Enabling Research Collaboration - reflections from our first London Institutional Conference
The Enabling Research Collaboration event held last week in London was a great opportunity for the Overleaf team to talk to university librarians and research office staff to find out first hand what's really important to them.
Many UK librarians talked about the challenges brought on by the new Open Access legislation that requires UK universities to archive publications from their authors in their institutional pre-print repositories at the point of acceptance to a journal. That is surprisingly tricky, because the paper doesn't usually get a DOI (a digital object identifier --- like a permanent bit.ly link for a scientific paper) until it is published, which can be weeks or months after acceptance. That makes it hard to link up the initial deposit record with the final published paper, which is exactly what they have to do for the next UK research assessment. Fortunately, solutions are on the way, and we talked about how Overleaf's publisher integrations could help make this process simpler for authors and for librarians who need to meet the new compliance requirements.
We also heard from Simon Porter on "Research Data Mechanics", and our special guest Helen Josephine who flew over from Stanford to present on 'Facilitating Collaboration at Stanford University', who gives her thoughts on the day in this blog post.
And there were cupcakes! :)