Behind the scenes with the OA team: Michael
In this second post in a series aimed at introducing the Open Access team here at St Andrews, we have Michael. The first post in this series mentioned that the open access team members each have filters set up in the Research Information System (Pure), and we explained that each member of the team has specific schools and departments in their filters. Michael’s filters include mainly sciences – so Physics and Astronomy, Computer Science, Medicine, Biology are all under Michael’s umbrella, plus many more of course.
1. What do you say when people ask, “So, what do you do for a living?”
Depends who’s asking – sometimes something vague like ‘research support’; other times I’ll specifically say ‘making the University’s research publications Open Access’
2. What’s the first thing you did when you came in to work today?
Put the kettle on! Seriously, I prioritised email enquiries for myself and mark things for other members of the team, as appropriate.
3. What do you spend most of your time doing, day-to-day?
Enquiries, validating Pure records, publication monitoring, mediated deposit, chasing researchers for deposits, follow-up on missing dates of acceptance, processing APCs.
4. Favourite part of the job?
Dealing with more complex/deeper types of researcher enquiry that draws on individual and team expertise. For example, sometimes we help with publications costing for grant applications or approach publishers for special permission to deposit a book chapter or other type of research.
5. Least favourite part of the job?
Constantly asking for dates of acceptance!
6. What led you to work in the field of Open Access?
I’ve worked in University research support and Libraries so my background was a natural fit with the emerging priority of Open Access to meet funder mandates and for research dissemination and assessment.
7. If you could change one thing in the world of academia what would it be, and why?
I’d like to change scholarly publisher expectations. It isn’t reasonable in the long term to expect that, because researchers wants to publish, you can expect a large cash handout either in the form of substantial article processing charges or a profit margin out of all proportion to the value added. It’s unsustainable.