Countdown to HEFCE open access policy for the next REF

Don't get egg on your face!


Be ready for the next REF and submit your accepted articles to RaY from 1st April 2016.

Contact RaY for more information.

Your username and password: they belong to you!

Your York St John IT credentials - username and password - give you access to a host of useful services. For example, you can use email services and access licensed resources such as software, journal articles and databases that the University has purchased for you.

When we purchase these resources, we often sign a legal contract with the provider stating that access will be given to authorised users only. If users from outside of the institution are given access then we would be breaking the terms of our contract.

Publishers keep a close eye on unusual activity, and if they detect password sharing, then they are within their rights to withdraw access to material to the entire institution.

Keep your username and password safe. Don’t share them with others – and don’t ask people from other institutions to share their details with you. Your obligations to the University are outlined in our Acceptable Use Policy for University ICT Systems.

We provide mechanisms to allow our researchers to get access to the material that they need, for example, by providing free inter-library loans. If researchers obtain material by other routes then it is more difficult for us to know of any gaps in our collections, and any information needs that we can meet in future.

So, help us to help you. We’re always keen to hear feedback about our services and how we can improve, and continue to meet your needs.

See ways to contact us here.

5 days of open education

It is open education week, so we have teamed up with our colleagues in the Technology Enhanced Learning team to produce a programme called '5 days of open education'. Librarians from ILS have written days 3 and 4, concentrating on Creative Commons licences and open access publishing.  If you think this sounds interesting, you can sign up at
https://blog.yorksj.ac.uk/moodle/2016/02/25/5-days-of-open-education-sign-up-now/ We'll be posting some of the key bits from the programme on here over the next couple of weeks too.

Electronic delivery of Inter-Library Loans now available

Following a successful pilot, the British Library’s Secure Electronic Delivery service for inter-library loans is now available to all staff and students at YSJ. An email is sent to you by the British Library with a link to download a PDF of your ILL. Electronic delivery of entire books isn’t possible due to copyright regulations, but articles and individual book chapters can be sent to you electronically.

Why get your ILLs sent to you electronically?

• It’s faster than waiting for a paper copy to be posted to you or to be ready to collect
• You can keep multiple copies of the file on multiple devices
• You have a choice of whether to view on screen or print the article

How to request electronic ILLs

When completing the ILL form, simply select ‘Secure Electronic Delivery’ from the list of delivery method options. The articles are in an encrypted format, so to download them successfully you will need to complete the following steps:

• Register for a British Library account, which you will use to log in to your document – just go to http://ondemand.bl.uk/onDemand/home and click ‘Register’
• Ensure that you have Adobe Acrobat PDF Reader 9 or higher installed on the device you want to use to install your ILL – this is free to download from the Adobe website: https://acrobat.adobe.com/uk/en/products/pdf-reader.html

Instructions for downloading the files different devices can be found on the Inter-Library Loans website: http://www.yorksj.ac.uk/information-learning-services/information-learning-services/faqs-for-staff--students/inter-library-loans/electronic-delivery-of-ills.aspx

You can also contact the ILL team on interlibrary@yorksj.ac.uk or 01904 87 6149 to find out more.

Accessible electronics ILLs available for Additional Support users

The standard electronic delivery service is encrypted and a British Library account is needed to access the document. However, if you are an Additional Support user then you may be eligible to receive unencrypted accessible PDFs of your inter-library loans. There is no need to log in to access these documents, and scans have OCR (Optical Character Recognition) applied so that you can highlight and copy text and make comments. The documents are compatible with the Read & Write Gold screen-reading software, available on the York St John student PCs, and are likely to be compatible with other screen-reading softwares.

To request accessible PDFs, you just need to contact the inter-library loans team. You can do so by emailing interlibrary@yorksj.ac.uk, calling 01904 87 6149, adding a note to an ILL request, or just by asking the Service Desk Team or your Academic Liaison Librarian to notify ILL staff on your behalf.

Using a DOI to upload your research to RaY

A DOI or Digital Object Identifier is a unique alphanumeric string which is assigned by the publisher when your article is published electronically. The DOI of an article always remains the same so is much more stable than a url which is prone to change.
The DOI always begins with ‘10’ followed by a combination of numbers and/or letters. Eg.

10.1080/1533015X.2015.1111080

10.1007/s11103-016-0452-0

10.1558/ruth.v9i1.7

The DOI can be used to upload your article details into RaY. In the Manage Deposits option in the menu select the Import from DOI (via CrossRef) option:

Then simply paste your article’s DOI into the box – you can do multiple DOIs at the same time if you have more than one item to load – and click on Import:

The bibliographic details of your article are automatically pulled through from the CrossRef database. You should check these and add any local data such as your email address in the Creators field, Department and subjects. You will also need to upload a file

If you have any questions about using the DOI to upload your research please email RaY.