The three partners in the LOCH Project have all had busy few months, using the Summer to gear up for Open Access implementation in the new semester.

Events

• In early August, the project held a workshop in Edinburgh to talk about planning and implementation of Open Access requirements in REF 2020. Project partners presented case studies relating to activities at their universities and delegates were given the opportunity to start formulating or refining their own institutional plans.  Presentations are available at https://libraryblogs.is.ed.ac.uk/loch/2015/08/06/ref-open-access-planning-workshop-5th-august/.

External Promotion & Publications

• Dominic Tate attended the ELPUB 2015 conference in Valetta, Malta and talked about UK Open Access policy and the University of Edinburgh’s approach to implementing Green Open Access in light of the OA requirements for the forthcoming REF. A conference paper which briefly analyses the implications of these requirements and  the presentation slides are available at https://www.era.lib.ed.ac.uk/handle/1842/10553.

Reusable Outputs – Deposit of Acceptance Email Templates

• Colleagues at St Andrews University have published a series of reusable email templates which can be used by repository staff in a variety of circumstances to encourage academics to transition to “deposit on acceptance” (as required for REF compliance). These are licenced with CC-BY and are available at https://research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk/handle/10023/7506.

Reflections on the Last Few Months

Reviewing progress over the last few months, the Summer has been extremely busy, with LOCH Project partners working closely with colleagues from Elsevier and the PURE UK User Group to further develop functionality to support OA compliance for research funder and research assessment requirements.  Thinking back about our activities, they have mostly been informed by external policy and amendments to it – and balancing these external pressures with a need to provide robust processes and services to support researchers in their work.  Thinking about our conversations and deliberations over the last months – here are five top tips for Open Access implementation:

1. Devise, implement and maintain one steady internal policy on Open Access which provides best-fit for a range of external drivers (REF, RCUK, Wellcome, Horizon 2020 etc.).
2. Do not change internal Open Access policy to reflect changes in the wider environment – doing so could be unsettling for researchers and undermine confidence in your Open Access services.
3. Devise one very simple, clear message about what action researchers need to take and the support there is available to them.
4. Robust yet flexible planning and early adoption are everything. Do not underestimate the time it takes to achieve a change of culture around publication practice.
5. Don’t work in isolation – gain the buy-in of senior stakeholders, research administrators, library staff and academic research leads across your institution.

Looking Forward

We are now in the new Semester and April 2016 is rapidly approaching – and there is still much work to complete, but there are already a number of  dates for the diary and events in planning:

• A short workshop on Open Access implementation for PURE customers is planned to take place at the PURE UK User Group in Birmingham on Wednesday September 30^th. Please contact dominic.tate@ed.ac.uk for further details of this event.
• Dominic Tate will be presenting at a FOSTER webinar facilitated by Jisc and ARMA on Thursday 19^th This webinar will feature a series of case studies on Open Access advocacy – details are available at https://www.arma.ac.uk/events/training-and-development/online-resources/neventitem.2015-06-17.2792528938.
• A further Open Access planning workshop is planned for early December – this will take place in England – exact location and date to be confirmed and publicised shortly.

Dominic Tate – on behalf of the LOCH Project Team

Earlier this year we published a report “A year in the life of Open Access support: continuous improvement at University of St Andrews” which described development of our OA support service. In our case study we mentioned email templates that were being used and in our “REF-monitoring” workflows (Appendix 2. p14) and to back up our simple messages about the HEFCE OA Policy for the next REF. We have recently amended the templates, simplifying the message further to avoid any confusion over dates, and because many of our researchers now have a reasonable awareness of the policy. We continue to use them as a way of encouraging early deposit of accepted manuscripts into our Research Information System, Pure – and to thank authors who have already deposited.

The email templates are at: http://hdl.handle.net/10023/7506 (with a Creative Commons license)

We have now sent out well over 200 emails, and have been getting a great response. Naturally our inbox is bursting with additional enquiries and some concerns, but in general authors are happy that they are getting guidance on what/how/when to deposit. Our deposit rate for 2015 across the University is now around 69%, with one School (where we have been working closely to develop additional support) reaching 89%. Some Schools are yet to catch on, so we continue to use other forms of communication such as regular newsletters. Our favourite response to these is “Interesting… please do come and speak at our staff council to get us up to speed” – so the advocacy work continues!

Jackie, Mike & Kyle – OA Support Team, University of St Andrews Library

On the 31st August, over one hundred researchers from across the breadth of the University of Edinburgh met together in the Informatics Forum to discuss the challenges of dealing with the research data. Following-on from the 2014 conference of the same title, the event consisted of twenty presentations on this subject.

The event was opened by a keynote given by Prof Jonathan Silvertown, talking about his experiences of using crowd-sourced data from citizen scientists, and how to build mechanisms to ensure the quality of the data.

The rest of the day was filled with presentations addressing a wide range of data challenges, including topics such as data from the Large Hadron Collider, working with large data sets from China, and data derived from social media. At the end of the event, the topics were pulled together in a closing talk by Kevin Ashley, Director of the Digital Curation Centre.

If you attended Dealing with Data 2015, and have not already done so, could you please complete our brief survey at DwD2015 Feedback. It should only take 5 minutes and will help us to improve future events.

Programme with presentations

10:00 Welcome. Download PDF
10:05 Opening keynote: The Alchemy of Volunteered Data: turning base metal into gold, Prof Jonathan Silvertown, Institute of Evolutionary Biology. Download PDF

Session 1 – Informatics Forum
10:45 – 11:05: University data, open data and the Smart Data Hack, Ewan Klein, Informatics.
11:05 – 11:25: Edinburgh Data Science and Managing National Data Services at Edinburgh. Mark Parsons, EPCC. Download PDF
11:25 – 11:45: Channel shift – using data analysis to improve service delivery at the City of Edinburgh Council. Michal Wasilewski, Informatics. Download PDF

Session 2 – Informatics Forum
12:00 – 12:20: What are the challenges of collecting and analysing data in primary care? Lessons learned from a feasibility study in six general practices in Lothian, Scotland. Natalia Calanzani, Debbie Cavers, Gaby Vojt, David Weller, Christine Campbell, Population Health Sciences and Informatics. Download PDF
12:20 – 12:40: Facilitating the reuse of brain imaging and clinical data from completed studies across the life course: the Brain Images of Normal Subjects (BRAINS) Imagebank. Samuel Danso, Dominic E. Job, David Alexander Dickie, David Rodriguez, Andrew Robson, Cyril Pernet, Susan D. Shenkin, Joanna M. Wardlaw, Brain Sciences. Download PDF
12:40 – 13:00: Scottish Neighbourhood Statistics and R: Adding value to a public data resource with the ‘tidy data’ paradigm. Jon Minton, AQMeN. Download PDF

Session 3 – Appleton Tower
12:00 – 12:20: Data ecosystems and wicked problems; supporting “students as researchers” in complex data environments. Arno Verhoeven, ECA; James Stewart, SPS; Ewan Klein, Informatics. Download PDF
12:20 – 12:40: Networked learning analytics: Studying the association between learner generated discourse and learning. Srećko Joksimović, Dragan Gašević, Education. Download PDF
12:40 – 13:00: Automated Content Analysis of Discussion Transcripts. Vitomir Kovanovic, Dragan Gašević, Informatics and Education. Download PDF

Session 4 – Informatics Forum
13:45 – 14:05: Exploring Digital Divides in China, Ashley Lloyd, Business School; Mario A. Antonioletti, Terence M. Sloan, EPCC.
14:05 – 14:25: Gone Fishing: The Creation of the Comparative Agendas Project Master Codebook, Shaun Bevan, SSPS. Download PDF
14:25 – 14:45: Electronic lab notebooks and research data management at Edinburgh Experience to date and challenges and opportunities going forward. Rory Macneil, RSpace. Download PDF

Session 5 – Appleton Tower
13:45 – 14:05: Tweeting Jonson’s “Foot Voyage”: deeply mapped data, Anna Groundwater, HCA. Download PDF
14:05 – 14:25: University of Edinburgh Reid Concerts Database Project, Fiona Donaldson, Music. Download PDF
14:25 – 14:45: Encountering feminism on Twitter, Prof Viviene Cree, and Dr Steve Kirkwood, Social and Political Science, with Dr Daniel Winterstein, Sodash. Download PDF

Session 6 – Informatics Forum
15:00 – 15:20: The VELaSSCo framework: a software platform for end user analytics and visualization of large simulation datasets, G. Filippone, A. Janda, K.J. Hanley, S. Papanicolopulos and J.Y. Ooi, IIE, Engineering.
15:20 – 15:40: From raw data to new fundamental particles: The data management lifecycle at the Large Hadron Collider, Andrew Washbrook, Physics. Download PDF
15:40 – 16:00: Tipping the balance – introducing data management on a centre-wide level, Tomasz Zieliński, Eilidh Troup, Andrew Millar, Biology. Download PDF

16:00 Closing talk: Kevin Ashley, Director, Digital Curation Centre
Kerry Miller
RDM Service Coordinator

May 2015 saw the end of the current Roadmap period and we are now into a period of consolidating work that has already been done and organising future work for the next phase of the RDM programme. The draft Roadmap 2.0 has been submitted to the steering group for approval and should be published soon.

The RDM services brochure is now almost complete and should be printed and distributed to Schools soon.

A meeting was held between the RDM team and the DCC to decide on the best approach for offering school level customisation of DMPonline. It was decided that customisation would be offered to all schools and undertaken as and when requests were made.

The Infrastructure upgrades have been procured and physically installed for the IGMM storage capacity expansion and the Research Computing Infrastructure DataStore integration servers.

Upgrades for backup/DR infrastructure have been procured and physically installed.

A 2 part workshop sponsored by EU FOSTER programme, “Good practice in data management & data sharing with social research” and “Overcoming obstacles to sharing data about human subjects” was delivered at the Scottish Graduate School of Political and Social Science Summer School.

A new series of awareness raising presentations and training courses for researchers, committees, and support staff in CHSS, CSE, and CMVM are currently being organised for 2015/16.

The RDM website has been successfully migrated to the new content management system, this included reviewing and revising all content, links, and images to fit with the new structure and layout. All schools in CHSS and CSE now have links on their own webpages to the RDM webpages, and CHSS will be placing a link from their new college pages when they go live.

An EAHIL workshop on ‘Managing research data’ was held on the 10^th June and the report of the

Met with RDM staff from University of Lisbon who were visiting the University (via James Toon).

Met with Jennifer Warburton, University of Melbourne, as part of Library visit.

Met with French delegation (INIST-CNRS) as part of Library visit.

Kerry Miller
RDM Service Coordinator

Perhaps particularly in a post-Christian society it is stereotypes we live with, rather than the nuanced reality of religion. Listening to the thoughts of ministers by reading the Old Statistical Accounts has challenged one of these for me recently. We are all familiar with the notion of religion’s hostility to folk culture. The story of John MacDonald, born in 1779 and brought up in Reay, on the north coast, demonstrates this perfectly.

He early manifested an intense love for music, and even in his boyhood acquired considerable skill in subduing into melody for Celtic ears the wild sounds of the bagpipe. This was his favourite instrument; and on leaving home for college in 1797 [in Aberdeen] it was carefully packed in his trunk, and doubtless furnished many a pleasant interlude amidst the busy studies of the session.

However the young man, son of a Church of Scotland catechist, was becoming increasingly committed to his faith.

Poltalloch Harp, Courtesy of West Highland Museum

Before the following session higher matters began to occupy his attention, and the pipe was that year left purposely behind. His father, in order to try him, wrote to inquire what would be done with the pipe. “Just what you think right,” was his answer, well knowing what treatment his idol was likely to receive at his father’s hands. The old man no sooner received this license from his son than he went to fetch the pipe from its place, and laying it on the block, he plied with right good-will the axe on its chanters.

The fingers of all musicians will tighten a little on their mouse as they read that. Young John became an influential preacher, down in Ferintosh on the Black Isle, and beloved to many across the Highlands. But he didn’t feel that music and his brand of faith were compatible. It seems that as people became more religious, affected by the Evangelical movement in the late 1700s in Sutherland and Ross-shire, and in the early 1800s on the west coast, that they rejected their music and the telling of the old stories. The poet Derick Thomson likens Calvinism to a scarecrow; a ‘tall, thin black-haired man’ who ‘took the goodness out of the music’ replacing it with ‘a new song’ and ‘fragments of the philosophy of Geneva’. Thomson is ambivalent about this religious legacy, but is sure it was hostile to folk culture.

The ministers writing in the Statistical Accounts were not all John MacDonalds nor did they all usher in scarecrows. Many record local leisure activities neutrally, even positively. The minister of Islay noted that ‘dance and the song, with shinty and putting the stone, are their chief amusements. Numbers of them play well upon the violin and the bagpipe.’ In Coll and Tiree the people composed and sang songs, told Fingalian tales, and held ‘dancing assemblies at different farms in turn.’ The minister in Thurso fancied himself an expert on fiddle and pipe music. He found ‘the Highland reels are played particularly well … in Caithness; but the proper slow bagpipe tunes and marches, are not given in that perfection here, which seems almost peculiar to the West Highland pipers.’

A few used folk culture to lament changing times. On the south shores of the Dornoch Firth, the minister romanticised the people of Kincardine. They were apparently moral, hospitable, agile, inquisitive, ‘fond of information’ (which I suspect means gossipy!) and ‘extremely patient under hunger, cold, and other distresses, from which their southern neighbours would shrink with horror.’ However he felt all was not well and used the decline in ceilidh culture to emphasise this. ‘The tale, the song, and the dance, do not, as in the days of their fathers, gild the horrors of the winter night.’ He blames this on the rise of legal distilling. The minister of Strachur, Argyllshire, went further. He used a romanticised vision of the past and a perceived cultural decline in music and poetry to subtly criticise the landlord for introducing commercial sheepfarming.

David Allan ‘Highland Wedding at Blair Atholl’ featuring the famous fiddler Neil Gow (1780).

This positive clerical view is not the whole story. In Stromness the minister saw the connection between ‘sottish enjoyment of drinking’ and music and dancing. His neighbour in North Ronaldsay worried about fifty of his parishioners who gathered at some prehistoric cairns on New Year’s Day for ‘dancing with moon light, with no other music than their own singing.’ The connection of music, dancing and community get-togethers with drinking and with ancient spiritual beliefs gave many ministers cause for reflection.

My study is not meant to suggest that the church, particularly Evangelical Calvinism in the way it was absorbed and put into practice in Scotland, has nothing to repent of in its frequently invidious effect on local culture. But the more I look, the more Jackson Pollock-like becomes the picture. John MacDonald was not the only influential religious leader to throw out the musical baby with its bathwater. Yet ministers were not doctrinal automatons. For as many as saw moral dangers in the old stories and the new tunes, others were neutral, enthusiastic or even sentimental about folk culture.

Of course there may be another reason ministers living in draughty manses supported musicians. In Ronaldsay the music of the piper, it was said, was capable of banishing rats!

Dr Elizabeth Ritchie, Centre for History, University of the Highlands and Islands

We hope you have enjoyed this post: it is characteristic of the rich historical material available within the ‘Related Resources’ section of the Statistical Accounts of Scotland service. Featuring essays, maps, illustrations, correspondence, biographies of compliers, and information about Sir John Sinclair’s other works, the service provides extensive historical and bibliographical detail to supplement our full-text searchable collection of the ‘Old’ and ‘New’ Statistical Accounts.

Sources:

John Kennedy, The ‘Apostle of the North’: the Life and Labours of the Rev. Dr. M’Donald, (Toronto: J. Campbell, 1866)

Derick Thomson, ‘The Scarecrow’, quoted in Malcolm Chapman, The Gaelic Vision in Scottish Culture (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1978)

Old Statistical Account: parishes of Kilchoman, Tiree and Coll, Thurso, Strachur and Stralachan, Stromness, North Ronaldshay