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.

On the 1st of March I attended a colloquium run by the Institute of Historical Research on the subject The Finch Report, open access and the historical community.

The event was split into three panels trying to give the society, publisher and intermediary views from the historical community. It was attended by a range of people from students and researchers to publishing company VPs and there was a lot of lively discussion. Suffice to say I felt a bit out of my depth.

The main issues that came out of the discussion were:

• In the humanities and social sciences green open access is preferable but it needs to be sustainable and the embargo periods need to be right (not too short)
• Humanities and social sciences are very different from STM subjects and so there can't be a one size fits all gold OA policy
• There are international concerns, mainly that the UK is going out on a limb by leading the way in OA and this could result in it becoming isolated in the global research environment
• There needs to be a diverse publishing environment and that publishing can't just be left to those big companies that can manage APCs as this may end in a monopoly that kills off smaller publications and publishers
• Licenses are still a thorny issue and people are still not sure what CC licenses cover

So as you can see there is still a lot of work to be done by governments, funding bodies and the academic community and publishers to make open access work for everyone. It all seems to boil down to the fact that people still don't understand OA completely. There needs to be more communication to rid people of their misconceptions about OA - and that's across the board including those making the policy and those doing the research.

One area that people seemed most confused about was monographs and where they fit in with recent research council mandates. In fact most people were barely thinking about monographs at all and they were definitely marginalised in this journal-heavy discussion. And why not when an academic can get the same REF score for writing two journal articles as they can for spending months, or even years, writing a monograph. But what these academics don't seem to understand is that if no one rallies for monographs we might lose them altogether.

But not to worry, monographs have a champion in the form of Jisc Collectios' OAPEN - UK scheme. This scheme sees a number of monographs from a range of subjects and publishers being made openly available online via the publisher website and Google Books. Caren Milloy from Jisc was there to make the case for monographs and to make sure they weren't left out of the discussion, and of course to plug the upcoming Jisc Open Access Monographs in the Humanities and Social Sciences Conference in July.

So all in all a really good afternoon that raised a lot of issues, and I got a few business cards too.

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

So term has officially started and so have the guest speaker visits. I am taking a module on digital publishing and the department has set up weekly guest speakers on digital publishing, the first one was this week.

The speaker this week was Liz Marchant, Head of Science Publishing at Pearson. She told us about how they develop digital products and how this process is different to developing print products.

The main issues in digital educational publishing it seems are how to define and add value to a product when schools haven't adapted their budget to ongoing subscription models. Pricing is a key issue too, one that she admitted Pearson are still playing around with. Do you price per user or for groups and how do you make sure that people re-purchase your products.Publisher/customer relationships aren't just one off interactions anymore, they can go on and on and as such the user plays a much more important role in the development and especially the design of the product.

So there were a lot of issues that I hadn't really thought about before and while this was a talk about educational publishing, something I'm not interested in particularly, a lot of the issues are relevant to all digital publishing.

So yeah good start to the term and

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.