Join the University of Derby and the University of Essex as we celebrate Open Access Week 2023! 

Session link: https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3ameeting_YjZhMDE1ZTktNjdiYS00ODNjLWEwNzEtYWQ5MWFkYjkwZjJj%40thread.v2/0?context=%7b%22Tid%22%3a%2298f1bb3a-5efa-4782-88ba-bd897db60e62%22%2c%22Oid%22%3a%2239ebed84-001e-4140-9a4e-9ed9c2ac68ab%22%7d

In this talk, we will be joined by Tim Fellows, Product Manager at Jisc and Dr. Alex Freeman, Executive Director, Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication at the University of Cambridge and creator of and lead for Octopus. They will cover how the platform aims to sit alongside journals to create a new culture of collaboration and recognition, improve access to research outputs, and provide a new academic incentive structure to reward best practice and recognise specialisation. Octopus.ac is a new scientific publishing model, designed to encourage, enable, and reward best practice using 21st century tools. Free to read, free to publish, and entirely open source, this is a new way to register research that is fast, free and fair. 

Moving away from the traditional journal paper, Octopus.ac has smaller publication units which more closely align with the research process. These eight publication types are: research problem, rationale/hypothesis, method, data, analysis, interpretation, real-world application, and review. Publications are linked to aid navigation and discovery, as well as to showcase the inherent interconnectedness of research. Any publication can be reviewed, and reviews are treated as a publication in their own right, recognising peer review as a valuable skill and incentivizing culture of constructive feedback. 

We believe that many of the problems in the current research culture form one principal issue: that journals are being pulled in two different directions – the dissemination of findings to practitioners and general audiences, and being the primary research record of what has been done, when and by whom, in detail, for the benefit of specialists. This leads to key content being dismissed to supporting appendixes, while researchers write their results in a highly-narrative, attention-grabbing way which maximises impact.

This event is Open to all so please do sign up to find out more about Octopus and the benefits it has for you and your research! For more information about Open Research, please see the University of Derby's Open Research SharePoint pages and the Library's information on Open Research at the University of Essex.