Home University of Edinburgh Library Essentials
December 17, 2025
Open Journals Forum event report
We were very pleased that the OJS Forum was so popular. The event was fully booked and we were delighted to welcome 50 delegates from around the UK to the Main Library to hear presentations from practitioners with a depth of experience – from Publications Managers through Systems Administrators to Journal Editors.
Our invited speakers included: Vanessa Gabler from Pittsburgh University, Jackie Proven & Gillian Duncan from St Andrews University, Brian Hole from Ubiquity Press, Franziska Moser from Universität Zürich, Adam Rusbridge from Edina and Kevin Ashley and Alex Ball from the Digital Curation Centre, plus speakers from the University of Edinburgh.
All of the presentations are available for download from the Edinburgh Research Archive.
Some of the key themes that the speakers of the Forum touched upon were:
1. Resources
2. Learning curves
3. Managing expectations
4. Quality control
5. Licensing
6. System configuration
7. Positive student engagement
1. Resources
Although the OJS software is open source, the time and effort required to set up and support a service are difficult to quantify. Pittsburgh University currently have 3.05 FTE working on their service, whilst the University of Edinburgh estimate it be in the region of 0.5 FTE (although it’s probably more once you factor in time spent from everyone involved). All involved in current hosting services agreed that it was a valuable service for the library to provide to students and academics who want an affordable alternative to traditional commercial publishing.
2. Learning curves
Everyone who uses OJS spoke about the steep learning curve for staff and students in learning how to use OJS. And how it’s just as much a learning curve for library staff who learn as the encounter new challenges and requests form students. However, the common experience was that, although there was a large commitment to training and support at the start of the process, after a short while journal publishers become self sufficient and require minimum ongoing support.
3. Managing expectations
For all institutions with journal services managing expectations was crucial. It is essential at the start of the process to make it clear what the service will provide and what it will not. Some questions to ask are:
* If a service provided FREE of charge what does that include/exclude?
* Is it merely system support?
*Will there be training & ongoing support for design/layout/copyright?
*What conditions will the service impose- use of standards, licenses, policies?
*Are editors prepared to manage submissions & peer review process?
The institutions providing a service have a range of processes and documentation in place– not only does this help manage customer expectations but it standardise the services and makes it far easier to manage.
4. Quality control
To what level does the service provider become involved in the quality of the journal? It may be useful to set up a publishing advisory board accepts new journals for publication and the service assesses the peer review process of each journal. Quality shouldn’t be compromised just because a journal is Open Access.
5. Licensing
All of the OJS services publishing and hosting open access journals recommended using a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license. Many people found the standar Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial (CC-BY-NC) license too restrictive as it effectively prohibits licencing content to EBSCO and ProQuest or other commercial aggregators.
Furthermore, in the UK the CC-BY format is appealing as many funders of research – for example the Wellcome Trust and RCUK- require this flavour of license as part of their Open Access policy.
6. System configuration
Changes to underlying code and heavy customisation are to be avoided – out the box OJS is not particularly pretty but it can be improved using CSS and good design. The question of one installation versus multiple installations was discussed – depending on the number of titles there are benfits to each approach.
7. Positive student engagement
Many of the speakers talked about the process of setting up and/or editing journals as being a positive way to engage with young career academics and make them aware of peer review processes, copyright and open access at the early stages of their career. Gillian Duncan, from St Andrews University and Editor of the Journal of Terrorism Research mentioned the benefits for all parties of having PhD students as guest-editors for special editions.
If you want to find out more about the Journal Hosting Service please contact onlinejournals@mlist.is.ed.ac.uk
New books at New College Library – August
New College Library has a regular display of new books at the far end of the Library Hall, close to the door to the stacks.
New in this month is Caesar and the Lamb : early Christian attitudes on war and military service by George Kalantzis, on the shelf at BT736.2 Kal.
Also new is Migrations of the holy : God, state, and the political meaning of the church by William Cavanaugh, at BV630.3 Cav.
These titles were purchased for Theology & Ethics at the School of Divinity, Edinburgh University.
You can see an regularly updated list of new books for New College Library on the Library Catalogue – choose the New Books Search and limit your search to New College Library. Here’s a quick link to new books arriving in the last few weeks. A word of caution – some of the books listed here may still be in transit between the Main Library (where they are catalogued) and New College Library, so not on the shelf just yet.
Baldwin Brown Images of Old Edinburgh
Recently in the DIU we have been digitizing 21 negatives of images described on their box Shelf-mark – E2005.1 Box 5, as ” Old Edinburgh.” We are aware that some members of Library staff enjoy the challenge of locating parts of the town from old photographs or unusual view points. We think some of these will present a challenge to even the keenest location spotting geeks and we would like to add any juicy information gathered to our related metadata fields. Over the next few weeks we shall post our “Old Edinburgh” images. No prizes for guessing except the smug air of recognition that a superior mind is at work. So as Bamber used to say , “Starter for ten ” anyone?
Making research ‘really reproducible’
Listening to Victoria Stodden, Assistant Professor of Statistics at Columbia University, give the keynote speech at the recent Open Repositories conference in lovely Prince Edward Island Canada, I realised we have some way to go on the path towards her idealistic vision of how to “perfect the scholarly record.”
Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island
As an institutional data repository manager (for Edinburgh DataShare) I often listen and talk to users about the reasons for sharing and not sharing research data. One reason, well-known to users of the UK Data Archive (now known as the UK Data Service), is if the dataset is very rich and can be used for multiple purposes beyond those for which it was created, for example, the British Social Attitudes Survey.
Another reason for sharing data, increasingly being driven by funder and publisher policies, is to allow replication of published results, or in the case of negative results which are never published, to avoid duplication of effort and wasting public monies.
It is the second reason on which Stodden focused, and not just for research data but also for the code that is run on the data to produce the scientific results. It is for this reason she and colleagues have set up the web service, Run My Code. These single-purpose datasets do not normally get added to collections within data archives and data centres, as their re-use value is very limited. Stodden’s message to the audience of institutional repository managers and developers was that the duty of preserving these artefacts of the scientific record should fall to us.
Why should underlying code and data be published and preserved along with articles as part of the scholarly record? Stodden argues, because computation is becoming central to scientific research. We’ve all heard arguments behind the “data deluge”. But Stodden persuasively focuses on the evolution of the scientific record itself, arguing that Reproducible Research is not new. It has its roots in Skepticism – developed by Robert Boyle and the Royal Society of the 1660s. Fundamentally, it’s about “the ubiquity of error: The central motivation of the scientific method is to root out error.”
In her keynote she developed this theme by expanding on the three branches of science.
- Branch 1: Deductive. This was about maths and formal logic, and the proof as the main product of scientific endeavor.
- Branch 2: Empirical. Statistical analysis of controlled experiments – hypothesis testing, structured communication of methods and protocols. Peer reviewed articles became the norm.
- Branch 3: Computational. This is at an immature stage, in part because we have not developed the means to rigorously test assertions from this branch.
Stodden is scathing in her criticism of the way computational science is currently practiced, consisting of “breezy demos” at conferences that can’t be challenged or “poked at.” She argues passionately for the need to facilitate reproducibility – the ability to regenerate published results.
What is needed to achieve openness in science? Stodden argued for the need for deposit and curation of versioned data and code, with a link to the published article, and permanence of the link.This is indeed within the territory of the repository community.
Moreover, to have sharable products at the end of a research project, one needs to plan to share from the outset. It’s very difficult to reproduce the steps to create the results as an afterthought.
I couldn’t agree more with this last assertion. Since we set up Edinburgh DataShare we have spoken to a number of researchers about their ‘legacy’ datasets which – although they would like to make them publicly available, they cannot, either because of the nature of the consent forms, the format of the material, or the lack of adequate documentation. The easiest way is to plan to share. Our Research Data Management pages have information on how to do this, including use of the Digital Curation Centre’s tool, DMPOnline.
– Robin Rice, Data Librarian
New Darwin discovery
This appears to be a previously-unknown collection of shells formed by Charles Darwin. Whilst cataloguing chosen exhibits for an upcoming exhibition, myself and Gillian McCay the geology curator tipped out a small green box of what appeared at first to be some rather dirty looking gastropods. You can imagine our surprise when we found a slip lining the box which informed us the specimens were collected by Charles Darwin.
Darwin’s shells
When we considered we were looking through the collection of his close and influential friend Charles Lyell, there appeared little reason to believe otherwise. After some research I discovered that St Helena (the given location of the find) was one of the stops Darwin made on HMS Beagle, the five year voyage he made investigating geology and making natural history collections, many of which were sent back to Cambridge. Somehow these specimens have gone from the shores of St Helena, through some of the most important figures of early natural science, to delighting a couple of unsuspecting and very excited curators.
Emma Smith, Exhibitions Intern
New Book in LUNA Book Reader
Last month we digitised the fantastic Recueil de Desseins Ridicules, 1695 by George Focus (shelfmark SRD.1.2) for an order, but were so fascinated by the images that we thought it worthy of further investigation. However, all we have really been able to find out is that he was born in Chateaudun circa 1639/40, that he was influenced by Nicolas Poussin & Gaspard Dughet & that he spent much of his adult life insane & “Confined to small houses” where he died in 1708.
The DIU would like to thank our Volunteer, Noah Salaman, for all the work he did prepping these images to go into the book reader software. We think this book has great potential for a crowd-sourcing project to transcribe & translate the text on each of the drawings- watch this space!
The Book Reader can be viewed at http://images.is.ed.ac.uk/luna/servlet/s/jedr3j
Or, you can zoom in on the full size pages at http://images.is.ed.ac.uk/luna/servlet/s/y3zwbv
From slave trader to ‘Amazing Grace’ – John Newton
![[Newton, John] / An authentic narrative of some remarkable and interesting particularas in the life of ********* ... London, 1786.](https://libraryblogs.is.ed.ac.uk/newcollegelibrarian/files/2013/07/z-1188.jpg)
[Newton, John] / An authentic narrative of some remarkable and interesting particularas in the life of ********* … London, 1786. New College Library Z.1188
In 1764, the year he was ordained as an Anglican priest, his Authentic Narrative appeared and quickly became a bestseller. Newton’s early life as a seaman slave trader coloured his experiences in later life, when he wrote and campaigned against slavery and is known to have met and advised William Wilberforce. He was a prominent hymn writer, and his legacy lives on today in the well known hymn ‘Amazing Grace’ .
New College Library has this sixth edition, at Z.1188, published in 1786, but it went through ten British and eight American editions before the end of the century. It was quickly translated into several other languages – New College Library also holds a Gaelic edition at Gaelic Coll. 137.
Sources
D. Bruce Hindmarsh, ‘Newton, John (1725–1807)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, May 2010 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/20062, accessed 18 July 2013]
Open Access journal Concept publishes summer issue
Concept, The Journal of Contemporary Community Education Practice Theory has published its Summer 2013 issue.
As well as a contribution from internationally respected and well published academic, Mike Newman there is an article from Jo Northedge, a current student on the Community Education Msc programme at Moray House. Their articles characterise one of the key purposes of the journal, which is to encourage writers other than academics to contribute.
The first issue of Concept was published in the Spring of 1991. After a long and successful life in print, in late 2009, with the support of the library, Concept published the first online issue of the journal using Open Journal Systems (OJS).
There have been a variety of special issues and discrete publications on themes including including Youth Work, Participation, Citizenship and Community Development.
The new issue and a full archive of the online issues are available on the journal site: http://concept.lib.ed.ac.uk
LUNA highlights available on Flickr
The CRC’s image collection is available through the LUNA image discovery tool, and can be accessed here.
This is great, but there’s a need to get the collections well-publicised, through as many means as possible, and because of this, the Digital Imaging Unit advised that a linked Flickr site would be a good vehicle to draw users in. The Digital Library Development team investigated ways of linking LUNA data to Flickr, and came up with a solution that involved interrogating the LUNA database, populating some MySQL tables, and using PHP to generate Flickr-compatible XML. From here, the Flickr App garden- an ‘Aladdin’s Cave’ of useful interfaces to Flickr resources- was checked to find a suitable load API, and indeed we found one. The results can be seen here:
Metadata for the records includes Title, Rights Statement, Description, Tags (Creators, Subjects, Ids, Shelfmarks) and a link back to the high resolution LUNA record.These highlights have had their metadata enriched by volunteers to improve the presentation of the records. However, there is a lot of work to be done to get all of LUNA up to this standard, and we’re aware of the need for more cataloguers. Could crowdsourcing be a valid approach to this? There’s a debate for another post!
Thanks to DIU interns Alice Tod and Jessica Macaulay for their hard work on these items.
Analogue Photoshop?
This week we started a trial – photographing some Glass Lantern Slides for the Towards Dolly Project, & one of the first images we took showed that there is nothing new under the sun…
GB 237 Coll-1434 (Box 4), Roslin Glass Slides. The Drop Scene Two Miles Up the Wanganui River, New Zealand. Photograph of a Maori girl standing on a canoe at ‘the drop scene two miles up the Wanganui River’ in New Zealand in the late 19th or early 20th century. In the background there is another canoe, jungle and mountains.
Although this slide was produced in the early 20th C, there is clear evidence of photo manipulation. Once we zoomed in on the image it became clear that the Maori Girl in her Canoe on New Zealand’s Wanganui River was in fact a fraud! Sunlight doesn’t often come from 2 directions, nor does perspective suddenly alter proportions (compare the girl’s canoe with the smaller canoe behind her). Furthermore, she has the classic ‘cut-out’ look of early photo-montages. Despite this, on the small 8cm x 8cm original, it is hard to spot at a glance- one of the unexpected bonuses of digitisation is the ability to zoom in on small details.
Click on the image below to see a larger version.
Collections
Hill and Adamson Collection: an insight into Edinburgh’s past
My name is Phoebe Kirkland, I am an MSc East Asian Studies student, and for...
Cataloguing the private papers of Archibald Hunter Campbell: A Journey Through Correspondence
My name is Pauline Vincent, I am a student in my last year of a...
Projects
Cataloguing the private papers of Archibald Hunter Campbell: A Journey Through Correspondence
My name is Pauline Vincent, I am a student in my last year of a...
Archival Provenance Research Project: Lishan’s Experience
Presentation My name is Lishan Zou, I am a fourth year History and Politics student....