Research Bites is a new summer programme of lunchtime briefings for researchers. The third session is on Collaboration and Networking on Wednesday, 26th June at 12.30pm in the Library Seminar Room.
Come along to find out about some of the range of tools available to you to help you with collaboration in your research area: Blackboard Collaborate (a virtual meeting space), blogs and file sharing services (such as File Drop, Google Drive and SkyDrive). Also discover the power of networking tools such as Academia.edu and LinkedIn.
To sign up, please email libi1@stir.ac.uk.
Bring your lunch – we will provide tea and coffee. The session will last no longer than an hour.
Attendance at the session is limited to 15 people.
Research Bites is a new summer programme of lunchtime briefings for researchers. The second session is on Write N Cite 4.0 on Wednesday 19th June at 12.30pm in the Library Seminar Room.
Come along to find out how Write N Cite 4.0 might help you with your research. WNC 4.0 is an add-in for Word which allows you to cite references in your text and automatically create a bibliography using references from RefWorks within your Word document,
To sign up, please email libi1@stir.ac.uk.
Bring your lunch – we will provide tea and coffee. The session will last no longer than an hour.
As the session has a practical element it is limited to only 10 people
To learn more about Refworks see http://libguides.stir.ac.uk/refworks
Lots of people now use DropBox. Mark Toole, Director of Information Services has written some advice about Dropbox , including when it is not safe to do so and some tips for when you do use Dropbox.
https://www.jisc-collections.ac.uk/JISC-Collections-events/oabooksconf/
This international conference is the first to focus specifically on the monograph and tackle the issues around open access. Day one will provide an overview on open access in relation to monographs looking at key issues of business models, maintaining quality, the future of peer-review, creative commons licensing and international policy development. Key speakers include Kathleen Fitzpatrick (MLA), David Sweeney (Hefce), Carl-Christian Buhr (European Commission), Martin Eve (Open Library of Humanities), Carrie Calder (Palgrave) among many others.
On the second day of the conference there is a whole strand focused at HSS academics: How exactly do you get your monograph published in open access?
This strand is for HSS researchers and PhD students who are interested in the idea of an open access monograph. It will cover the following topics:
- Protecting your identity, ORCID
- Get to grips with copyright and creative commons – A guide to Creative Commons for HSS researchers
- Find a reputable OA publisher – Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB)
- Funding, mandates and embargoes – what are the options?
- Tips for promoting your OA book
- Tracking your book – what you show know about altmetrics
The full conference programme is available online at: https://www.jisc-collections.ac.uk/JISC-Collections-events/oabooksconf/OAbooksprogramme/
There is no fee to attend this conference. Registration is online at: http://www.eazybook.com/inanyevent/registration/eb-event-1a.php?eventid=368
Many thanks
Caren
Caren Milloy I Head of Projects I JISC Collections
The Wellcome Trust extends open access policy to include scholarly monographs and book chapters
http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/News/Media-office/Press-releases/2013/WTP052746.htm
“The extended policy will become effective for holders of grants awarded after 1 October 2013, and for existing grantholders from October 2014. The new policy does not apply to textbooks, ‘trade’ books, general reference works or works of fiction, or to collections edited but not authored by Trust grantholders. It would not affect, for example, a non-fiction work written by a medical historian aimed at a general audience and published by a commercial publisher.”
First of all congratulations on your impending graduation! Here are some useful tips from Information Services on things you should do before you graduate. You can save yourself a lot of hassle by following these instructions before you graduate (your network account will be disabled on the night of your graduation so you will not be able to logon to CampusNet, university PCs, print system, online library resources or the portal afterwards).
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Move your data (files/photos etc) from your university Home FolderAs you won’t be able to access the university network after graduation, you should take a copy of any files that you currently have on your H drive. The easiest way to move these would be to use a USB stick or connect your own laptop to CampusNet and copy your files to your laptop/external hard drive. If you fail to do this, all is not lost as our Systems team can retrieve data saved on your H folder for up to 6 months after you graduate. However there is a £20 admin charge for backing your files up onto a CD and posting to you.
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Student email account – find out how to access after graduationThose with office365 (Outlook Web App) email accounts (UG and TPG students) will continue to have access to their uni email for 1 year after graduation. You will not be able to login to the portal however, so will have to access OWA via the direct web address: http://office365.stir.ac.uk. It’s worth taking a note of this now.Research Postgraduates – we regret that it is currently not possible to extend Outlook access beyond your graduation date so you should take care to set up a forward on your university email account before you leave.
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Return your library books and pay off any outstanding finesPlease make sure you return your library books and pay outstanding fines by 5th June. Delaying in sorting this out can result in a delay in processing your graduation. You can pay your fines online: go to the portal> Resources tab > ‘pay library fines’. Or you can pay in cash at the Lending Services desk in the Library. Cheques to the Library should be made payable to ‘University of Stirling’.
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Sell any outstanding credit on your print/copy account to a student who is continuingIdeally you shouldn’t have any significant sums left in your print/copy balance but if you do, you can talk to the Information Centre about arranging to sell any left over credit in your account to a student who is continuing on at the university. The IC can then arrange to transfer the credit to the named student. Please note that you cannot be refunded the £6 free allocation per academic year nor any departmentally added funds. There is a £5 minimum transfer level – we won’t transfer amounts smaller than £5. Contact the Information Centrefor more help.
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Set up Refworks to allow you to continue using it after you graduateIf you use Refworks, you can continue to access your account as an alumni but you must set this up before you lose access to your network account. See our guidance on how to do this.
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This week, some students will have had difficulty in connecting to the Portal between 09:00 and 09:35 on the morning of Wednesday 1st May when module registration for the autumn semester opened.
When module registration first goes live, there is an enormous peak in the number of people trying to connect so the connection pool for the portal is very quickly exhausted, resulting in lots of people being unable to login until somebody else logs out. We are often asked why we don’t do something to prevent this happening. Suggestions from students include: get a better system; make the Portal work; get different years to pick their modules at different times etc. The first two points relate to the technical infrastructure whilst the final point looks at the business logic.
Extensive technical measures have been put in place to help increase Portal stability and availability however we are fully aware that more can be done. Below summarises why for business reasons module registration takes place in the way that it does.
On the suggestion of staggering opening times of module selection for different years/groups, Student Administration have advised that, whilst that might work in a university with more constrained choices, it would be less effective for Stirling because our degree programmes are so flexible, and so different groups of students will take the same modules. So, for example:
- If we opened up registration for 4th year before 3rd year, the 3rd year students would be disadvantaged, as the 4th years would get first pick of the capped level 10 modules;
- Similarly, both 2nd and 3rd years take level 9 modules, and both 1st and 2nd years take level 8 – so the years can’t be split without someone losing out;
- If we opened up registration for, say, single Honours in a subject before combined Honours, the combined Honours students would feel disadvantaged;
- We have around 100 combined Honours programmes, and each subject combines with several others, which means that splitting into subject groups in a way that disadvantages no-one is effectively impossible.
The key difficulty is that in some academic areas, the number of places on each module is very limited, which generates a peak of demand as soon as module registration opens. The majority of students who are anxious to register very early on day one are looking to take one or more of these restricted modules, and so are from the same subset of programmes. A proposal will be put to the Education and Student Experience Committee to reduce the capping of modules so that this pressure is removed – essentially meaning that students would not feel they have to register in the first hour to get the modules they want to take.
On the issue of the system/making the Portal work better:
The Portal acts as a gatekeeper for the underlying student database, and manages the number of connections so as not to cause the database or the database server to fail and thereby lose data. The student database server is due for replacement and this has been scheduled for summer 2013. This should allow IS to increase the number of connections which can be managed concurrently.
IS carefully monitors the status of the Portal and the student database during module registration. While it may have appeared that the portal was unavailable immediately after 9am, there were 877 students undertaking and completing module registration in the first hour. By 09.35 performance had returned to normal – ie the massive increase in connection requests had returned to a more normal level.
- It is worth noting that on a typical Wednesday morning between 9am and 10am the student database handles around 2500 transactions per hour, on 1.5.2013 between 9am and 10am the system handled 111700 student system transactions, which is a 43x increase on usual morning workload for the database.
As well as monitoring the Portal, IS notifies all staff ahead of the big day and asks them not to use the Portal for other purposes so as to maximise the available connections for our students.
Hopefully, the combination of requesting capped modules to be reduced; minimising Portal use for other purposes on module registration day along with a new, more powerful database server will address the concerns for next time.
In response to a significant number of complaints about noise from students studying in the Stirling Campus Library in the build up to the exam period, we are going to trial extending the Silent Zone on Level 4 to include Level 3 also.
The dates covered will be from April 22nd until May 31st .
We hope that this will help encourage an environment more suitable for revision and one that is easier to interpret than the current Level 3 ‘quiet’ arrangement which can be open to differing interpretations of what quiet is.
If you are being bothered by somebody else making noise, please email us on infocentre@stir.ac.uk and we’ll do our best to get a member of staff up to that area.
Extra study space on Level 3
During the same period (May), the Enterprise Zone rooms will all be open and available for silent study.
In the past* we have alerted staff and students to the dangers of giving out your network username and password BY EMAIL to anyone claiming to be from IS/IT at the university. Now it seems that the scammers are starting to phone members of staff to try and fool people into disclosing their network credentials.
The instance which was reported to us came from an Indian call centre and the caller claimed to be from DTP Group (one of the university’s suppliers). He claimed that he was maintaining the university servers so needed a username/password to get logged in. The staff member receiving this call realised it was a scam and did not reveal her details.
Please be aware that you should never disclose your university password to anyone no matter who they claim to be. Members of staff in Information Services will never ask for your password – this information should always be known only to you.
Information Centre
infocentre@stir.ac.uk
*http://blogs.stir.ac.uk/isnews/?p=2599 ; http://blogs.stir.ac.uk/isnews/?p=2428
Further to our previous posting about the new student email system, Outlook Web App (part of Microsoft’s cloud based Office365 offering), we are pleased to confirm that the new system will go live during the winter vacation on 30 January 2013.
We now have a pilot group of c60 students live on the system and feedback has been generally positive to date.
To find out more about the new system and it’s features, we have set up a mailing list to keep students informed. All students are members of the mailing list by default but can unsubscribe if they wish. Staff may also join the mailing list if interested, by going to http://lists.stir.ac.uk/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/office365-students and following the instructions under ‘Subscribing’.
We also have web pages with links to Outlook Web App help and FAQs: http://www.stir.ac.uk/is/student/it/email/#office365
If you have any comments about the date or the move to OWA, please contact the Information Centre: infocentre@stir.ac.uk
Information Centre