior to publishing in a journal, check whether your prospective journal has any rules around preprints – do they consider posting preprints as ‘prior publication’?

What’s the best platform for what you want to achieve? If you want feedback on your paper from a specific group before going more public, you could share it on St George’s data repository via a closed group or a private link.

Are there charges for posting? Where there are charges, these tend to be much less than open access fees in more established journals, however you will still need to consider how these are paid.

Where can I post preprints?

bioRxiv.org is a preprint server for the biological sciences. Many journals allow you to submit work that has been previously published as a preprint, and preprints posted to bioRxiv can also be directly transferred for submission to a variety of other peer review services (eg Plos, BMC). An analysis⁶ earlier this year of biorXiv preprints found that “two-thirds of preprints posted before 2017 were later published in peer-reviewed journals”.

medRxiv is a preprint server using the same software as bioRxiv, and papers on health sciences topics can be posted there.

BioMed Central have recently launched a new prepublication option, In Review, for articles under consideration in four of their journals: BMC Anesthesiology, BMC Neurology, BMC Ophthalmology and Trials.

F1000 Research, Wellcome Open Research and the new AMRC Open Research operate under a slightly different model: preprints posted to these sites are then openly peer reviewed, and the article is considered published once it has passed peer review. 

All these sites screen contributions for plagiarism and appropriateness, and to ensure they meet ethical standards.

Where are preprints indexed?

bioRxiv and medRxiv preprints are indexed by Google, Google Scholar, CrossRef and other search tools. They are not indexed by Web of Science, however they will be indexed in EPMC as follows:

“To distinguish preprints from peer reviewed articles in Europe PMC, each preprint is given a PPR ID, and is clearly labelled as a preprint, both on the abstract view and the search results… When preprints have subsequently been published as peer-reviewed articles and indexed in Europe PMC they are crosslinked to each other.”

Preprints are not indexed in PubMed until they have achieved sufficient peer review.

How do I find out about preprints?

Preprint platforms have options to set up alerts for subject categories, recent additions and to track papers when they are revised.

Rxivist combines preprints from bioRxiv with data from Twitter to help find the papers being discussed in a particular field, to help researchers deal with the “avalanche” of research⁷ they may be faced with. 

I’m a SGUL researcher, can I record and deposit my preprints in SGUL’s CRIS (Current Research Information System), St George’s Research Data Repository or publications repository, SORA (St George’s Online Research Archive)?

Records for preprints can come into your CRIS profile from CrossREF & EPMC. This is useful as it adds to the completeness of your publication list in CRIS.

As and when a paper from biorXiv or medrXiv goes onto to be published in a journal, then we’d expect to see a record for this in CRIS too.

For the purposes of making full text available via SORA, we have historically only made those versions of an article post peer review (either the final accepted MS or publisher version where possible) publically available.

For REF 2021, while preprints will be eligible for submission⁸, only outputs which have been ‘accepted for publication’ (such as a journal article or conference contribution with an ISSN) are within the scope of the REF 2021 open access policy. SGUL researchers should continue to follow the deposit on acceptance advice and upload the accepted version of their papers to CRIS for SORA.

The future of preprints

While there has been debate on the pros and cons of preprints in terms of whether research disseminated in this way will advance healthcare for patients⁹, improvements to preprint platforms (such as medRxiv’s cautionary advice to news media on their homepage) and backing by funders should mean that as a tool for researchers to quickly share & find preliminary findings, preprints will be around for the foreseeable future.

As funder mandates and preprint practices develop in the medical and health sciences, we will keep our system capabilities for capturing and promoting researchers’ preprints under active review.

Queries about preprints or open research?

Contact us

CRIS & Deposit on acceptance: sora@sgul.ac.uk

Open Access Publications: openaccess@sgul.ac.uk

Research Data Management: researchdata@sgul.ac.uk

We look forward to hearing from you.

Michelle Harricharan, Research Data Support Manager
Jenni Hughes, Research Publications Assistant
Jennifer Smith, Research Publications Librarian

Look out for a Library blog post on open peer review during Peer Review Week which is taking place September 16-20 2019.

If you are interested receiving updates from the Library on all things open access, open data and scholarly research communications, you can subscribe to the Library Blog using the Follow button or click here for further posts from us.

References

1. Knowledge Exchange. Preprints: Science in real time [Internet]. Bristol: Knowledge Exchange; 2018 [cited 2019 Aug 7]. Available from: http://www.knowledge-exchange.info/event/preprints.

See also the slide deck:

Chiarelli, A; Johnson, R; Pinfield, S; Richens, E. Practices, drivers and impediments in the use of preprints: Phase 1 report [Internet]. 2019 [cited 2019 Aug 8]. Available from: http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.2654832

2. Wellcome Trust. Open Access Policy 2021 [Internet]. London: Wellcome; 2019 [cited 2019 Aug 8]. Available from: https://wellcome.ac.uk/sites/default/files/wellcome-open-access-policy-2021.pdf

3. Peiperl L. Preprints in medical research: Progress and principles. PLoS Med [Internet]. 2018 [cited 2019 Aug 8];15(4):e1002563. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.1002563

4. Johansson MA, Reich NG, Meyers LA, Lipsitch M. Preprints: An underutilized mechanism to accelerate outbreak science. PLoS Med [Internet]. 2018 [cited 2019 Aug 8];15(4):e1002549. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.1002549

5. Learn, JR. What bioRxiv’s first 30,000 preprints reveal about biologists [Internet]. 2019 [cited 2019 Aug 8]. Available from: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00199-6

6. Abdill, RJ, Blekhman, R. Tracking the popularity and outcomes of all bioRxiv preprints. bioRxiv [Internet]. 2019 [cited 2019 Aug 7];515643. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1101/515643

7. Abdill, RJ; Blekhman R. Rxivist.org: Sorting biology preprints using social media and readership metrics. PLOS Biol [Internet]. 2019 [cited 2019 Aug 8];17(5):e3000269. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3000269

8. REF 2021. Guidance on submissions (2019/01) Section 238. [Internet]. 2019 [cited 2019 Aug 7]. Available from: https://www.ref.ac.uk/publications/guidance-on-submissions-201901/

9. Krumholz HM, Ross JS, Otto CM. Will research preprints improve healthcare for patients? BMJ [Internet]. 2018 [cited 2019 Aug 8];362:k3628. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.k3628

A year’s worth of Open Research and SGUL

If you are a researcher at SGUL, we are here to help you share and preserve your data, and publish in a way that meets your funder open access mandates, as many have a commitment to making data and publications as openly available as possible.

SGUL has two repositories to enable researchers to share and preserve both data and publications: read on for more facts and figures about how adding your work to these ties in with our Strategic Plan to maximise the impact of our research.

Research Data

In late 2017 the Research Data Management Service announced our pilot Research Data Repository. In 2018 we published more than 20 outputs to the repository including the official proceedings from SGUL’s Education Day (2017), presentations from Infection and Immunity’s annual INTERTB symposium, and, to mark World AIDS Day this December, the Centre for Global Health released the first of six free training modules to share SGUL expertise on treating one of the biggest causes of HIV-related mortality in Africa. Our work has been viewed, downloaded and shared locally and internationally.

Contact the Research Data Management Service to talk about sharing your data, powerpoint presentations, posters and videos on the repository.

This year also saw the introduction of new Europe-wide data protection legislation. How could we forget that? Our team worked closely with colleagues across St George’s and external organisations to support our researchers in the run-up to 25 May. Our GDPR and Health Research blog post was part of that awareness raising campaign.

In 2018 SGUL’s Information Management (IM) Team was also formed. Made up of our Information Governance Manager, Data Protection Officer, Freedom of Information Officer, Archivist, Records Manager and Research Data Manager, the IM Team looks to streamline information flows across St George’s and raise awareness of information policies and good practice. We run regular seminars on IM.

Contact our Records Manager for more information.

 

Open Access publications

On the publications front, the number of articles now free to read via SORA (St George’s Online Research Archive) has been steadily increasing, driven by the open access mandate for the 2021 REF (for more on this, see our webpages).   We now have nearly 3000 articles publicly accessible via SORA with more being added all the time. Downloads of the articles is also rising; up to 2,300+ downloads per month on average in 2018 (from 1,800+ downloads per month on average in 2017). As with data, the articles have a global reach, being downloaded by readers in all parts of the world.

Records are included in the open access aggregation platform CORE, which contains over 11 million full-text articles.  CORE is working with trusted parties such as institutional and subject repositories and journals (other sources of articles such as SciHub¹ and Research Gate² have been subject to action by publishers due to copyright infringement). CORE also allows for text mining of the corpus.

This year we also upgraded our CRIS (Current Research Information System). Among other improvements, if you confirm your ORCiD in your CRIS profile, any publications matched in our data sources with your ORCiD will be automatically claimed for you. For more on ORCiDs and the benefits of having one, see our blogpost from earlier this year.

Contact us at sora@sgul.ac.uk if you would like guidance on keeping your CRIS publication lists & metrics up to date.

 

Funder initiatives

Funder mandates and publisher policies around open access to research are an area of constant evolution. This year has seen the announcement of Wellcome Trust’s plans to update their open access policy for 2020, to ensure all Wellcome-funded research articles are made freely available at the time of publication, and Plan S, which aims to require all research articles funded by the coalition of research funding organisations behind the plan be published in open access journals, or on open access platforms.

Plan S has certainly caught the attention of publishers – for example it has been welcomed with caveats by the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers³, and Nature recently reported it has support in China⁴

SGUL researchers have benefited from negotiations by Jisc Collections⁵ with publishers around subscriptions and open access charges; for instance in being able to publish open access for free under the Springer Open Choice agreement.

Contact us via openaccess@sgul.ac.uk if you have any questions about how to meet your funder open access policies.

 

Lastly, special thanks to all of our researchers who have answered our calls to be involved with open research.

In particular, to the laboratory researchers who opened up their groups, projects and labs to us earlier this year and told us all about their data and records management practices. We have now produced a report on our findings and will be building on this work in the New Year.

And to all who have been making their papers open access, as we work towards the next REF.

We hope to see or hear from you in 2019

Michelle Harricharan, Research Data Support Manager
Jenni Hughes, Research Publications Assistant
Jennifer Smith, Research Publications Librarian

 

Contacts

CRIS & Deposit on acceptance: sora@sgul.ac.uk

Open Access Publications: openaccess@sgul.ac.uk

Research Data Management: researchdata@sgul.ac.uk

 

References

1. Page, B. Publishers succeed in getting Sci-Hub access blocked in Russia. The Bookseller [Internet]. 2018 Dec 11 [cited 2018 Dec 13]. Available from: https://www.thebookseller.com/news/sci-hub-blocked-russia-following-court-action-publishers-911571

2. McKenzie, L. Publishers escalate legal battle against ResearchGate. Inside Higher Ed [Internet]. 2018 Oct 4 [cited 2018 Dec 13]. Available from: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/10/04/publishers-accuse-researchgate-mass-copyright-infringement

3. STM. STM statement on Plan S: Accelerating the transition to full and immediate Open Access to scientific publications [Internet]. The Hague: International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers; 2018 [cited 2018 Dec 13]. Available from: https://www.stm-assoc.org/2018_09_04_STM_Statement_on_PlanS.pdf

4. Schiermeier Q. China backs bold plan to tear down journal paywalls. Nature [Internet]. 2018 Dec 13 [cited 2018 Dec 14]. Available from: http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/d41586-018-07659-5

5. Earney, L. National licence negotiations advancing the open access transition – a view from the UK. Insights [Internet]. 2018 [cited 2018 Dec 14]; 31 (11). Available from: http://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.412

 

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Get a Unique Researcher ID for Free and Help Identify Your Research Outputs

What is ORCID?

Image from: https://members.orcid.org/sites/default/files/28-banners.png

ORCID stands for Open Researcher and Contributor ID

• Creating an ID is free
• The ORCID registry is maintained by a not for profit organization, funded through organizational membership and subscription fees

Why should I get one?

You can create a unique, persistent identifier which you can use to better identify yourself with your research outputs, such as publications and data sets.

• It links you together with all your publications, whatever version of your name they are published under. That means if you change your name, or a different variation of it is used (eg middle name or initial), your publications will still be linked to your identity and will be collected in your ORCID record. And, what’s more, you can continue to use the same ID when you change organisations.

 

• It’s also useful for clarifying which publications aren’t yours but have been published by someone with the same name – especially helpful if there’s someone with a similar name in the same field or the same organization as you.

 

• It can link to many different types of research outputs, including datasets and software, as well as journal articles, meaning that you can easily get credit for all your published work.

 

• ORCID integrates with a variety of other systems, such as funder applications and publisher manuscript systems, saving you from having to put the same information over again (see the section Who can see the information? below to find out how this works). Some actually require ORCID IDs, such as the Wellcome Trust’s grant applications system (and here’s some more on why they made that choice).

 

Image from: http://www.ref.ac.uk/

ORCID and REF

The recent REF 2021: Decisions on staff and outputs says “The funding bodies consider that the benefits offered by persistent staff identifiers are significant, in terms of increased efficiency, transparency and interoperability in the research data landscape.” While not mandated for REF 2021, ORCIDs look likely to be required for future funding assessments, and HEFCE “strongly encourage” an ORCID ID to be provided for Category A submitted staff in REF 2021.

ORCID and CRIS

There will be some exciting developments with SGUL’s CRIS later this year when the CRIS is upgraded. If you have an ORCID ID, CRIS will retrieve records from data sources that have the ORCID ID in their metadata (such as Europe PubMed Central, PubMed, Web of Science). Once you have confirmed that the ORCID ID is yours, CRIS will retrieve any future records from those data sources with that ORCID ID in their metadata, and automatically add the records into your publications list.

How do I get an ORCID?

If you haven’t already got one, go to the ORCID website and click “Register now”. You can add your professional information and any other identifiers you might have to your account.

Who can see the information?

• You control the content in your ORCID, who can see it
• There are three visibility settings : everyone, trusted parties, or only me. Visibility to items can be set individually. For more information see Visibility settings
• If you are happy to have the information visible to anyone, you can set visibility to ‘everyone’.
• This means the profile will be visible via the orcid.org website, and importantly can be searched for via the API, which means the data can be reused.
• If you want to be able to let the data update across systems that are registered /integrated to use ORCID data, then set it to ’trusted parties’
• You can register your ORCID record with Research Fish, and this will enable you to add publications in your Research Fish portfolio to your ORCID record (so if it is in Research Fish, it will be included then in ORCID). Also you can use the publications search in Research Fish to fetch publications from ORCID and add them to your Research Fish portfolio.

Useful links:

Building your ORCID record and connecting your iD

ResearcherID & ORCID Integration – how to associate ORCID with ResearcherID

EPMC: How do I link my articles to my ORCID?

 

Jennifer Hughes, Research Publications Assistant

Jennifer Smith, Research Publications Librarian

Contact: openaccess@sgul.ac.uk

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Open Access: Green and Gold

St George’s researchers: read on to find out how to make research open access, and how to win a £30 Amazon voucher…

There are two different ways to make your research articles open access: the green route and the gold route.

Green Open Access: What is it?

Green open access means making your research articles freely available via a subject or institutional repository (such as SORA, SGUL’s institutional repository), after any embargo period required by the publisher has passed.

What do I need to do?

When your article is accepted for publication, create a basic record in the CRIS (Current Research Information System for St George’s Researchers) and upload your author’s accepted manuscript to it. . (This is the version after any changes resulting from peer review, but before the publisher’s formatting and copy editing.) We will then check the record and apply any embargo period before making it live in SORA.

For more guidance, please log in to your CRIS profile and click on the Help tab at the top right hand side.

If you have any questions, see our website or contact sora@sgul.ac.uk

 

Gold Open Access: What is it?

Gold open access means making your research articles freely available on the publisher’s website when they’re published, usually under a license which allows for reuse.

What do I need to do?

Find out if the journal you’re publishing in has an open access option, and then see if you have any funding available to pay for it.

Some publishers offer discounts or waivers for SGUL researchers: check our page on open access fees to see if any of them apply to you.

If your research is funded:

RCUK and COAF (a partnership of six health research charities) have provided us with funds to make articles arising from that research open access. To find out if you’re eligible, see our website or email openaccess@sgul.ac.uk

If your research is funded by another grant, check with your grants officer to see if there are any funds in it for open access publications.

If your research is unfunded:

Consider applying to our new Institutional Fund for open access publication fees – see the link on our open access webpage.

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Open Access Week Competition

Win a £30 Amazon voucher: follow our Twitter account @sgullibrary to enter our competition on this year’s OA week theme “Open in order to…”  – tell us why you think ‘Open’ is good. (See our blog post and Terms and Conditions for how to enter).

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If you are interested receiving updates from the Library on all things open access, open data and scholarly research communications, you can subscribe to the Library Blog using the Follow button or click here for further posts from us.

Open Access Open Research

SGUL’s open access institutional repository SORA now has over two thousand full text publications written by SGUL researchers freely available online, a great milestone for SGUL to celebrate in International Open Access Week 2017.

On average there are over 1800 downloads of papers per month from SORA, the papers are indexed in SGUL’s Hunter, and in Google for maximum discoverability:

Win a £30 Amazon voucher: follow the library’s Twitter account @sgullibrary to enter our competition on this year’s OA week theme “Open in order to…” – tell us why you think ‘Open’ is good. (See our blog post and Terms and Conditions for how to enter).

Open access publication is a requirement of many of the big funders in biomedical and life sciences research due to its role in making research more accessible, more discoverable and more impactful¹.

On the 4^th October the Wellcome Trust released a new science strategy, Improving health through the best research. In it, they reaffirm their commitment to open research:

“Scientific knowledge achieves its greatest value when it is readily available to be used by others. And if knowledge generated with Wellcome support can be used for the improvement of health, it should be.”

Open research is an umbrella term bringing together a variety of efforts to make scientific research transparent and reproducible, and to increase its impact on policy, practice and technological advances. Open access publication is an important part of open research, helping to make research outputs accessible and useable by anyone. Another key tenet of open research is open data, and St George’s has recently launched a data repository to enable researchers to share, store and preserve their research content.

Queen’s University, Belfast, has put together some examples of how open access has benefitted their researchers.

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For further information, please visit our open access webpage or contact openaccess@sgul.ac.uk.

1 The Open Access Citation Advantage Service, SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) Accessed 19 October 2017

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If you are interested receiving updates from the Library on all things open access, open data and scholarly research communications, you can subscribe to the Library Blog using the Follow button or click here for further posts from us.

Open in order to…

The theme of this year’s International Open Access Week, which runs from 23^rd-29^th October, is “Open in order to…”. This year the focus is on thinking about possibilities are opened up by making research outputs open access.

Win a £30 Amazon voucher: follow the library’s Twitter account @sgullibrary to enter our competition on this year’s OA week theme “Open in order to…” – tell us why you think ‘Open’ is good. (For terms and conditions, and how to enter, see the end of this post.)

Here are some reasons why research is made “open in order to…”

…improve public health

Breakthroughs in medical science are frequently in the news, but the research publications underpinning the headlines are often locked away behind a publisher’s paywall. For example, the research article referred to in this recent article from the BBC  is currently only available to subscribers to the British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, and many publications cited in the recent award of the Nobel Prizes for Chemistry and Physics are not publicly accessible. By contrast, a recent study by SGUL researchers on meningitis in children was published in an open access journal, meaning that the full article can be read by anyone, anywhere in the world, at any time.

Open access research allows anyone who is interested to read and evaluate the research for themselves. This might include:

• Medical professionals wanting to improve patient care;
• Members of the public wanting to learn more about a condition they have;
• Journalists wanting to report more accurately on the story;
• Policy makers;
• Researchers whose institutions don’t subscribe to the journal the research is published in, or who are operating outside an institution.

Opening up research helps improve public health by increasing access to academic research.

 

…raise the visibility of my research

Studies¹ have consistently shown a citation advantage for open access publications over closed access ones. Depositing your work in a repository increases the avenues by which your research can be discovered, as well as helping readers to follow your research from paper to paper more easily by collecting them all together.

 

…enable global participation in research

Making research open enables all researchers to access it and removes the financial barrier for those working in less well funded institutions, as well as independent researchers working outside institutions. Making your data and publications accessible for free and licensing it under terms which allow for reuse means that other researchers can pick up on and build on your research, benefitting the global research community as a whole.

 

…find new collaborators

Making your work open helps researchers on related topics find it and identify possibilities for collaboration. Open access can also promote cross-disciplinary working by making it easier for researchers to access work outside their own discipline.

1 The Open Access Citation Advantage Service, SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) Accessed 19 October 2017

 

How to enter:

Follow @sgullibrary on Twitter and complete the phrase “Open in order to…” using the hashtag #openinorderto and @sgullibrary’s Twitter handle.

Terms and Conditions:

1. The competition will run from Monday 23 October 2017 until Sunday 29 October 2017.
2. The prize draw is open to anyone with a valid SGUL ID.
3. Winners will be chosen from all valid entries once the competition has closed on Sunday 29 October 2017.
4. Winners will be contacted via Twitter. Be sure to check your account.
5. The prize can only be collected in person from St George’s Library on production of a valid ID card.
6. Prizes must be collected within two weeks of notification.
7. The Judges’ decision is final and no correspondence will be entered in to.
8. Photos of the prize winners will be taken to be used in publicity on Library media channels.
9. One prize winner will be selected, unless the prize is not collected by the deadline, in which case the uncollected prize will be reselected (once only).
10. Your tweets may be reused by St George’s Library for future promotional or informational purposes.
11. Entries must contain the hashtag #openinorderto and must tag the library’s Twitter account @sgullibrary.

 

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To find out more about open access, contact openaccess@sgul.ac.uk or visit the Library open access webpages.

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If you are interested receiving updates from the Library on all things open access, open data and scholarly research communications, you can subscribe to the Library Blog using the Follow button or click here for further posts from us.