Another day at Jisc Collections and yet more bus related problems. I swear I can't ever just be on time. I can do half an hour early or half an hour late.

But anyway, I made it. I started my day by carrying on working on the area of digital textbooks. The main problem at the minute is that students are participating in book rental schemes directly from the publishers which cuts out the libraries, and they don't want to be cut out. So Jisc is looking at the possibilities of bringing the libraries into this process and maybe having textbook rental schemes for groups of universities. The problem is how do you choose the books.

That's where I came in. Universities had been asked to list the books most taken out from their libraries and then the top 10 business titles. I then went through these lists to see if there were any titles that would be useful for all universities involved. This involved just seeing which titles appear the most and who publishes them. I then made my own little list and sent this and the list of e-textbook survey questions I did last week to the person on the project. I haven't heard anything back yet so I don't know how well I did yet.

Then in the afternoon I carried on with the other project I've been working on. This is the lists of tasks carried out by publishers and authors. My job yesterday was to try and find a way to visualise the results so that they could appear on a website in an interesting way. I didn't get very far but I'm working on it.

My supervisor had to run of to Edinburgh, obviously, but before she left she told me not to come in next week because she won't be there (day off woop) and that when I came in the week after would be my 6th time and so the last week of my 6 week placement. I did not know it was only a 6 week placement so I was confused and dissappointed. But then she told me that depending on funding she would like me to keep coming back, so that was nice. A little rolelrcoaster ride of emotions despite nothing actually changing, what a way to end the day.

I've had a busy week so I thought I would combine everything into one lovely post.

To start with there was day 4 at Jisc Collections. This week I was looking in detail at the results of some workshops Jisc did with publishers and authors. They asked groups of each to identify what parts of the publishing process they were involved with and how long it took them. This was really interesting as it gave me a chance to see all the hidden things that publishers do behind the scenes. When you say publishing most people just think editorial, you know

So a few fellow students interested and I attended an National Union of Journalists debate on Open Access hosted by the Wellcome Trust.The discussion was on the importance of editorial quality in Open Access publishing.



There was a great line up of speakers:

Philip Campbell - Editor-in-Chief, Nature 
Matt Cockerill - BioMed Central and Springer STM Professor
Stephen Curry - Imperial College and open access blogger
Peter Lee - Publishing Director, Cell Press 
Mark Patterson - Managing Executive Editor of open access journal eLife 
Pete Wrobel - NUJ, Magazines and Books

It was a really interesting discussion that raised a lot of questions about how people view Open Access. The main issue that came up was that some people feel that publishers no longer add that much value to articles but others argue that, especially with very technical STM articles, the editors play a vital role in making the content readable for the general reader.

So access isn't just a question of getting hold of the articles but being able to understand them as well and this is where editorial still have an important role.

A lot else was said and some people were voicing very passionate opinions because they felt this was their first chance to have their say (non-academic users of the content mainly). But there isn't space here to go into all the details but don't worry, the whole thing was filmed and posted on YouTube.

The one thing you will miss out by only seeing the video is the boozing and schmoozing at the end. We chatted with some big wigs from the NUJ and got some contact details so the evening was definitely a success, even if we may need to develop our mingling techniques to be a bit less blunt.

So yeah today about Creative Commons licenses.

Rocked up at Jisc this morning a little late because of traffic and the fact that I couldn't drag myself away from the video of Beyonce's halftime show and found my desk was no longer my desk. For some reason we couldn't sit in the corner of the office like normal but got moved to a big empty meeting room. It took half an hour to get all the technology together to provide us with two computers but we finally got started. The meeting room was a bit big and empty for the two of us but at least I didn't feel like I was in people's way.

But down to work. So a lot of OA publishing is based on the use of Creative Commons (CC) licenses so today we looked up what people understand about these licenses and how this affects people's attitudes towards OA. To get a feel for the situation I set to work trawling through blog posts, Twitter feeds and articles to see what people were saying about CC licenses and what questions needed to be answered. We used this information and Sam's research into existing FAQs to begin developing a CC user guide to help researchers understand how they can use CC licenses to help get their research out there.

What all this showed is that people are not 100% sure what CC licenses cover, myself included which is why I began on the Creative Commons website familiarising myself with the licenses. But underneath the general misconspetions about CC licenses are some more thorny issues. People are