24 June 2024
Jaycie Carter, Library Assistant, Curzon Library, Birmingham City University
The First-Timers Reception
The First-Timers reception was an excellent way to kick off UKSG 2024! It was lovely to realise that although I might be very new to the profession compared to the majority of the people at the conference, actually all sorts of people at different stages of their career had not been to UKSG before. It was comforting to know that I wasn’t on my own in that respect. The reception gave me an opportunity to ask all the weird, awkward questions that comes with being new, like what to wear for the conference and, more importantly, the gala! The reception also made me appreciate how UKSG brings together everyone in the scholarly information community, not just UK librarians (as I’m used to). It was super interesting getting the opportunity to chat with people in the publishing industry and find out more about how that works. Hearing about people’s flights from abroad also made me feel better about my long train ride from Birmingham!
Let's Talk About Green - Beth Montague-Hellen, Francis Crick Institute, Katie Fraser, University of Nottingham
Beth Montague-Hellen and Katie Fraser’s talk “Let’s Talk About Green” was one of the most useful and informative of the conference for me. As someone who is extremely new to conversations about Open Access publishing, it was really useful to be given a background into what Green Open Access is, how it came about and the pros and cons. I appreciated that they shared their differing viewpoints, especially about the future of scholarly research publishing and to what extent Open Access poses a threat to publishers.
Beth shared that whilst they extensively use Green Open Access to publish research from the Francis Crick Institute, they still subscribe to journals as their academics want to use the final, finished product rather than pre-publication versions of research. For me, this raised the question of why publish Green in the first place? I definitely appreciate that having Green Open Access is better than it not being Open Access at all, but does it achieve the goals and ethos of Open Access if no one is actually accessing the research? This really got me thinking about the work that could be done, as discussed by the speakers, to garner more respect for research published Green. For instance, I’m interested in how we can improve institutional repositories so that research that is on there is easier to access, such as raising awareness of repositories among students and academics and improving their metadata and search functionality. At Birmingham City University, we have uploaded records in our library catalogue for items in our repository; I didn’t realise it at the time, but it’s now exciting to understand how this might help promote Open Access material at the university.
Finally, I was really intrigued by the speakers closing proposition that Green Open Access may work itself into redundancy, i.e. that Green Open Access may be more of a method than an end in itself. Hearing their ideas about what publishing scholarly research could look like has definitely got me excited about the future possibilities and potentially finding a job that would allow me to be a part of this move to Open Access.
(Editor's note: see our editorial this month from Beth and Katie "Don't you forget about green")
Plenary Session 1: Moving Research Integrity Conversations Upstream
The Plenary Session about research integrity really opened my eyes to how interconnected publishing practices and research culture are and, therefore, how much publishing models can threaten the integrity of research. Given that libraries play a key role in the publishing landscape and how research is disseminated, the session also made me realise that we have a role to play in and an influence on research culture too.
Especially as a cataloguer, I was interested to hear about the challenges of recording retractions – which, to be honest, I hadn’t even realised was a thing that happened before the conference! Given the complicated network of all the different places research can be published, ensuring that a retraction notice is published in every place (and in such a way that is actually noticeable) is certainly difficult. I’m interested to see how efforts to create linked data networks could help with publishing retractions as well as creating new opportunities for improving research integrity in general. Nevertheless, it was heartening to hear about all the work that is already being done by a lot of different people to work on this issue.
Workshop 1 - Making and Breaking the Rules: critical literacies for an AI-disrupted world
My favourite workshop I attended was “Making and Breaking the Rules: critical literacies for an AI-disrupted world” by Susan Halfpenny, Steph Jesper and Siobhan Dunlop. All three of the speakers were incredibly engaging and funny with very interesting insights into AI literacy and how to teach it. I’m certainly someone who is scared by new technology, but the workshop made it clear that actually much of what we consider commonplace now was new and scary once, and librarians have historically been quite good at adapting to new technology. This isn’t to say that AI doesn’t present challenges and threats that should be taken seriously. But it does mean we can use what we already know and the skills we already have. Namely, we can adapt our existing critical and digital literacy models and our methods for teaching them to AI, rather than reinvent the wheel. I really appreciated the opportunity to put this into practice during the workshop, which created some really interesting discussion points on our table. On the whole, while I think that AI and machine learning presents exciting opportunities, I am still concerned about the ways it can (like any technology) be misused and used unethically. However, the workshop made me more hopeful about the ways we can teach students and academics to think really critically and carefully about which AI tools to use and when and how to do so.
Exhibition
The Exhibition was the part of UKSG I was most intimidated by before the conference began. Whilst I of course love freebies, having to make conversation with people about their services and products is very scary! The First Timers Reception really helped with this though, as I both met people who were presenting at the Exhibition (and weren’t, as it turns out, as intimidating as I thought) and I also met people to walk around with. To my surprise, I actually ended up really enjoying the Exhibition. It helped that the Exhibition was there for the whole conference, so I could take my time.
As a new person to the profession, I have a lot of questions, and everyone was very patient, generous with their time and happy to explain things to me. For instance, in my short time working in libraries, I have heard lots of different names of organisations – like Jisc, OCLC and ExLibris – without really fully understanding who they are, what they do, and how they’re funded. The Exhibition was a really great chance for me to ask all these questions and get a better picture of how everything works. For the same reason, I went to the talks about and by UK university presses and open infrastructure and standards, which also helped. To be completely honest, UKSG made me realise the map of everyone involved in publishing, hosting and sharing scholarly information is even bigger and more complicated than I realised! But I do feel like I have better grasp than I did before.
I would really like to especially thank Kevin Sanders at the Open Book Collective – who very kindly answered all my many questions about open access publishing – and Susan and the team at AIP Publishing for sponsoring my place and being very friendly and supportive! I would also like to thank UKSG for giving me a sponsored place this year. I learnt so much (much more than I can cover in this report!) and it was really an amazing opportunity.