Joint sessions with Academic Development Directorate this week

This week, we are contributing to two of the sessions in the ADD calendar of research support events.  On Thursday, Clare will be joining Phil from the Technology Enhanced Learning team to look at Social Media for Research Dissemination.  On Friday, Victoria and Clare will be running Literature Searching for Researchers.  More information on these sessions, and the others offered by ADD for researchers, can be found on their website. Also, don't forget that ILS offers a range of bite-sized introductions to a number of research topics, including Keeping Track of Your Reading and and introduction to the issues surrounding Open Access.  These are in the calendar on the ILS blog for researchers.

Keeping track of your reading

We will be running a drop in session on Wednesday describing some tools for keeping track of your reading. We'll be talking about keeping track of what you have already read, what you'd like to read, and how to stay on top of relevant authors and topics as they're published. Please come by DG103 at 10:00 if you would like to join in.

More on what we've covered in the past can be found here.

For those of you who haven't attended the ILS researcher support sessions, we usually spend about 30 minutes talking about some tools or strategies we recommend based on the needs of researchers in the room. We'll stick around for another 30 minutes afterwards in case there are individual questions about your research or if you'd like to get stuck in with the tools we've demoed. The full roster of workshops is available in the Google calendar on the right of your screen or here.

Newspaper archives - what is available here?

Increasingly researchers are able to use online archives of newspapers, recent and more historic, as part of their resource searches.  Having recently added some new services to our portfolio in ILS, we thought it was worth rounding up what is now available to you. All of these are accessible via the databases page on the ILS website.

17th-18th Century Burney Collection Newspapers

The newspapers, pamphlets and books gathered by the Reverend Charles Burney (1757-1817) represent the largest and most comprehensive collection of early English news media.

19th Century British Library Newspapers

19th Century British Library Newspapers contains full runs of influential national and regional newspapers, representing different political and cultural segments.

British Newspapers 1600-1900

A combined search tool for the two collections above.

FT.com

FT.com interative provides access to the full text of the global editions of the Financial Times to search and browse the archives, including interactive features and extra reports on industry sectors and companies.

Historical Newspapers

Searchable full text, full page, and article-level images from the archives of The Guardian, The Observer and The New York Times, 1791-2003.

InfoTrac Custom Newspapers

Full text, up to the present day, of UK newspapers, including The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, The Independent.

UK Press Online (ON CAMPUS ACCESS ONLY)

A British tabloid newspaper archive, covering the Daily Mirror, Daily Express, Daily Star and other major titles.

Posting to Academia.edu & ResearchGate

It's been a while since we've talked about either ResearchGate or Academia.edu, though we know many of you use these services, both as readers and contributers (we do too). If you haven't yet stumbled across these two, they are online platforms on which researchers can post their papers. Academia.edu tends to be more humanities-focussed and is based in San Francisco and ResearchGate tends to be more STEM-focussed and is based in Berlin, but both of them host papers from all over the world and across all disciplines. These platforms position themselves somewhere between a research repository (other examples would be YSJ's RaY, SSRN, or arXiv) and a social networking site like LinkedIn or Facebook.

Though these services give users the ability to publicize and download articles without paying a subscription or article charge, they're not providing open access in a responsible, sustainable manner.  As we pointed out before, these platforms are owned by private companies and their goal is to create good financial returns for their investors. Mendeley, a socially-oriented citation management service, was purchased by Elsevier a few years back, and so it's possible that ResearchGate and Academia.edu will be sold to a similar (or the same) buyer in future. Another likely scenario is that they will sell onwards to marketers or R&D companies information about networks, research trends and other data you upload.

Providing open access to your research outputs is best practice, as well as making you compliant for the next REF. There are a number of accepted methods of making your work open access --YSJ's policy is to upload them to RaY -- but uploading to ResearchGate and Academia.edu are not acceptable for REF. You can continue to upload to either or both platforms, just remember to upload to RaY as well.

If you're interested in reading up on this, this blog posting by Kathleen Fitzpatrick, is a good place to start.