Dan Holden is the Head of Open Research in Information Services and is based in the McClay Library. Dan manages the Open Research Team who are responsible for managing the University’s read and publish journal agreements.

Background

Prior to his current role Dan was the Faculty Librarian for Engineering and Physical Sciences and was responsible for all aspects of library provision for the Faculty, including the purchase of print and electronic resources, stock management, and the delivery of library training and support to academic staff and students.

In 2013, Dan took on the additional responsibility of the provision of Open Access (OA) support to researchers, helping to ensure they could make their publications freely available online, in a move away from the traditional publishing model whereby readers must pay to access scholarly information. 

Due to the expanding interest and importance of Open Research, the Open Access Team was renamed and the Faculty Librarian aspect of Dan's role was also reassigned so that he could concentrate on Open Research full-time. 

Current roles and responsibilities

Dan currently manages the Open Research Team. Open Research comprises openness throughout the whole research cycle, enabling access to research tools and data as well as making academic publications freely available, and is now incorporated into the policies of many key funders. 

The Open Research Team are responsible for managing the University’s read and publish journal agreements. These agreements are a way for publishers to transition their subscription journals to fully OA journals. OA and subscription costs are combined into a single payment to the publisher by Library Services so researchers do not have to pay any additional fees when publishing OA. 

The remit of the Open Research Team has also expanded to include support for research data management (RDM) and e-theses. When the University closed due to the first COVID-19 lockdown, postgraduate research students were unable to submit a print copy of the final version of their thesis prior to graduation (a requirement then). In collaboration with colleagues in Student Services and Systems, the Open Research Team implemented an equivalent e-theses system to ensure thesis submission was not disrupted. The feedback from students about this was so positive that e-thesis only submission was introduced in September 2021. During the past year E-theses were downloaded from the University’s Research Portal (Pure) nearly 25,000 times.

The Open Research Team also provides Research Data Management assistance to researchers in a number of areas including funder requirements, data management plans, applications for the Active Data Storage service (a central facility for storing large datasets during the course of a project) and the deposit of post-project datasets in Pure. 

Contribution to specific research initiative or project

A key project for the Open Research team was assisting with the University’s Research Excellence Framework (REF) submission by ensuring that all the journal articles and conference papers published by academic staff were eligible for assessment. REF OA policy requires that the accepted manuscript for all journal articles and conference papers must be deposited in Pure within three months of the date of acceptance.  

Last year, the Open Research team checked the details of more than 6,100 Pure records and made the journal articles and conference papers that accompanied them OA via the Research Portal.  

The University’s REF submission in March 2021 was the culmination of 7 years’ work by the Open Research Team. The work included liasing with authors, publishers, funders, academics and REF Champions, and promoting and delivering training on OA across the University. 

Overall, more than 45,000 journal articles and conference papers were processed but the work is not over yet as the REF OA policy applies to the post-2021 REF too!