28 June 2024
Rob Johnson, Vice Chair, UKSG and Managing Director, Research Consulting and Bev Acreman, Executive Director, UKSG
UKSG has a long tradition of funding innovation within the knowledge community. Our support in the 2000s and 2010s enabled a number of significant developments including:
- Early development of the COUNTER standard for reporting usage statistics for electronic resources in a standardised way.
- Establishment of the Transfer Code of Practice for publishers to follow when transferring journal titles between parties.
- Development of the KBART (Knowledge Bases And Related Tools) recommended practice to facilitate the transfer of holdings metadata from content providers to knowledge base suppliers and libraries.
Historically we have funded a number of substantive research projects, but over the last few years our support has tended to take the form of smaller grants and awards.
In 2018 we established a new Research and Innovation Subcommittee to focus on three key areas:
- Annual innovation awards targeted at new professionals in the scholarly communications sector.
- A new white paper series titled Open Scholarship: Issues and Trends in Scholarly Communication.
- Sponsored conference places.
An initial round of innovation awards were made in October 2019 and funding was made available for sponsored conference places. There was insufficient interest to progress the white paper series.
Following the onset of the pandemic, and in light of the associated financial risks facing the organisation, the innovation awards and sponsored places were suspended and the Research and Innovation Subcommittee fell into abeyance. It was formally disbanded as part of a revised governance structure implemented in 2022.
Reinstatement of Innovation Awards in 2023
In June 2023 the Board agreed to support a piece of research into the knowledge community, which ultimately led to the conference review undertaken by Information Power earlier this year and to the reinstatement the Innovation Awards for 2023. This decision was taken forward by the Officers and Executive Director as follows:
- 28 July 2023: launch of a call for applications for the 2023 Innovation Awards.
- 29 September 2023: 8 applications were received by the deadline seeking funding of between £2,500 and £36,900 each, though most were in the range £3-5,000.
- October/November 2024: UKSG’s officers (Chair, Vice Chair, Treasurer) independently scored the applications on criteria of ‘strategic fit’ and ‘return on investment’ and then met with the Executive Director to confirm which awards to make. In some cases we went back to the applicants to request a revision to their application and/or seek further information on their plans before reaching a decision
- 1 December 2023: Five award winners were announced, each receiving between £3,000 and £5,000, making a total of just over £21,000.
Progress on the 2023 Innovation Awards
The Appendix provides an overview of the current status of our 2023 awards. The activities took some time to get off the ground, meaning the majority of spend will take place in the current calendar year, with a small amount continuing into 2025. Otherwise all of the projects are now proceeding roughly as planned. All funds are disbursed either in arrears on production of evidence of expenditure or through trusted intermediaries such as SCONUL.
Applicants were asked to include details of how they would share the results of their work with the UKSG community in their applications. This has started to occur, with two eNews editorials published as part of the HELibTech project, and we expect knowledge sharing from the funded awards to ramp up over the coming months.
Recommendation and next steps
Innovation Awards remain a discretionary activity, reviewed by the Board annually.
Appendix: Current status of 2023 Innovation Awards
As at 18 April 2024
EARLL
The grant is being used to fund three CPD events to be hosted at LSE Library, two focussed on diversity and the third a one-day Early Career Librarians conference.
Event date planned for 28 June
Global Equity Network
The award is being used to organise an ‘Action Learning Set’ (ALS) as a part of the Global Equity Network (GEN) – an Academic Libraries North (ALN) affiliated network for current and aspiring Library, Information and Knowledge (including galleries, archives, etc.) workers from global majority / UK ethnic minority. An ALS is a collaborative space where a group of individuals collectively address workplace challenges and opportunities.
Meetings commence 24 July in Leeds and are scheduled to be completed February 2025. Fees will go towards a paid facilitator.
HELibTech - £3.9K
The award is being used to provide an innovative ‘reboot’ to Higher Education Library Technology (HELibTech). This will be a one year project to expand and re-energise its open (open access and open data) community focus through a set of ‘community editor’ functions around specific themes.
Two facilitators are up and running on updating their sections – Paul Verlander and David Rowe. Just introduced the Library Technology Product Directory.
Open Institutional Publishing Association
The award is used to support an in-person Symposium on Institutional Open Access publishing. Linked to the launch of OIPA, this symposium will bring together members of the new association, alongside other interested participants.
Conference was held on 10 June 2024 – the monies will be used to provide subventions for speakers and delegates who would otherwise be unable to attend.
Open Science: Wheel of Prosperity
The award will be used to develop and disseminate and use gamification to include, teach and connect the scholarly communication community around various aspects of open science/research. The game will be shared online under a CC By license and fund travel, conference fees to publicise its development.