This is a guest blog post written by Dominic Tate, Associate Director, Head of Library Research Support

The University of Edinburgh’s Library Research Support Team, of which the Research Data Service is part of, won the ‘Outstanding Library Team of the Year’ category at the Times Higher Education Awards 2024 in Birmingham on 28th November. The team plays a central role in the institution’s transition to open research, with the impact of its work spreading far beyond the Scottish capital. The team created and implemented a UK-first rights retention policy, enabling scholarly work to be published in an open-access format while the authors retain the rights to their work.

Across the UK, 30 other universities have since followed Edinburgh’s lead, and the library team has also presented its work in India, Switzerland and the Netherlands. The team has already saved its university more than £10,000, with hundreds of thousands in savings anticipated in the years to come and millions expected across the broader university sector.

The library team’s new Citizen Science and Participatory Research Service, meanwhile, aims to boost public trust in science while facilitating research that depends on lived experience. By providing library spaces to researchers and community groups, the service enables collaborations on research projects, while the public can also access heritage collections and other library resources. The team endeavours to connect researchers with the communities around them, helping them answer research questions of public concern.

The judges applauded the Edinburgh library team’s initiative, commending its efforts to “share its experience with the wider sector” alongside its “emphasis on community access”. Its work, they said, “demonstrated a collaborative approach between the library research support team, academic and professional services staff, students and the local community that is scalable to other parts of the sector”.

You can read an e-book profiling all the winners.