As well as being the archival home of P G Wodehouse and Michael Palin, the British Library also plays occasional host to live comedy. Featuring the likes of This Is Going to Hurt author Adam Kay, Sofie Hagen on her debut book Happy Fat, lead Taskmaster assistant Alex Horne, and many more, the Chortle Comedy Book Festival took over the Library’s Knowledge Centre on 13 January.

In my role as a fan of both comedy and books, and a writer, editor and Tweeter of things for the British Library, I went along.

Alex Horne. Photo by George Torode

Task #1

Sneak into some of the excellent sessions taking place at the Chortle Comedy Book Festival. Write about 10 things you learn during the day. You have 800 words. Your time starts now.

1. You wouldn’t want to be behind Alex Horne in the morning Reader queue. A massive cotton fried egg. A driving theory test card game. Toilet roll holders daubed in Marmite. Those who arrive early to the Taskmaster session have the opportunity to watch Alex Horne unpack a suitcase full of enough random task props and ‘money has bought’ prizes (I’ll let you guess which are which) to confuse the most experienced bag searcher.

2. More children watch Taskmaster than Dave probably expected and a lot of them are in the British Library audience. And on stage doing tasks. ‘Do cheer on your favourite child’ instructs Alex as they rush to put up tents in which to change into adult-size onesies.

The hour is punctuated by enthusiastically-entered audience tasks (‘Eat the best picture out of your slice of bread. You have 200 seconds.’) The public’s appetite for ridiculous things to do (there have apparently been two Taskmaster weddings; no Taskmaster funerals thus far) and their desire for Alex Horne to be the one to set them was what led him to write the Taskmaster book, as the Twitter requests and emails from schools became increasingly hard to keep up with.

3. The British Library’s status as a legal deposit library features in task #154. If you think applying for a Reader Pass in order to complete a task shows dedication, spare a thought for the comedians on the show, who do seven or eight tasks a day for six days, for each series. OK, so the six days are often spread over a six month period. But everything is a genuinely unscripted surprise. 

Robin Ince. Photo by George Torode

4. Robin Ince often forgets to mention his book on his book tour. I’m a Joke And So Are You asks what we can learn about human beings through looking at a particular branch of them: comedians. Both inspired and provoked by some media responses to the death of Robin Williams and the comedian stereotypes they drew on, the book targets common clichés about comics and asks whether they really are just clichés, and what they can tell us about people more generally.

5. Actors don’t like it when you tell them that you perform your internal monologue in their voice. And it turns out Robin Ince is pretty good at impressions. Alexei Sayle, Kenneth Williams, Brian Cox, 1970s Actor With an Open-Necked Shirt, his own compulsive thoughts (although I suppose we have to take his word for it on the last one).

Deborah Frances-White and Jessica Fostekew. Photo by George Torode

6. We should all be really cross at ploughs but you’ll need to read Deborah Frances-White’s The Guilty Feminist to understand exactly why.

7. Comedians sometimes risk severe abdominal discomfort to avoid visiting the toilet after gigs in case they overhear audience members discussing how bad they thought they were. But Deborah Frances-White believes her brilliantly successful podcast is built on responding to criticism. If people love the podcast but think it’s got something wrong, she wants to know, and it may well inform the theme of a future episode. As much as we all try to be as empathetic and inclusive as possible, sometimes, unless it is your lived experience, you don’t get it, and you need someone who does to tell you.

8. ‘I’m a feminist and’ may be what you really mean; ‘I’m a feminist, but’ sounds funnier, and the first responsibility of The Guilty Feminist podcast is to be funny. The laughter that accompanies so many of the episodes, which are often recorded with a live audience, also helps foster a sense of community. Hearing other women respond to things in the same way you do, having your experiences endorsed by others, shows us we are not alone.

John Robins and Elis James. Photo by George Torode

9. John Robins and Elis James have mastered the literary challenge of representing two voices in print: use different fonts.

Their session on The Holy Vible has the feel of both the book and their Radio X show and podcast – like you’re having a good time with your extremely funny friends. The Q&A has a similar…vibe, if you will…like the audience are catching up with their mates after the Christmas break: did John enjoy the Bohemian Rhapsody film? We’ve just seen Alex Horne - would you go on Taskmaster as a pair?

10. John Robins is after my job. Anyone who speaks with such intensity on the different uses of inverted commas in British and American English and the unique misery of a missed typo is clearly angling for some time with the British Library style guide and a bit of proofreading.

Obviously this event has happened now, but you can find out what else we have coming up at www.bl.uk/whats-on

Ellen Morgan, Content Officer at the British Library

The solid foundation of the open access movement is the importance of public access to research, but it is clear that discovery of this open research remains one of the barriers to fulfilling this goal. There are many organisations making progress in this space and it is not always easy keeping up to date with the projects that are currently underway, or even knowing about what is in the pipeline. In order to improve opportunities for collaboration and alignment, the British Library and Arcadia Fund brought together key organisations in this space to discuss what we want to prioritise as a group and what challenges are being faced.

On Friday 21 September 2018, the following organisations met at the British Library:

• Arcadia Fund
• BASE: Bielefeld Academic Search Engine
• British Library
• COAR: Confederation of Open Access Repositories
• CORE
• Crossref
• DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals
• EMBL-EBI: Europe PMC
• Impactstory
• Internet Archive
• Jisc
• Open Access Button
• ORCID (unable to attend on the day but involved in preparations and post workshop collaboration)
• University College Cork (attendee also the Chair of the Infrastructure Working Group of the Irish National Open Research Forum)

Three major themes arose from the day’s discussions: identifiers and metadata, user experience and sustainability. Poor licence metadata is an ongoing problem for organisations such as Crossref and DOAJ, who find that many publishers do not understand what is required in the licence field. However, while everyone in the room would like to see this situation improve, many of the discovery tools have found alternative ways to check document access. That being said, improved licence metadata would allow for an enhancement of Crossref services, such as an Open Access (OA) flag on records.

A more urgent issue was that of user experience, this encompassed many facets including versioning, repository deposit, and the challenge of reaching those outside of academia. There is increasing competition from commercial solutions which reduce the number of clicks to the full text of an article, and we must keep pace with these improvements. The idea of a design-jam was raised as a possible way for organisations to look at better user experience. As for the challenges of reaching those outside of academia, it was acknowledged that we need to engage in new communication channels. One suggestion was to outreach to school librarians who can incorporate OA discovery into digital literacy education.

Image by Sara Thompson (CC BY-SA 2.0).

Sustainability was the biggest topic of the day. This raised two different angles, the need to reach a maturity to create paid services, and a cultural change in libraries to redirect some of their budgets to supporting open infrastructure. Unpaywall is a great example of a service that has a free offering and a paid for service (which currently integrates with Web of Science and Scopus). BASE also receives money from EBSCO for their data feed into the discovery service.

As not all services have a paid service offering, the issue of funding was a concern for many around the table. Universities, and more specifically university libraries, are seen as the group that should be investing more in open infrastructure. The first place to start is a better connection between the builder of services and the user of services. Unpaywall’s link resolver is used by 2000 libraries, which is far below the market potential.

If libraries are going to have a role in protecting open infrastructures, then they need to engage more with the various open services available. Work is already being done in Canada and Germany to look at redirecting funding from subscriptions to tools that support access to information. SPARC are also trying to motivate members to redirect big deal cancellation funds to open infrastructure. It is also heartening to see more groups join the Global Sustainability Coalition for Open Science Services (SCOSS), of which DOAJ is a current beneficiary.

While improved funding will help ensure longer term sustainability of these infrastructures, there is another area of trust that needs to be considered and that is preservation of content. The British Library commented that (open access) publishers do not always meet their legal deposit requirements. There may be a role here for national libraries to better support discovery services, by ensuring that the content remains accessible for future generations.

The emphasis on sustainability shaped the decisions made about the next steps after the workshop. In order to attract more funding for open infrastructure, there is a need to efficiently convey all the important work these organisations are currently undertaking. Therefore, the group collaborated on a document to outline the major projects in the pipeline over the next two years..

For those in universities and funding organisations who already champion open access discovery services, they will have a brief document to point to which outlines the work being done in the space. For organisations who want to play an active role in discovery, they will be able to look for potential areas of collaboration. It also offers an opportunity to receive more feedback from the open research community.

While it is essential to gather support for the projects that are being pursued, we also hope that people will get in touch to offer suggestions to improve this work. It is our intention that we will produce this roadmap annually so that it may become a reliable way for the community to stay up to date with the progress that is being made and the priorities for the future.

The other outcome of the day was a short set of recommendations that participants agreed would help improve the discovery of open access content. As more research is published open access, the urgency of tackling these issues increases, particularly if the scholarly community wants to see more community owned solutions rather than commercially owned.

Recommendations

• Funders commit to paying APCs only to those publishers that provide accurate article licence information to Crossref.
• Funders must articulate values of open science, not just open access, and express a clear preference for infrastructure to be open source and have open APIs.
• This funding should also support open infrastructure interoperability to contribute to long term sustainability rather than showing a preference for the development of new services.
• Libraries need to engage more with open infrastructures, both through service integration and funding.

Facilitating access to knowledge is the essence of librarianship and at the heart of the mission of the British Library. Perhaps now more than ever, libraries must aim to understand the technologies through which our users discover knowledge and help support an open and transparent approach to discovery that opens up more relevant content. That is why we see great value in collaborating with open access discovery providers.

Through understanding the priorities of the organisations in this area, we are better able to see which services could integrate with our own systems, and the projects that we wish to support through partnership. We hope that the provision of this Open Access Discovery Roadmap 2018 will allow others in the community, particularly universities libraries and public funders, to do the same.

Dimity Flanagan, Scholarly Communications Lead at the British Library.

 

Any requests for information on the workshop can be sent to [email protected]. For enquiries related to specific projects mentioned in the roadmap, please contact the relevant organisation directly.

 https://doi.org/10.22020/v652-2876

 

One of the key arguments in favour of open access to research is that the public should have the right to read the results of publicly funded research. While much effort is put into creating policies, workflows and business models to enable openness, are we succeeding in engaging the public with research?

On Monday 22 October, the British Library celebrated the beginning of Open Access Week with the event, Open and Engaged (see #openengaged). It brought together representatives from higher education, funding organisations, libraries, charities, publishers, NHS, government, industry and independent research organisations such as museums and archives. The purpose of the event was to broaden the conversation around open access from a largely compliance-driven approach to one of engaging wider audiences through open research. Instead of just looking at issues relating to open access publishing, the focus was on the importance of public engagement and the public’s understanding of research. In the current climate of fake news and a mistrust of expert opinion, it is becoming even more important that the opening up of academic research leads to meaningful dissemination and confident public interactions with research results.

The scene was set by opening speaker, Katherine Mathieson, Chief Executive of the British Science Association (BSA), making it clear that open does not necessarily mean accessible. As BSA research clearly demonstrates, there is a lack of engagement with science in the UK, sitting apart from core areas of culture like music and sport. While it is important to move towards openness, particularly in promoting greater transparency, Katherine emphasised the need for organisations to help disseminate such research to the different areas of the public in an effective way.

These are organisations like the BSA, Sense about Science, the Alliance for Useful Evidence, House of Commons Library and the many public libraries throughout the UK. Katherine argued that academia would benefit from operating within a system that incentivises meaningful engagement with the public, potentially through a set of global principles that could then be adapted on a local level. If we are going to promote and invest in open research through funder policies, then thought must also be given to extending the reach of this openness beyond academic audiences.

The second component to openness and engagement is ensuring that when information is delivered, people also have the skills to assess it. This raises a myriad of issues, related to information literacy, complex terminologies and transparency around data provenance to name just a few. We learnt about AccessLab, a BSA initiative to improve judgement of information through citizen-scientist pairings. We learnt about Sense about Science’s work on making sense of uncertainty in research, and the importance of tools that target lay researchers, such as Impactstory’s Get the Research, a project being taken forward with the British Library.

At the core of information assessment is the issue of trust. Trust was a theme that came up time and again despite the difference in topics of our presenters. Martin Lugton, Product Manager at the Government Digital Service, spoke of how trust and transparency were the primary motivations for the opening up of government data at the beginning of the decade. In fact it was part of a transparency agenda to address the low level of trust in politics. While we can see that this opening up has had significant impact, particularly through the 400 plus apps that have been created using data from data.gov.uk, there is still important work to be done in the space. As Theresa May stated in 2017, “it is not enough to have open data; quality, reliability and accessibility are also required”. The story so far around government open data, offers considerable parallels to the issues being addressed throughout the day at Open and Engaged. Yet the starting point for the government was still that initial push to openness, one that has seen the UK lead the way on the Open Data Barometer.

For scholarly publishing, there are still many challenges to overcome in the movement towards open research. Our second keynote speaker of the day, Professor Jane Winters from The School of Advanced Study, spoke about the evolving relationship of humanities research with open access. Despite a long tradition in the humanities of writing for the public, the transition to open access modes of publishing has been slow. It is still hampered by a lack of awareness – two thirds of early career researchers have little awareness of open access and the other third are confused –, but also a lack of funding to expand on small scale experiments in open publishing. Jane expressed a desire for a more diverse scholarly publishing scene that embraces the benefits of digital by moving away from merely replicating print content in PDF format. An issue that was echoed by Hollydawn Murray in her presentation on the work by F1000 and their efforts to bring science publishing into the 21^st century.

Overcoming such obstacles is particularly pressing in the monograph space, a key medium for humanities researchers. Helen Snaith from Research England addressed this topic looking at the challenges and solutions for open access monographs. Helen also invited feedback from workshop participants. Many focused on the opportunities a change in publishing models could bring, such as an improved online reading experience, collective organising to re-invent academic publishing, and new models that focus not only on gold and green open access but incorporate public value, engagement and collaboration. That being said, there are some fundamentals of publishing that need to be addressed, and this brought the conversation back to transparency. Transparency was also a key theme in the presentation Laure Haak (see photo above) and Josh Brown from ORCID gave on persistent identifiers. Properly implemented, identifiers can not only help to discover content but also to create trust by making it clear who created, contributed to, funded and reviewed it.

The theme of transparency carried through to the concluding panel discussion that raised questions about the UK’s national approach to opening up research. To a large extent, the discussion was shaped by the recently announced Plan S. Panel members raised questions about the suitability of hybrid open access and called for a more ‘exciting’ open access model. They discussed the proposed cap for article processing charges in the context of a call for greater transparency around the costs of publishing. It was argued that only when the scholarly community are better informed to the costs of publishing, can they define an acceptable price for the dissemination of their research. Professor Parveen Yaqoob, Pro-Vice Chancellor for Research and Innovation at the University of Reading, questioned the current business models for open access, in particular for monographs, along with the funding allocation.

Matthew Day from Cambridge University Press highlighted the publisher’s commitment to open science alongside the difficulties of achieving a transition through national policies in a global publishing market. Professor Haidy Geismar, from University College London, encouraged us to imagine a cooperative ecology for open access, and to embrace a blurring of the line between research repositories and publishing. Chris Banks, Director of Library Services at Imperial College, brought us back to the opening idea of the day, speculating whether we need to broaden our idea of openness, to focus on research communication more widely and breakdown content delivery models that no longer seem useful in the online age.

We hope that by having such a varied mix of people in attendance, those somewhat outside of the open access debate became better informed about progress and obstacles in the transition to open access. Equally, those who were more familiar with these debates, had the opportunity to view them from a new perspective, to consider an expansive definition of openness.

The panel at one of the Open and Engaged plenary sessions, discussing what a UK national open research plan should look like. Photos by Torsten Reimer.  

In the closing remarks, Torsten Reimer, Head of Research Services at the British Library, emphasised the need for broad reflection of scholarly communications. He argued that we need to shift the focus from making research open to making it legible for different audiences. Crucially, this has to include an analysis of the way information is discovered and the role algorithms play, for good and bad. It is concerning that as technology allows us to produce and share ever more knowledge, it also seems to narrow our world view to what machines consider we want to see on social media.

Through activities like Open & Engaged the British Library hopes to contribute to a broad discussion on the future of scholarly communications, within and beyond higher education. Open & Engaged is part of a wider programme through which we expand and modernise our services under the Library's Living Knowledge vision. This programme includes projects such as a shared-service platform for access to open knowledge and new approaches to open research content up to a wider audience. As the national library, we will continue to play a pivotal role in the provision of knowledge and help to shape the global information ecosystem to deliver more equitable access to information.

 

Dimity Flanagan

Scholarly Communications Lead at the British Library

 

Any requests for information can be sent to [email protected]