Refresh your existing Aspire reading lists for the new academic year

Since the Reading List Copy on June 23rd you can see your current reading lists for the coming academic year (2015-2016) and last years' lists (2014-2015) when you click My Lists in Aspire.

• You can remove last years’ lists from My Lists
• Now please update and re-publish your current reading lists for the new academic year

Library staff will buy any new books and acquire any other new resources on your lists.

We’d like to take this opportunity to thank you for adding your Semester 1 and long thin module lists to Aspire well in advance of the new academic year.

If you have any further questions or would like some training or an update on using Aspire then please e-mail us on acastaff@aber.ac.uk or call 1896.

Link your Aspire lists for new modules to the hierarchy, and publish!

We now have new module codes available for you in Aspire to link your reading lists to the hierarchy.

• If your reading list is currently in draft form in Aspire you can link it to the hierarchy
• Check that the correct year and semester have been applied - if not you can change them
• Now publish your list

Library staff will begin buying books and acquiring other resources for your reading list.

We’d like to take this opportunity to thank you for adding your Semester 1 and long thin module reading lists to Aspire well in advance of the new academic year.

If you have any further questions or would like some training or an update on using Aspire then please e-mail us on acastaff@aber.ac.uk or call 1896.

Free access to over 170 million company records

The data has previously been available to the public but at a cost.  This week the Beta version has been released to allow free searching and viewing of the 170 million records available.  The data includes financial accounts, company filings, past and current director details.

https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/

2015 Aber LibTeachMeet. Finding Time for the Past: Special Collections in the Internet Age.

The 2015 Aber LibTeachMeet held at the Hugh Owen Library on the 3rd June, was a great success. For full details of the event, please visit:  https://aberlibteachmeet.wordpress.com/2015/06/10/we-found-time-for-the-past/

Tuesday 30th June: Aspire Reading Lists deadline for Semester 1

Add your reading lists to Aspire for modules being taught in Semester 1 (or being taught both semesters) by June 30th to ensure there is sufficient time to buy books and digitise materials for Blackboard for the new academic year. 

Please contact your subject librarian or the Academic Services team acastaff@aber.ac.uk 01970621896 if you would like some one-to-one help to begin adding your lists to Aspire. Find self-paced training materials  here (help sheets, videos, a presentation and FAQs).

If you have already added your lists, use this checklist to update them ready for teaching and library resourcing.

Wellcome Trust / Research Information Network Report on Scholarship and Review

Responding to academic concerns regarding the effectiveness of peer review for papers published in journals, the Wellcome Trust commissioned the Research Information Network (RIN) (http://www.rin.ac.uk/) to investigate possible strategies to improve the peer review system in the light of:

i) the availability of new technologies in e-journals and
ii) the large number of new entrants to academic journal publishing, particularly in the area of open access publishing.  

The resulting Wellcome Trust / RIN report was published in March 2015 - http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/stellent/groups/corporatesite/@policy_communications/documents/web_document/wtp059003.pdf

The report envisages the following developments:

• Innovations such as post-publication peer review and open peer-reviewing will be slow to take off as the academic cultures supporting the current pre-publication peer review system are very powerful
• Whilst it would be good for all stages of the peer review process to become more open, a distinction needs to be made between revealing reviewers’ identities and revealing the actual content of their reviews
• More interaction is needed between editors, reviewers and authors, both before and after publication
• Article-level metrics (altmetrics), which measure the numbers of comments, ratings, bookmarks and news coverage which papers receive on the web and in social media, are becoming increasingly important as alternative methods of assessing public engagement
• Some form of scholarly credit needs to be introduced to recognise the contribution of peer reviewers, as shown by the development of such systems as Peerage of Science (https://www.peerageofscience.org/) and Publons (https://publons.com/) .  This recognition should be in the form of attribution, there being currently little academic enthusiasm for a system of monetary rewards 
• Distinction needs to be made between peer review to determine the academic soundness of a paper and that to determine whether or not a paper fits the scope and ambition of the journal to which it has been submitted. Publishers are now starting to set up “cascade systems” so as to avoid reviewing the same paper more than once.