{"id":1379,"date":"2015-10-30T18:15:28","date_gmt":"2015-10-30T18:15:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.iriss.org.uk\/socialmedia\/?p=1379"},"modified":"2015-11-02T14:15:44","modified_gmt":"2015-11-02T14:15:44","slug":"research-unbound-finch-open-access-and-social-media","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.iriss.org.uk\/socialmedia\/2015\/10\/30\/research-unbound-finch-open-access-and-social-media\/","title":{"rendered":"Research Unbound: Finch, open access and social media"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is a summary of a presentation I gave\u00a0at an\u00a0Open\u00a0University seminar on\u00a0Social Media and Research in Ageing<\/a>\u00a0on\u00a030 October 2015.<\/p>\n

The emergence of social media during the last 10 years has endowed the web with ever more powerful, accessible and innovative ways of communicating.\u00a0Social media is really just the natural evolution of the web and\u00a0the\u00a0starting point for my presentation\u00a0was a look at\u00a0disruptive power of web-based communication, sharing and collaboration.<\/p>\n

Bookselling, newspapers, music and cinema have all been transformed in the last 15 years. \u00a0Academic publishing has been relatively unaffected, perhaps surprising given\u00a0that\u00a0when Tim Berners-Lee created the Web in 1991 his aim was to support and improve scientific communication and the dissemination of research.<\/p>\n

In\u00a02012 the\u00a0Finch report<\/a> proposed a fundamental shift in how research is published and disseminated: by 2014 publicly funded scientific research was to be freely available to all on publication. \u00a0Although Finch acknowledged\u00a0the existence of social media the report’s recommendations focused on adapting\u00a0the traditional publishing\u00a0business model to accommodate open access<\/a>. \u00a0Essentially this involves publishers generating their income by\u00a0charging authors a publication fee rather than levying subscription fees on readers.\u00a0\u00a0For most of the public, however, journals continue to live behind paywalls.<\/p>\n

So what about the commitment to make\u00a0publicly funded research freely available to the public? Well, the major publishers have supported Access to Research<\/a>, an initiative\u00a0equipping public libraries with free access to a number of subscription journal articles. According to open\u00a0access agitator\u00a0Cameron Neylon it’s\u00a0<\/em>an empty political gesture that fails to meet the needs of the UK public (Improving on \u201cAccess to Research\u201d: Restrictive access and licensing fail to meet the needs of the 21st century<\/a>).\u00a0<\/em>Under the scheme the public may look at abstracts\u00a0online but must visit a participating library to read the article. No wonder Neylon calls it ‘an initiative from a 20th Century industry\u00a0attempting to stave off progress towards the 21st Century by applying a 19th Century infrastructure’.<\/em><\/p>\n

Neylon has questioned academic journals’ fitness for purpose, noting that researchers\u00a0don’t consume articles in the form in which they write them: journals focus on text whereas researchers\u00a0want data. Publishing data in chunks is something Gary Hall advocates in his notion of the Unbound\u00a0Book<\/a>. Hall is Professor of Media and Performing Arts and Director of the wonderfully named Centre for Disruptive Media, at Coventry University. He makes the point that\u00a0If you talk about what you’re\u00a0doing on blogs or wikis or share your data on services such as Figshare<\/a>, by the time you come to publish you have already put quite a lot of your wisdom out there.<\/p>\n

Brian Kelly has been blogging for many years as UK Web Focus<\/a>, advocating the use of social media to get your work disseminated and talked about.\u00a0He has expressed\u00a0frustration over the inaccessibility of institutional\u00a0repositories, which seem\u00a0to be more of a\u00a0research audit tool for the institution than a means of\u00a0dissemination, a view echoed in\u00a0a research study undertaken by Iriss\u00a0in 2013 (Improving access to research for the social services \u2013 can higher education digital repositories help?<\/a>).\u00a0If your stuff is to be findable\u00a0on the web it needs Google juice\u00a0(Using social media to build your academic career<\/a>)<\/em>. In\u00a0other words your\u00a0work has to be findable by web search engines.<\/p>\n

Research Unbound<\/a> is Iriss’s\u00a0contribution to encouraging a more open approach to sharing research. Inspired partly by Gary Hall, it\u2019s both a campaign and a website, built on\u00a0Wordpress,\u00a0offering space to blog and take the first steps towards\u00a0understanding\u00a0new media and acquiring skills in\u00a0digitally literacy. \u00a0A report from Future Work Skills<\/a> talks about a new media literacy:<\/em><\/p>\n

the ability to critically assess and develop content that uses new media and to leverage these media for persuasive communication.<\/em>
\n Knowledge of fonts and layouts was once restricted to a small set of print designers and typesetters, until word processing programs brought this within the reach of everyday office workers. Similarly, user-friendly production editing tools will make video language\u2014concepts such as frame, depth of field etc\u2014part of the common vernacular<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The need to present research evidence\u00a0in more accessible formats\u00a0was discussed in the Guardian earlier this year\u00a0(see previous post Embedding knowledge in practice and digital participation<\/a>). \u00a0It was argued\u00a0that\u00a0organisations should develop a culture that\u00a0encourages and values reading, discussing and reflecting. In addition it was suggested we consider\u00a0different ways of presenting content that might be\u00a0more accessible for those without an academic background: a short animation or video might be preferred to wading through 60 pages of dry text.<\/p>\n

What and how we communicate has been explored by\u00a0the Research Utilisation Research Unit<\/a> (RURU). Davies and Powell (Communicating social research findings more effectively: what can we learn from other fields?<\/a>)\u00a0stress\u00a0the importance of dialogue in knowledge interaction and suggest borrowing techniques from other disciplines, such as advertising.<\/p>\n

Two years Iriss hired a\u00a0Creative in Residence<\/a> to help us think about and improve our communication skills and techniques. For three months Andy, with a background\u00a0advertising and copywriting in the commercial and the public sector, inspired us to think more thoroughly and creatively about what our projects were trying to achieve. He taught us the WWW of communication: not World Wide Web, but Who? What? What?<\/p>\n