Join us for a half-day workshop at the prestigious Crick Institute in London, hosted by ChronosHub in collaboration with Accucoms. This event will bring together members of the UK Higher Education Institution (HEI) community for a day of insightful presentations, networking opportunities, and meaningful discussions on the challenges faced in open science and scholarly communication workflows.
Meeting Evolving Open Access Challenges
On October 1st, ChronosHub, together with its sales partner Accucoms, had invited UK Higher Education Institutions to gather at The Francis Crick Institute in London in order to discuss challenges and solutions to pressing OA management challenges. The half-day event was titled ‘Meeting Evolving Open Access Challenges’.
Summer firmly behind us, and ignoring the evolving deluge outside, delegates from institutions in London and nearby counties, as well as representatives from ChronosHub and Accucoms, spent a productive and lively morning and early afternoon together in an effort to discuss the impact of OA mandates and policies and the complexities around its many business models, in a variety of settings and formats. The aim was that in a short space of time, be able to come together collaboratively in an effort to tackle some of the most pressing questions in the OA ecosystem, or, at least, would walk away with new ideas and approaches.
Beth Montague Hellen, head of the library at the Francis Crick Institute, gave a brief and fascinating intro to the research conducted on site, and to the many cultural challenges encountered in the transition towards open access, including the sector’s sluggish acceptance of the Green OA model.
Martin Jagerhorn, head of business development at ChronosHub, further set the scene by discussing the results of a pre-event survey, which asked participants to paint a picture of their internal OA needs and workflow challenges. The issues addressed in the survey were further discussed in a lively interactive workshop, in which three mind-maps were elaborated on the challenges around green, gold and hybrid/OA agreements respectively.
Strengthened by a hearty lunch, and safe from downpour at the lovely Crick premises, the afternoon was kicked of by Louise Zambianchi, Open Access Manager at Lancaster University. She shared Lancaster’s experiences of working with ChronosHub to automate the workflows along the publishing journey, and what the learnings and benefits have been so far to the library and researchers. This triggered many questions related to UK specific topics, such as how to deal with UKRI block grants, VAT returns, and REF compliance as well as common sector challenges like incorrect data from the publishers on agreements.
The afternoon continued with a second interactive workshop focused on ideating collaborative solutions to the identified key challenges in the first workshop. Still grouped into gold, hybrid/agreements and green teams, many practical solutions were put forward by the participants, some of which we at ChronosHub will think of supporting, including a collaborative solution for publishers to use ChronosHub’s new Journal Manager and enabling the UK institutions to share costs and agreement data for their ChronosHub Journal Guides.
At the end of the event, we all had to brave the rain, but it seemed we were ‘stepping high’ buoyed by new ideas and the conviction that challenges, no matter how fast evolving, can be met collaboratively in the spirit of true library musketeers – All for one and one for all!
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