Behind the scenes with the OA team: Jackie

Kyle Brady
Tuesday 16 October 2018

In this first ‘Meet the team’ post we’ll hear from Jackie. Jackie is the Repository & Open Access Services Manager, and oversees the publications side of Pure, the University’s Research Repository, and our journal hosting platform OJS.

1.    What do you say when people ask, “So, what do you do for a living?”

Within the University or to colleagues working in scholarly communications I will say “I manage Open Access Services as part of the Digital Research division in the Library”. ‘Repository Manager’ is also part of my job title, but I almost never say that out loud. To people not familiar with universities or research publishing I’ll say something like ‘providing services to help our researchers make their publications more visible’. I generally don’t say I’m a Librarian, although due to a limited list of options that’s what I put as ‘mother’s occupation’ on my daughter’s marriage certificate 🙂

2.    What’s the first thing you did when you came in to work today?

Other than making tea while my laptop and applications come to life… I check calendars to see what the day holds, and prioritise tasks around appointments. We have revived our use of Trello recently to help track various projects that are on the go in addition to core support activities, so I check anything approaching due date or needing re-assigned. I have a meeting with a Director of Research later to discuss Open Access, so I’ll do a quick ‘background check’ for that School and gather all the material I need. Meanwhile I have opened our research information system (Pure) to check for any new tasks…

3.    What do you spend most of your time doing, day-to-day?

It’s actually really varied, which I love. A fair amount of time is spent analysing data (compliance rates, financial figures, usage statistics…) and subsequent compiling of reports, as well as working in Pure to monitor all aspects of publications recorded there. There can be lots of work behind the scenes to maintain the infrastructure that allows our researchers to make their publications Open Access, and to develop the associated processes that keep things as streamlined as possible. I will attend a range of meetings across the week, many of which ensure we work really closely with colleagues in Research and Innovation Services and others. Plus lots of time on email (lots!) – answering queries and communicating with researchers.

4.    Favourite part of the job?

Meeting researchers from across the University, finding out a little of what they do in all sorts of disciplines, and providing support to (hopefully) make their jobs a little easier. One of our services is to provide a journal hosting platform so that staff and students can set up their own Open Access publications, and working closely with editorial teams embarking on these projects is hugely rewarding.

5.    Least favourite part of the job?

Spreadsheets. While I do like a nice bit of data analysis, reports that require data from multiple sources (particularly finance data) can send me into a spinning rabbit-hole of Excel

6.    What led you to work in the field of Open Access?

My whole reason for taking up Library studies was to connect users with information, and it always seemed obvious that more content should be free of licensing restrictions and paywalls. After qualifying and a brief spell in an FE library I worked on a Jisc project: TrustDR (Trust in Digital Repositories) – “Seeking to understand more fully the complex problem area of legal rights issues in digital repositories of learning objects and to suggest ways of simplifying the problem area in order to find pragmatic solutions.” [Simples!!] I gained a huge amount of knowledge on topics such as the application of Creative Commons licences, and never really looked back!

7.    If you could change one thing in the world of academia what would it be, and why?

That inclusivity was at the heart of everything, with less focus on reputation and the associated reward structures. I see this as part of a transition to a default culture of Open Research.

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