Sadly Tuesday was my last official day at Jisc Collections, unless some money can be squeezed out of the budget to keep us on. But despite this sad occasion the day started like any other and there was still work to be done.

I started the day by having a chat to my supervisor about the recent Open Access in History event we both attended. I then spent a few minutes tidying up my blog post on the event for possible use on the Jisc website.

After I had finished that I moved on to helping my fellow intern with writing a reference guide for researchers in humanities and social sciences explaining Open Access and Creative Commons licenses. This is a project that began a few weeks ago and while I had helped with some of the initial research I hadn't been involved much because it wasn't really my cup of tea. My colleague had made so much progress and I was just needed to write a few bits round the edge, an introduction to the guide and an introduction to OA, because he had written so much explaining what the licenses are, how they work and why people should be thinking about using them. This guide is definitely needed as one thing that comes up time and time again in discussions of OA is that people just don't quite understand it. With this guide people will be able to find answers to some of the most common questions about CC licenses. It is by no means a comprehensive guide but it's a really good starting place and I'm glad I helped (even if it was only a little).

This took up most of the day but when I was no longer needed there were a few extra jobs for me. I helped find contact information for some publishers for planned interviews (something I'm going to get very familiar with while working on my dissertation) and then I proof read a report on ebook provisions in Scottish libraries. It was long but the report was interesting, especially as I had helped with some of the initial data collation.

So all in all a good last day. I got to see some of the projects I worked on come to fruition and I was still learning lots right until the end. It would be great if I could stay on but if not I have had a really good 6 weeks at Jisc Collections and I have learnt a lot. One thing I won't miss however is the commute to London every week.

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 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

So I woke up at half 6 again and tried to psyche myself up with a big mug of "I love London" mug.

It didn't really help but it got me on the bus. But once I had got there and woken up a bit things picked up.

I started my day by going through a list of all the titles available through the OAPEN scheme. These titles have been offered free through Open Access to see how popular they are compared to a control group. I went through the list and found each title on the publisher's website. I looked to see how well advertised the fact that the book was freely available was and took screen shots to go in a presentation. I also looked the books up on Google Books again to see how obvious it was that the books were free.

I can tell you now it was not obvious on most of the sites that these books were 

So on Tuesday I started at my new work placement with Jisc Collections. They are a government funded organisation that work on behalf of libraries and universities to secure good deals on journals but they also do a lot of research into new forms of access - and that's where I come in.

I am very interested in Open Access and hope to write my dissertation on it so this place really appealed to me. The research they do into not just open access but all new access models available to academics and researchers is so interesting, if you're into that kind of thing. And from what I learnt on my first day I think this placement is going to be really useful.

But day one means taking things slow and getting to grips with the place which is what we did. I arrived with my fellow Brookesian (that's a word right) and we were shown into a meeting room where our supervisor talked us through who Jisc are, what they do, why they do it and how we could help. Then we had an office tour and met everyone else and then it was lunchtime. So not much done yet.

But after lunch we got to work collating the results of a survey done by Humanities researchers about access models and how they feel about them, specifically how they feel about self-publishing as an option for their work. It was so interesting to see the range of responses although what came across the most was that the current academic climate wouldn't recognise self-published work and so many thought it would be a waste of their time to try and do it. Better to leave it to publishers who know what they are doing and would bring a level of prestige to the work.

But at the same time many were dissatisfied with the current service they were getting from publishers and would like to move away from the traditional publishing models if only the culture would let them. So it all comes down to people needing to be better informed about Open Access and self-publishing if they are going to accept it as a legitimate form of publishing.

Not bad for the first day. So I look forward to seeing what else I can learn over the coming weeks.

I haven't posted for a while but it's not neglect, I was busy at a two week work placement with TQMI, a management consultancy.

My main role was to write some content for the website by interviewing the consultants and writing what they said up into articles. But they were all out consulting a lot of the time so I also helped do some market research, looking at how the competition use their websites and social media in an effort to improve how TQMI use theirs.

While this wasn't a strictly publishing placement, I had a really good time and I learnt a lot that I can bring to publishing. Apart from the market research I did and the skills that taught me (very transferable), I learnt a lot from talking to the consultants.

I mean a lot of what they said went a bit over my head as jargon but once I got past that and got into it I really feel I benefited from it. I learnt about the key things a business needs to do do be formally recognised as excellent. I learnt about how to set up a business, how to keep up with constant change, the importance of an engaged staff and the principles and ethics behind good business. "Great but that's still not publishing" I hear vaguely cross your mind but as they have drummed into us from day one on the course - publishing is a business. So these business skills, yeah they aren't going to help me edit a manuscript, but they will help me get the most out of my work and the people around me.

So overall a very busy and very interesting 2 weeks. But I will admit, I'm ready to get out of the world of business development engagement processes and back to books. Simple, lovely books.

I'm sorry this has taken so long but I have had a pretty busy week and between deadlines and Christmas shopping/baking I haven't had a chance to post anything.

So last Friday was my last day at Wiley-Blackwells. It started like any other with me reviewing new submissions and then moving onto compiling monthly stats reports for a few journals. But then after lunch it got very last-day-of-term-y. I had mentioned to my supervisor that I was interested in Open Access and she very kindly managed to find a load of presentations from an Open Access day they had had recently, to explain to the staff the details of OA and how Wiley was going to adapt to it. She printed the slides off for me and talked me through them which was incredibly kind of her as well as being very interesting.

As a big thank you for everything, which was definitely necessary because I have learnt so much on this placement, I brought everyone a box of chocolates and a Christmas card. This obviously meant that we needed to take an extra long tea break to eat the chocolates so I was late to the closing HR meeting because we had got chatting.

But I did make it, tea in hand, and I was glad I did because as well as the general thank-yous we also got a certificate! This is now up on my wall as my pride and joy.

So that's it. The end of a great 9 weeks at Wiley and a stressful first 12 weeks at uni. I'm going to go and take a well earned break so all that's l

Penultimate day at Wiley and this picture sort of sums it all up really.

Day began as ever with the JSAP submissions then I moved onto finishing collating the results to the open access nursing survey.

Then I moved onto something new. I had to write an application to get the journal Zoonoses and Public Health classified under an additional category on the ISI database. I had to write up the aims of the journal and show how they align with the definition of the category and then include tables showing the citations in and of the journal. These tables show related journals and if they are categorised in the same category this would help the case for getting the journal into the new category. However, the data I brought up wasn't particularly convincing but my supervisor said that was ok.

I finished the day by finding referral information for a couple of health science

Bit of a belated post but don't fear, day 7 is here now.

So the day began as usual with sorting out submissions to the Journal of Small Animal Practice. Then I moved on to a brand new task for this week only. I uploaded the articles to the new issue of Nurse Author & Editor Newsletter. This involved making sure the articles were in the right format and uploading them to the site. I then had a look on Scholarly Kitchen for possible articles that Wiley could follow up and possibly use in some of their internal newsletters.

Again these weren't the most exciting of tasks but I could see how important they are and I actually found Scholarly Kitchen very interesting and have pegged it as a possible source of much dissertation research. There are a lot of great articles on open access including different angles on it such as what authors want from it. To finish the day I did some envelope stuffing and carried on organising the results of the nursing survey and making some pretty graphs.

But I didn't just spend the whole day at the computer. My lovely supervisor had organised a meeting for me with one of the commissioning editors in the books section of the health sciences department. We had a nice informal chat in an empty office about the role and duties of a commissioning editor, how journals and books work together, how she got into the industry and a bit about the course at Brookes. It was a really great chat and I learnt a lot.

But it doesn't stop there because in response to my meeting, one of the interns working in the books section was having a meeting with one of the people from the journals team, my team if you will, and I was invited along. Again it was a nice informal chat about what her role as journals project manager (or a similar title, the terminology is a bit interchangeable), how she got into the field, the big issues in journals publishing and how she felt about and is preparing for open access. Again, great talk.

So another day at Wiley and a lot more learnt. Only two more days left to go now.