At the recent UKSG19 conference, Taylor & Francis attended several sessions, hosted their own roundtable event, and recorded interviews with librarians on some of the big topics being discussed in the library community.
Scroll down to discover the key themes that emerged from selected sessions, responses from the roundtable event, and video interviews with librarians.
Takeaways from Selected Sessions
Open Access and Plan S
Plan S has forced OA into the mainstream, and the future of OA is much closer than we think. Libraries are still very much in a reactive, not adaptive, mode to Plan S and not yet in a position to plan and act as they continue to learn as much as publishers are. We all need to find a pathway through using collaboration, consultation, and perspectives – it will be a complex journey. There are different needs within disciplines, authors, faculty, career levels – and we need to bridge gaps between these communities.
Proactive and Cooperative Researcher Support
To break down silos within institutions, researchers and faculty need to be brought together to promote and support research excellence. For example, librarians at Liverpool John Moores University run sessions called Ready Steady Publish (about sharing best publishing practice) and the Research Café, an informal faculty lunch where participants from different departments take it in turns to speak about their research.
There are also challenges around ECR publishing: they have little stability and often work short and part-time roles in teaching and as research assistants. Research fellowships are hard to come by. ECRs need advice from their librarians and from publishers around REF and OA as well as one-to-one support on how to get published, resources on the publishing process, help in identifying sources of funding, access to resources and advice to make their research visible.
COUNTER Release 5 Reports
There’s a big appetite for COUNTER Release 5 support. The new reporting changes make usage analytics more detailed and more useful. COUNTER 5 will have a big impact on SCONUL usage for researchers.
Roundtable Discussion
How much of your role is in supporting researchers?
Which skills do you think will be needed by librarians to support researchers in the future?
Are there any trends in academic librarianship that concern you?
How can publishers support you?
Librarian Insights on Video
Simply click on the links below to watch the interviews!
The Researcher of the Future: What do your Library Patrons ask you About?
We asked librarians about the areas in which they are seeing the fastest increase in demand from their faculties.
The Librarian/Publisher Relationship
What is the importance of the relationship between Librarian and Publisher and the knowledge we can exchange?
How Does Taylor & Francis Support the Knowledge Community?
Librarians at UKSG19 discuss the wide-ranging ways that Taylor & Francis supports the researcher, librarian and author communities.