Understanding organisational cultures
Last week we had a really productive programme meeting about organisational cultures organised by the Embed project at Cranfield. The one day event managed to squeeze in 6 presentations and some interesting discussions without the event feeling rushed or cramped. There is an event blog which is worth having a look at.
Ian Stuart has written a nice summary of the day so I’ll point to his blog rather than repeat his efforts. I want to focus on what for me was the real standout of the day, the morning session where two academics spoke, one an enthusiast for the repository and the other a critic (but a very constructive one).
First up was the enthusiast; Dr Colin Macduff from Robert Gordon University. Colin came across the repository while preparing his PhD thesis. The thesis was designed as a standard paper thesis written for the supervisiors and examiners. However it became apparent that Colin’s work would be very relevant to public policy so he decided to look for alternative methods of publicising the thesis. Colin chose to deposit his thesis in the repository and actively promote it. Interestingly Colin also chose to build evaluation to gather data about the whole process of thesis deposit. There were 1400 downloads of Colin’s thesis in a year. This is especially impressive when you compare it to the 300 requests for the same year that the Royal College of Nursing had for all the paper theses that it holds. For me the most interesting idea that Colin suggested was the possibiliy of turning online theses into “virtual guest houses” where authors and readers meet. This seems to fit in with what other repository commentators have been saying about repositories needing to reflect the social networks that surround academic’s work.
The critic role was filled by Dr Bruce Jefferson of Cranfield University who billed himself as the Hooded Claw to the repository managers Penelope Pitstop. Although I don’t remember the Hooded Claw being quite so useful. The main thrust of Bruce’s talk was repository managers are not bringing the right evidence to their advocacy efforts. Number of downloads from the repository and studies that show an increase in citations in certain disciplines are interesting but what would be really persuasive is some evidence that depositing in the repository has a positive impact on the institution’s perfomance in the Research Excellence Framework (REF). From Bruce’s point of view a repository does not need to dramatically increase the number of citations for a paper. If it just prevents some of the institution’s papers from being zero cited then it could be considered a success since this will improve the institution’s REF profile. Bruce mentioned that he is conducting an experiment to gather this kind of data. If they choose to make this data available then it will make for interesting reading.
Another interesting point that Bruce made was that papers from repositories do not look as good as the official publishers versions and this is going to have an impact on how the content of that paper is perceived. This led on to a striking idea that repositories should seek to gather resources (such as press releases, powerpoint slides) that seek to explain the content of the paper to the press or the general public. This could be a great value added service if the repository presented those objects alongside the original academic paper.
Thanks very much to the Embed project for organising such a useful event, I haven’t come away from an event with so many new ideas in a long time.
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Showcasing of research papers is a neglected area, so anything that helps to publicise papers would be good, and anything that helps to explain content in papers to the press would also be good.