Maastricht University Library Wall

From 31 October till 4 November the Open Week has been organised as part of the worldwide Open Access Week, an annual event that promotes digital access to scientific research. The University Library has made her contributions to this endeavor by hosting related activities. The seminars as been organised in the Open week are fine examples.

During the Open Week, higher education institutions organise a range of activities, coordinated in the Netherlands by SURF foundation. New to the Dutch program this year was that in addition to research, teaching was also in the spotlight.

Looking back at the first web lectures seminar

Did you miss it? The first web lectures seminar on 2 November? Don’t worry; we’ll update you via the website.

Both teachers, students, researchers and system representatives shared their experiences and ideas to start considering why the university should think of this topic in the near future. While some faculties already make use of recording devices, service centers (ICTS, Library, Marketing & Communications) discuss how this can be centrally organized, creating a central storing facility and university channels on YouTube and iTunes-University.

Presenters and participants were enthusiastic about the program. See what they let us know: “This seminar fully met my expectations: all what I had known about web lectures before was rumors or some small description from colleagues, but it was really good to get a comprehensive idea what different forms of web lectures there are and what you can do with them. Especially I had looked forward to the practical experiences of colleagues, and I really enjoyed exchanging questions and ideas with colleagues from other departments and faculties.” (Heidi Maurer, FASoS)
“I was surprised to meet so many enthusiastic and highly trained people at the seminar.”(Bernd Kapeller, SBE)
“Vooral de variatie van techniek, onderwijskundige aspecten en gebruikerservaringen (ook van studenten!) vond ik erg goed.” (Paul Adriaans, FL)

Remarks and suggestions for improvement will be taken into account when organizing a second event. Take a look at the powerpoint presentations being used and the practices website which has been updated since the seminar. Do you wish to receive more information about web lectures or do have suggestions for other topics to be covered? Please feel free to contact me (Gaby Lutgens, g.lutgens@maastrichtuniversity.nl).

Gaby Lutgens

Seminar ‘Publishing a world class paper’ has been a success

More than 150 participants took part in the seminar on 20 October. Three speakers gave good advice related to the writing and publishing process, whereas the fourth speaker talked about an alternative of getting research more visible; besides addressing how to publish a journal article, he presented a newly developed publications portal for scientific output.

Professor Jan Smits stated that publishing articles in Humanities and Law not really differs from Science, Medicine or Economics. Routine and techniques in order to structure your thoughts and findings are essential. Professor Maurice Zeegers stressed upon the fact that it is important to build on your own skill-set: remain stress-free, be persistent and be disciplined. Using visualization techniques to structure your thoughts in the way that fits the structure of an article is important. Maurice provocatively stated: “if you can’t write, it’s because you don’t know what to say”.

Anthony Newman, representative of Elsevier Sciences gave a good insight in the considerations of a publisher. In addition to the former speakers, he gave a lot of practical information regarding writing and the publishing process. In accordance with Maurice he stressed the importance of language and structure (different per item: title, abstract, introduction, etc).
Anthony concluded with a summary slide:

Aside from publishing via a licensed or open access journal, depositing the articles in an institutional and/or subject repository will affect the visibility and findability of your paper positively. Ron Aardening’s presentation showed us a tool (with underlying workflow) to promote efficiently scientific output on different levels: UM, faculty, department, research school or individual researcher.

The evaluation of this half day seminar turned out to be very positive. Several respondents gave the advice to organize a similar seminar next year. If so, we will pay attention to the issues that were mentioned: keep an eye on session end times and be aware of overlap between the speakers.

On the website of Research- Open events 2011 you can find links to the sheets of the presentations, as well as the digital version of the booklet distributed at the seminar (Charting a course for a successful research career, A Guide for Early Career Researchers; 2nd Edition by Professor Alan M Johnson).

Photo impression

Henk van den Hoogen, Odin Essers