For our final webcast of 2015 Bianca Kramer and Jeroen Bosman joined us. Together they discussed innovation in scholarly communication and how new tools are changing researchers’ workflows.
Bianca and Jeroen are librarians at Utrecht University Library conducting a global survey on research tool usage. They also maintain a partly crowdsourced database of online tools for all phases of the research cycle. Their survey aims to empirically test researchers' choices for openness, transparency and/or efficiency in their workflows. They test this across disciplines, career stages and countries, and they have garnered 6,500 responses so far. With the survey available in 5 languages—and soon to be 7—this might be the biggest multilingual survey into how open researchers really are in their work. All results will become public, for anyone to analyze.
Watch the webcast
Take away messages
If you don’t have time to watch the whole webcast, here are some key points:
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Use their database of over 500 tools to find new tools to work with, and add any tools that are not yet listed
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Take their survey and spread the word about it within your community. If your institution might be interested in distributing the survey among its own researchers and getting the corresponding (anonymized) data find more info here and please get in touch!
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Follow the Force11 Scholarly Commons working group to stay informed about the workshops Force11 is organizing around defining the scholarly commons. We aim to have people from around the globe involved in these workshops and the activities around them.
If you’d like to download, use, or just take a closer look at the slides from the webcast they can be found here. More information about this project can be found here