Information School News

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-...

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.'

On Friday 31st August 2017, members of the Information School (Dr Ana Vasconcelos, Prof Paul Clough and Dr Simon Wakeling) and Professor David Ellis (Department of Information Studies, University of Aberystwyth) visited Bletchley Park  to meet with staff and discuss potential collaborative research activities. Following an initial discussion about the role of Bletchley Park in WWII – home of the top-secret codebreakers and what is now GCHQ – the visitors were provided with examples of archival materials held at Bletchley, such as the cataloguing system maintained with index cards, examples of intercepted coded messages and synthesised highlights created each day and sent to people such as Winston Churchill. They also toured the site at Bletchley Park, which is a major UK visitor attraction and film location for the Oscar-nominated film “The Imitation Game”.  Thanks go to Dr David Kenyon (research historian) and Peronel Craddock (Head of Collections and Exhi...

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.