The other week I took my first trip down to the Wellcome Trust Clinical Research Facility, based at Edinburgh’s Western General Hospital.  I had been invited to give a presentation to a range of research-active staff, research students and research administrators about open access.

Naturally, much of the research carried out at this facility is funded by the Wellcome Trust, which has long been a leader in open access, having required that copies of the research papers it funds are made openly available since 2006. Indeed, this policy has recently been extended to cover monographs as well as journal articles and conference papers.

Many of those present were in receipt of funding from MRC, and therefore subject to the new MRC/RCUK requirements on open access, so it was useful to be able to start a dialogue about these requirements and to let research and administrative staff know how the Scholarly Communications Team can help them meet these requirements quickly and easily.

The session was well attended, and I was pleased to see so many research students and early-career researchers take an interest in the publishing process, open access and issues to do with copyright and copyright transfer.

I would be very keen to conduct similar information sessions in other departments.  The Scholarly Communications Team can offer bespoke training and advice sessions on open access, academic publishing and copyright to a variety of audiences.  If you would like to arrange a similar session for your department then please do get in touch!

-Dominic Tate, Scholarly Communications Manager