Information School News

MORPHSS aims to investigate and promote open research practices in the Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS).  The project is designed to create frameworks and guidelines to encourage adoption of open practices in HSS as well contribute to our knowledge of such practices. The three-year, £800,000 project is a collaboration between Cambridge University Library, Cambridge Digital Humanities, Coventry University, the University of Sheffield and the University of Southampton. It is jointly funded by the Research England Development (RED) Fund, the Wellcome Trust and the Arts and Humanities Research Council.  The work to be carried out at Sheffield will be led by Stephen Pinfield, who now has a process in train to recruit a postgraduate research associate to work on the project for the next two years. The Sheffield team will contribute to the project as a whole but will focus for a significant proportion of their time investigating open practices in the Social Sciences, pa...

Professor Stephen Pinfield has contributed to an article for The Conversation, entitled 'The peer review system no longer works to guarantee academic rigour - a different approach is needed' The article discusses the issues with academic peer review and the innovative platform MetaROR which is intended to help address some of these problems, whilst also acting as a sort of 'metaresearch experiment'. Read the article here.

Professor of Information Services Management Stephen Pinfield has just published a new book,  Achieving Global Open Access - The Need for Scientific, Epistemic and Participatory Openness. The book explores some of the key conditions that are necessary to deliver global Open Access (OA) that is effective and equitable. It is aimed at academics and students engaged in the fields of Library and Information Science, OA or publishing. It can be read online here , and a print version will be published in the coming weeks.

The Information School, in collaboration with the University of Rome "Tor Vergata", has published the paper " AI-assisted peer review " in the Nature journal Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, by Alessandro Checco, Lorenzo Bracciale, Pierpaolo Loreti, Stephen Pinfield and Giuseppe Bianchi.  Image via https://www.vpnsrus.com/ In the context of academic research, we designed an experiment to test AI capabilities in predicting the review score of manuscripts. We show that such techniques can reveal correlations between the decision process and other quality proxy measures, uncovering potential biases of the review process. We discuss the opportunities, but also the potential unintended consequences of these techniques in terms of algorithmic bias and ethical concerns.

Are you thinking about a degree in Library and Information Studies? Do you want to know more about the different options out there, and about potential funding opportunities? CILIP East are pleased to present "Applying to Library School", which will take place from 6pm – 7.30pm on Tuesday, 8th December via Zoom. Come along and hear Prof. Stephen Pinfield from Sheffield University, and recent graduates from a range of university LIS departments speak. We will be covering full-time, part-time and distance learning options, and there will be plenty of opportunities to ask questions during the evening. Programme: 6.00-6.05pm : Housekeeping 6.05-6.35pm : Programme director talk 6.35-6.55pm : Q and A 6.55-7.00pm: Break 7.00-7.20pm: Student Experiences 7.20-7.30: Questions and close There is a small fee to attend the event which will in part cover costs associated with the event. Any profit made on this event will contribute to the CILIP East Small Grants Fund. CILIP members £3 + VA...

New Book: Open Access in Theory and Practice Professor Stephen Pinfield A new book, By Stephen Pinfield, Simon Wakeling, David Bawden and Lyn Robinson has been published today in hardback and Open Access form.  Professor Stephen Pinfield worked with alum, and former member of staff, Simon Wakeling and colleagues from City, University of London.  Open Access in Theory and Practice investigates the theory-practice relationship in the domain of open access publication and dissemination of research outputs. Drawing on detailed analysis of the literature and current practice in OA, as well as data collected in detailed interviews with practitioners, policymakers, and researchers, the book discusses what constitutes ‘theory’, and how the role of theory is perceived by both theorists and practitioners. Exploring the ways theory and practice have interacted in the development of OA, the authors discuss what this reveals about the nature of the OA phenomenon itself and the theory-...

On 3rd July 2019, the Information School, University of Sheffield, hosted a one-day workshop that started a conversation between Global North and Global South practitioners, researchers and academics about open scholarship in a global context, with Africa as a focus for that discussion. We were also lucky enough to be hosting (courtesy University of Sheffield GCRF QR funding) participants in this debate from Rwanda, a country in the East and Central African region, which has an interesting socio-political context deriving from a checkered colonial past, internal conflict and genocide and language policies implemented to craft a modern political identity. In introducing the debate, the two convenors of the workshop, Pamela Abbott and Andrew Cox, both senior lecturers in the Information school, set out some markers as to why they were interested in this topic. For Pamela, her background as an ICT4D researcher working in African contexts with librarian communities of practice, and her own...

Professor Stephen Pinfield, Dr Simon Wakeling and Professor Peter Willet have had a blog published on the major global publisher blog 'Scholarly Kitchen', summaring a recent article published from the Open-Access Mega-Journals project . You can read the blog post here. The blog discusses article commenting and community reviewing in the context of OAMJs. Scholarly Kitchen, established by the Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP), is a moderated and independent blog helping to fulfil SSP's mission to 'advance scholarly publishing and communication, and the professional development of its members through education, collaboration, and networking.'

Andrew Cox and Stephen Pinfield presented two pieces of recent work at the RLUK conference on the 22nd of March. RLUK is the organisation for research libraries in Britain and Ireland. The conference draws a large international audience from research libraries around the world. The conference presentation explored services to support research data management, based on an international survey of librarians. The workshop was for delegates to reflect on the potential meaning of artificial intelligence for academic libraries. It was based on the paper: Cox, A.M. , Pinfield, S. and Rutter, S. (2018) The intelligent library: Thought leaders’ views on the likely impact of artificial intelligence on academic libraries. Library Hi Tech. ( open access version available here ) A video of Andrew and Stephen's talk can be viewed here .

This week Professor Stephen Pinfield is visiting Sun Yat-Sen University in China. Whilst there, Stephen will be giving three lectures on recent research projects in which he has been involved and also discussing research collaboration opportunities. Stephen is hosted by old colleagues Miguel Nunes and Alex Peng, who are both Professors there; Miguel is Dean of the Information School. The three lectures that Stephen is giving on his visit are as follows: Open-Access Mega-Journals and the Future of Scholarly Communication (research conducted with Claire Creaser, Jenny Fry, Valérie Spezi, Simon Wakeling & Peter Willett): Open-access mega-journals (OAMJs) represent an increasingly important part of the scholarly communication landscape. OAMJs, such as PLOS ONE and Nature’s Scientific Reports, are large scale, broad-scope journals that operate an open-access business model, and which employ a novel form of peer review, focusing on scientific ‘soundness’ only and not judgments o...

Our new paper explores the potential impact of Artificial Intelligence on academic libraries. Innovations such as Siri and the driverless car have brought public attention to the potential of the latest developments in computing power, combining machine learning and big data. AI brings with it both exciting opportunities and risks to privacy, equality and employment. But until now the implications of AI for academic libraries have been relatively little explored. Using data from interviews with library directors, library commentators and commentators outside the library world, the new paper,  The intelligent library: Thought leaders’ views on the likely impact of artificial intelligence on academic libraries   ( open-access version available ) ,  explores the potential implications of AI for the academic library. We try to capture how interviewees thought AI would impact on academic libraries and from this reveal eleven issues that will define the paradigm of the "i...

In June, the Information School welcomed visitors from the Rutgers University summer school for library and information management. The summer school involves masters students from Rutgers and other partner universities, who are based in the UK for two weeks at Wroxton College near Oxford. The students are involved in lectures and seminars during their time in the UK involving speakers from this country and other parts of Europe. The students visited Sheffield for a day and were involved in classes led by Dr Briony Birdi and Professor Stephen Pinfield. Briony led a class on public libraries and Stephen on academic libraries. There were some really excellent discussions, with students contributing based on their knowledge of good practice and the literature. Students were also given a tour of the Information Commons and the Diamond building at Sheffield as examples of library and learning environments in the UK. Thanks to Helen Dickinson,  Information Se...

The ‘Mapping the future of academic libraries’ report commissioned by SCONUL was published on 8 December following a conference in London to discuss its findings. The report was produced by a team from the School: Stephen Pinfield, Andrew Cox and Sophie Rutter. Read the report here The report identifies a complex set of interrelated trends impacting on libraries the significance of which is often in the way they combine. In particular, it identifies five nexuses of trends bringing transformational change: 1. ‘Datafied’ scholarship: research increasingly underpinned by large datasets and digital artefacts, involving open, networked, algorithmically-driven systems 2. Connected learning: new pedagogies supported by technology-enabled flexible learning 3. Service-oriented libraries: libraries shifting their strategic emphasis from collections to services 4. Blurred identities: boundaries between professional groups and services b...

Professor of Information Services Management, Stephen Pinfield, along with his Co-Investigator, Professor David Bawden (of City University London), have been awarded £182,097 by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) for the 'Open Access in Theory and Practice' project. The project will investigate the uses of theory in open access research and their relationship with practice. The project will recruit a full-time Research Associate to be based in Sheffield. "We are delighted to have received this funding from the AHRC”, says Stephen. “We believe our project will make an important contribution to current discussions about open access and also about the relationship between theory and practice – both really important issues with wide implications for the role that academic research can play in society." The project will start in the first quarter of 2018 and will last for 18 months.

On 13th and 14th July Professor Paul Clough and Professor Stephen Pinfield visited CERN , the European Organization for Nuclear Research which is located near Geneva. The visit was to meet with Xiaoli Chen, a PhD student being funded by CERN and supervised by Stephen and Paul, along with Dr Sunje Dallmeier-Tiessen an Information Manager at CERN and working on the INSPIRE digital library that serves the High Energy Physics (HEP) community. Xiaoli’s PhD is investigating how INSPIRE can better support the Open Science practices of the HEP community. Paul and Stephen’s visit included a visit to the office where Tim Berner’s Lee invented the World Wide Web as well as visiting Geneva and its beautiful city centre.  Paul and Stephen also gave invited talks to staff at CERN. Paul gave a talk entitled “Competent men and warm women: Gender stereotypes and backlash in image search results” based on a CHI’2017 paper written with Jo Bates from the Information School a...

Academic librarians are being invited to participate in the survey “Mapping the academic library of the future”. https://survey.shef.ac.uk/limesurvey/index.php?sid=39554 The survey forms part of a research project commissioned by the SCONUL Transformation Group. We are investigating the future academic library for the next 10 to 15 years in the context of the decline in importance of the printed book and its repercussions for use of library space, development of services, and deployment of staff. As part of the project, we have already undertaken interviews with senior library staff and others from education, technology, publishing, estates and heritage sectors, and are now conducting a survey to add to our findings. The results of this research will be used to inform policy and future plans and will be made widely available. We would like to hear a range of views and are inviting all library staff to complete the survey. Because this research focuses on informing the SCONUL community,...

Professor Stephen Pinfield, Dr Briony Birdi, Dr Sheila Webber, Pam McKinney, Peter Holdridge and Paula Goodale have been awarded a Teaching Excellence in Social Sciences Award for Outstanding Practice in Learning and Teaching' by the Faculty of Social Sciences. The award recognises the team's delivery of our innovative distance learning programme, MA Library & Information Services Management. The award will be presented at the TESS End of Year Celebration event later this month.

This Friday, Professor Stephen Pinfield and Research Associate Dr Simon Wakeling will be presenting at the 39th annual Society for Scholarly Publishing Conference in Boston. The SSP is a major international organisation in the field of scholarly communication and publishing. Stephen and Simon will be presenting their work on open-access mega-journals. You can find details on their session here , and on the whole conference, which is running 31st May - 2nd June, here.

On 3 December 2015 Dr Stephen Pinfield will speak at the Baeredygtig Open Access Conference, Copenghagen. Stephen will present research carried out with Professor Peter Bath and Jennifer Salter on their work on open access for both a UUK report and other research

Dr Stephen Pinfield ,and other members of the European University Association’s Expert Group on Science 2.0/Open Science are developing a road map to assist European universities in the transition to Open Access (OA). The roadmap will be launched in early 2016.and the initiative will take forward the   EUA’s April 2015 Antwerp Declaration that underlines the importance for universities of pursuing and further developing the opportunities offered by rapid technological change for new ways of working based on the principles of scholarly sharing and academic collaboration. The focus will be on the following main areas: Promoting access and use of research publications and research data); Addressing the related intellectual property rights and copyright policies; Fostering structured dialogue among all relevant stakeholders – including universities, university associations, National Rectors’ Conferences, research funders, libraries, scientific publishers, national...