The next item of business is consideration of business motion <IP_ADDRESS> in the name of Joe Fitzpatrick on behalf of—I think I missed it—a one there. <IP_ADDRESS>.2 in the name of Joe Fitzpatrick on behalf of the Parliamentary Bureau, setting out a stage 3 timetable for a forestry and land management Scotland bill. I ask any member who wishes to speak against the motion to press the request to speak button. No one has done so, so I call on Joe Fitzpatrick to move the motion. As no member has asked to speak against the motion, the question is that motion <IP_ADDRESS>.2 be agreed to. Are we all agreed? The motion is there for agreed. Moving on. The next item of business is an urgent question. I have several members wishing to ask a question here, so I am going to ask people to ask a question, not to tell a story so that I can get everybody in, because then we are going to topical questions. The first question is cake forms, please. The Scottish Government, what is responses to the Scottish fishing industry's concerns regarding the terms of the Brexit transition agreement between the UK Government and the EU? Cabinet Secretary. Presiding Officer, yesterday's announcement was a surprise to no one. We have warned about this happening and so it has come to pass. The Tories have sold out the Scottish fishing industry once again, and Ruth Davidson should be shame-faced for her fastest broken Brexit promise yet. On 11 March, Ruth Davidson issued a statement jointly with Michael Gove that said this. The Prime Minister has been clear that Britain will leave the CFP common fishes policy as of March 2019. It is outrageous that Ruth Davidson and Michael Gove could have issued such a misleading statement last weekend when they must have known what was about to happen. The only thing that is clear now is that Ruth Davidson's credibility lies in ruins. She must apologise for her broken promise to our fishing industry. The Tories have negotiated the worst possible outcome. We will be in the CFP not as a partner at the table but at best consulted with. For that matter in 2019, it is a crucial time for fisheries negotiations. Just as the Conservatives infamously deemed Scotland's fishermen to be expendable in the negotiations going into the common market in the 1970s, now they are betraying the industry in their deal-making on the way out of the EU. Kate Forbes. I represent fishermen on the east and the west coast, many of them formally represented by the cabinet secretary. Does he share his sense of betrayal at this deal? Yes, I have the honour of representing fishermen in Kate Forbes constituency now in the port of Malleaghan came to respect them. They do difficult work, as we know, perilous work. I think that they will see this as a very clear betrayal. They were promised that the UK would be out of the CFP in March 2019, not once but in several occasions. Now we find that we will remain in the CFP and be rule takers rather than rule makers, bound by legislation not in the interests of sensible management, such as the key issue of choke species that threatens the viability of the Scottish fleet from 2019 onwards. What deeply concerns me is that the interests of the Scottish fishing industry have been given so little consideration by the UK Government throughout the Brexit negotiations and that those who profess to represent their interests have been shown to be entirely toothless. Kate Forbes. The cabinet secretary will have heard the suggestion from the Scottish Tory MPs that we should move on because the deal is done and focus on 2020, which I have to say that I find that quite unforgivable, especially after, in the words of fishing representatives like Simon Collins. I quote the failure of our negotiators to stand up for the fishing industry's interests has destroyed our trust in our government. Does the cabinet secretary agree with that? I do agree. What has happened is completely unacceptable and it adds insult to injury. The UK Government must now reconsider and seek sensible pragmatic arrangements that do not sacrifice the interests of Scottish fishermen. In doing so, perhaps a sensible start point to discussion on future relationships that do not lead to any expectation that Scotland's quota shares or access to waters will be used as a bargaining chip or permanently traded away as part of a Brexit deal. Peter Chapman, followed by Colin Smyth. I share the disappointment, but we should be clear that we will become an independent coastal state. It is happening. The SNP has been against Brexit from the start and we want to rejoin the EU in a heartbeat. Can the cabinet secretary confirm that current SNP policy is to rejoin the EU and rejoin the hated CFP? As the member knows, we have always opposed the CFP and, moreover, Michael Russell's proposals in the Brexit negotiations in Scotland and our place in Europe specifically stated that, in that scenario and our proposals, we have come out of the CFP. We have got absolutely nothing to regret or apologise for. What we are witnessing is a complete betrayal of the Conservative Party of the promises that were made, which incidentally persuaded people to vote for Brexit in the first place, and now we see that those promises are gradually unravelling. The first to unravel is the date. The next, I suspect, will be the substance. I have asked Andrea Leadsom, Michael Gove and George Eustace face-to-face over the table in discussions time and time again. Will you give an unequivocal assurance that the UK Government will not trade away permanent access to our exclusive economic zone, our fishing rights, as part of a Brexit deal? I have had no answer to that question whatsoever. Colin Smyth, followed by Tavis Scott. It is clear from the exchange already that Scotland's fisheries are being used as a political football by both the Scottish Government and the UK Government's supporters. The UK Government has failed to keep the promise that Scotland's fishing communities would no longer be in the common fisheries policy after March 2019, while the Scottish Government want it both ways, conveniently forgetting that its policy is to go straight back into the EU. Yes, that means back into the common fisheries policy. Does the cabinet secretary not accept what Scotland's fishing communities need as an end to this political bickering and for the transition period to be used to work with our fishing communities to negotiate the best deal possible to ensure that we support our fragile coastal towns? No, we have got your question. I want everybody in, please. I also secure tariff-free access to the vital of the EU market. I can tell you that the fishermen do not want to end up in a situation where the choke species problem says that vessels are tied up, are tied up at harbour, and they desperately require to have their voice heard at the table when these vital matters are being dealt with. Having attended the negotiations in Brussels both last December and the December before, I can assure you that those are absolutely vital matters. Yet, because of the deal that the Conservative leadership in London have entered into without, apparently, the Scottish Tory MPs having any influence whatsoever, that deal will mean that we will be mere consultees rather than partners and equals at the table. That surely should be disturbing to every member of this House. Tavis Scott, followed by John Finnie. Thank you, Presiding Officer. Given the fury of the industry in Shetland towards what has happened over the last few days, can the cabinet secretary shed any light on how decisions over the macro rollover or species rollover on the discard ban and on choke species will be taken forward? If there is no minister in the negotiating room in Brussels, who speaks for Shetland fishermen? Tavis Scott makes a very good point precisely because of the specific terms of the deal that has been agreed to by David Davis on behalf of the UK Government. The extraordinary position is that we will be in the CFP but out of the discussions, we will be bound by the rules but have no chance to input towards those rules to protect the fishermen in Mr Scott's constituency or anywhere else. That is quite a preposterous outcome.  The key thing is this, Presiding Officer. The fact that any UK Government could ever agree to it is proof positive that Scotland's fishing interests do not really matter very much to them. John Finnie, followed by Gillian Martin. Thank you, Presiding Officer. The Scottish Game Party are not fans of the common fisheries policy. Cabinet Secretary, whatever the future holds, will the Scottish Government insist on evidence-led decisions about our important fishing stocks, rejecting the hoover up bonanza promoted by Scotland's Tories? Yes, I entirely agree with that. Mr Finnie makes an important point, and I'm glad that it's been made in this debate. We have to have a fishery policy that is based on sustainable fisheries. Overfishing has been an acute problem in the past. The system of maximum sustainable yield of total allowable catches and quotas is based on evidence. It is based on the scientific evidence, and that is the correct basis for a sustainable fisheries policy. I am happy to agree with Mr Finnie's approach on those matters. Does the cabinet secretary agree that it doesn't matter how many meetings Scotland's Tory MPs have with Theresa May? It's now clear that there's no influence whatsoever in which can, in any way, protect or promote the interests of Scottish fishing. He mentioned in his answer that this deal is the worst possible outcome for Scottish fishing at the most crucial time. Can he expand on what he means by that? I can expand. It's that we will have no influence on the decisions, but the decisions will be taken by the other EU states. I'm not responsible, I'm pleased to say, for the conduct and views of the Scottish Tory MPs. However, I did notice with interest that Mr Douglas Ross said this about the decision. He says that there is no spinning this as a good outcome. It would be easier to get someone to drink a pint of cold sick than to try to tell us that this was a success. I'm not sure that he's got a way with words, but I don't really think that he's going to get very far with the Prime Minister. Thank you. That concludes urgent questions. I'm now moving on to topical questions.


ness models in publishing as we signaled when we set up our own press and as I've mentioned we do intend to support more community-led initiatives and that's not just content but also tools and infrastructure as well and I just wanted to say a little bit about my experiences of talking to authors about open access monograph publishing as we have our own press and so I do get into conversations with people from time to time and my experience of talking to to the more established academics particularly in arts and humanities is that they do have a lot of concerns about open access monographs open access journal publishing is not particularly embedded in many arts and humanities and social sciences disciplines yet certainly not in comparison to the sciences and therefore the shift from traditional to open access monograph publishing is a big change from many academic authors and they do have concerns and anxieties there's also a lot of misunderstandings so for many of them but but processing charges and the only model that they've heard of and they just can't imagine how this can possibly scale to be something that's viable across across academia and they think well how on earth is our university going to be able to afford this there is also I think something I've encountered is a mistrust from as I say from the more established academics a slight mistrust in publishers who they've not worked with before or who they haven't heard others experience of working with them so that is that is a hurdle that sometimes we come across as a publisher ourselves um authors also worried about loss of prestige if they go with someone and tried and tested and ref always comes up in every conversation it seems um and getting the incentives right around ref will um will be a key driver that will really influence how our academics behave and what they what they step up to do much more easily I think ref could really help with that at the moment it's seen as something that is there to worry about because we don't yet know what's coming and overall they they can feel quite comfortable with the status quo and unless there is that push of some reason I think there is a level of inertia there I do think we can counter a lot of this with much more positive messages about open access monographs um and being able to point to alternative models um in written about in ways that um the layperson who isn't intimately connected with this can actually understand I think will really help so hopefully the open book collective will help us with that um and the open access community framework as these will be things that libraries themselves can more easily get scripts with lots of information kept in one place um and then we can more easily translate that back to our academic audiences we do feel um that it would be helpful for some of our academics to hear from um the the peers that they respect to their institutions particularly so the people who are if you like the superstars of their disciplines if they're seen to be publishing open access monographs and are willing to talk about their experiences I think that will be incredibly powerful um and I won't dwell on this final point about the UKRI funding pot because we covered that quite a bit earlier but more information about the specifics of how that's going to work and how people can apply for it would be really welcome because um you know people are signing that publishing contracts already so why should libraries support open monograph initiatives um I think many libraries will feel that the values of open access publishing align with them and if they if they are able to I think most people are indeed willing to demonstrate that commitment financially however I would say that we do still need to prioritize and be selective you know we can't support everything and that therefore we are going to be looking for things that really um do align with our teaching and research requirements I think we just have to be realistic and there may be some one-off pots of money that we can put into experiments but talking about making this more sustainable going forward we do need to be able to show how things easily map on to what the main uh I guess research and teaching and learning requirements are at our own universities and what we expect in return for our investments is obviously we want good quality content and good publishing opportunities for our academics um we also want good and transparent governance because if these are community led initiatives that we have the opportunity to be involved with we expect openness and transparency around that and how decisions are made and like would like to be involved in those decisions if possible um and equally important that we have uh we have information about how things have been costed um what investments are being made um so as costs go up and if we're going to continue investing in them or an increasing number of things we just want certainty that um we have clarity over what what is happening there I think and I just wanted to finish up by saying a few things around how as a library we're thinking about this so this is not just about what we're saying up front in our policies our strategies or what we're purchasing thinking about how um accommodating and open and leading in this area of open is really transforming what we do within the library and that's not just in the tools and the infrastructure um that we're providing but also thinking more about how we structure our teams how people's roles and responsibilities are configured so that open isn't something that people lack confidence in talking about internally in the library and going out and talking to academics it'd be great if our academic liaison team for example had much more confidence and understanding of this and that's down to us in in my area not just um working on this in isolation but thinking about how we actively promote training and awareness raising within other teams um of our colleagues um and then that that message of um open access open research and what it can do and how it ties into the university mission is is something that everybody feels that they have um ownership and buying of so I'll stop there thank you very much uh thank you Sarah that's brilliant Simon if you can if you can return to us um virtually that would be wonderful thank you very much um I think that's of um the the common themes uh in in both your presentations there were that was that alignment with uh you know with with the values and ethos of the university making clear that that's that they do sort of um working parallel and using that as as as a lever I think is uh is is really interesting um I'm trying to oh gosh it's something um Neve uh Neve do you want to come and say this rather than me reading all this out I'm not very good at reading out loud okay Dave it's great to see you there can you hear me okay indeed yes hi and so um I'm just curious because of all the wonderful work that's going on here but for me it's really come to pass with with academics um complaining about not getting access to the resources that they need which we've had across the board in arts humanities especially and I said to them will you think about this the next time that you're publishing so my question really is that well but now libraries have tended to focus I think this is fair to say I'm promoting usage of the content they paid for and gave little or no attention to highlighting open access content coming from the outside right so hopefully that will be agreed by people and I wouldn't know has any library I can start under or York or anywhere else worked with the as Sarah said with the faculty liaison librarians and looked at the reading lists and these you know they what are required by faculty with a view to substituting the paid for content with the significant amount of high quality open access content that's out there not only that when they make that substitution to flag it in their catalogs is open access and to promote it to academics for example in reading this and saying have you thought about open access alternatives for this so we must be talking about in some subject areas at least between 20 and 50 percent have high quality content now being available and open access so if anybody has worked in this area I've been really interested to hear from them so I can just respond to that first if that's okay Simon so we one thing I meant to mention when I was talking and failed to dismally is that as part of White Rose libraries we've been working on an an OER tool kit and that's one of the things that we'll be rolling out over the summer to in particular help our liaison librarians have conversations with academics around alternatives to a material that's on reading lists so we're thinking particularly about OERs but also you're quite right it can cover open access monographs as well and we really want to find solutions to this as you've indicated so we're working collectively on that tool kit at the moment and it will be ready for the autumn term but it's really it's one of the primary aims of doing that is really to help increase people's confidence in having those conversations and increase their levels of understanding that sounds amazing Sarah thank you and watch that space for sure so hopefully I'll see more news about that on Twitter yeah I'm sure you will Simon do you want to so I don't know I can't think off the top of my head whether there's been any Scotland wide analysis here at least not recently and there may well be somebody else representing Skirl here who could who could add something to the chat if there's something I'm not aware or have forgotten I think we're here it's been more about conversation than analysis of the collections at the moment it's been engaging with academics and starting to make them aware of why they should be thinking about open content and I think if anything came out of the pandemic that was was positive it was the awareness raised about access to digital content particularly access to textbooks and the insane costs associated with that I'll just I'll just add an anecdote really and then I'll move on David I think but one of the things that happened early on was I had one of my academic colleagues wanting to know whether she could make her textbook her own textbook co-authored with someone at another institution available openly and we had to help her liaise with the publisher and all the copyright was with the publisher the publisher said no the cost was prohibitive to do it electronically and here's the good bit the book was about intellectual property law so you know even in that space where we've got you know academic expertise that the understanding is low but it certainly raised the profile and I've got a much more receptive audience now for thinking about open and I'm you know working with academics to think about that as well as the other things they should be thinking about which we're now working with on so we're looking at flagging and reading this for example whether they've considered decolonisation as something in terms of the books they're putting forward we can also flag with them have you have you considered an open version of a title as well that's great thank you so need were you going to respond no I just think that's great I mean I think it's really important to highlight the open access content I'll probably very recently in some libraries those two to me and we didn't even put our open access journals of such significance as plus one in our electronic journals holdings because it was open and free and we didn't pay for it right so that's the kind of thing it's almost like there's two libraries there's a library that pays for stuff and then there's the library that's doing all this great work on open access and on publishing work and so on but we have to do what I think our computer scientists say they have this horrible expression which is to eat your own dog food I think that's actually disgusting but I think it's well meant as you're supposed to practice what you preach you know so and I think libraries across the border you need to start doing that otherwise it's going to start looking like open washing libraries please pay attention I assume that because you know systems have built up over decades and decades of how you handled how one handles purchase material it's very difficult to then slot in open access material into that it's taking some time to come up with the systems for doing that Paul you've been very patient you've had your hand up and camera on can we turn to you Hi David thanks very much and I apologize I'm a late arrival at this meeting today I'm afraid I had meetings the first half of this afternoon but I've been listening for the last hour or so I just wanted to pick up the point that was raised about advertising open access to to academic colleagues and to use one example here in UCL which has been astonishingly successful in the last few months and in yet further raising awareness we have a press of course UCL press an open access press and partly as a result of the high cost of commercial OAAE textbooks during the pandemic we've launched we were encouraged to launch by the CD managers here in UCL an open access e-textbook platform in the press and we started commissioning authors UCL authors to turn their lecture notes and the textbooks they would have published with a commercial publisher to publish them with us and we're aiming particularly at but we're working with faculty tutors and working particularly with them people on teaching contracts who aren't necessarily on research contracts as well so don't have the burden of submitting to the ref as well as writing a textbook and there's really a tremendous amount of interest as I've been going around the last three months talking about the leadership teams of all 11 faculties and there is universally interest in turning some of the educational resources that we produce for our students into OAAE material published by the press so I think open access educational materials is a great way to advertise open access to academics and be the next big thing for our UK libraries in terms of creating OAAE content really interesting thank you Paul I don't know if there's if that resonates I saw Sarah nodding at one point there I don't know if you Sarah or Simon have comments as a response I would just just just add that we have as I've mentioned today just launched Aberdeen University Press at least as a something on its way and one of the things we've agreed in early in scoping the project around that was we weren't thinking purely about research outputs there's obviously a need to think about open educational resources and we have some demand I've been talking particularly to the School of Medicine about what they want to do so we're ambitious about the press we've got a long way to go and I've been very pleased to have help and support and information from Paul's colleagues at UCL about how they've done that but yes we want the remit to be wide and we want to include educational outputs as well as research that's great Brent the comment from Katrina there in the in the about in the chat about creating OAAE handbook for undergraduate teaching do you want to just say for people who don't know where you are Katrina just in case anyone wants to get in touch and or see keep an eye out for that and if you want to just say that in the in the chat that'd be brilliant and a few comments there's been lots of comments about metadata and the problems of metadata I think Simon you very clearly raised that with the example but the problems of how we ensure good metadata for materials and there's been some interesting responses there as well within within the comments are there any more comments or questions or or reactions to to to specifically to what the library can be doing in this area or alternatively Simon and Sarah if there are things that you think collectively you know we should be either people like RUK and other organizations or that we should be asking just to do or that we should be asking UKRI today to do if we if we still have RU UKRI colleagues on on the call this would be an ideal opportunity to give them a list of things I think I think certainty and and around eligibility was one thing that we repeat of earlier. David perhaps I could comment on there's a question just come in just landed about rights retention oh yes so how important do you think it is in the monograph world if at all I think there's no reason why rights retention shouldn't be something that all research outputs are subject to in theory we are working on rights retention at Aberdeen I know others are as well and I was really interested to see Sheffield Hallam have launched a rights retention policy just this week I think I'm being really careful about it for obvious reasons here it's very very clearly constrained to journal articles and conference proceedings but what I do say in covering papers is monographs are out of scope for now you know and I think we we will be really interested to see where things go with UKRI on this but in my view I can't I can't see any logical reason why monographs shouldn't be subject to rights retention it's more about the advocacy and the persuasion and the reassurance and all of these things that it's needed before we can get some of our colleagues over the line on that yeah I would agree with that Simon I think I think many of our colleagues in the arts and humanities would as I mentioned I think there's some way off accepting open access monographs to introduce rights retention it's too early state as well in relation to that I might just might just tip things over the edge so we're also working on rights retention for journal articles at York as part of the work that the N8 libraries are doing across the north of England but again we're framing it very much around just the journal articles at this stage and Rachel is responding from a UKRI point of view saying they weren't after consultation and consideration they weren't quite at that stage to put that in which is great and our last question perhaps if I may to Simon and Sarah I mean I think I've heard different people at different times today say this constituency you know younger people are more keen on new models or older people we know who are well established and have tenure or are keen on is there is there actually any clear demographics that you're seeing or does it vary across age groups across positions and across disciplines yeah I think my personal opinion is it varies enormously but we might but I think at York I don't know if it's true everywhere I suspect not I think almost inevitably that if well as I mentioned if we have established academics who've already who've already published and have certain expectations around that their work will be submitted to to ref and that they they feel very secure about what what they understand to be high quality and what their peers understand to be high quality they are more conservative I would say almost without exception now I know it's hard to make sweet statements there's always exceptions but yeah that's certainly my experience so I would say yes it does vary and I think it discipline is a driver as well you know some some academics are very used to to preprint repositories and others aren't so I think there's a there's a disciplinary issue there I would say I'm seeing tremendous energy from some early career researchers who are really really passionate about it possibly a little naive setting up their own journals and absolutely refusing to to entertain the notion that there should be any charges to anybody and I wonder quite how sustainable that approach will be but it's great to see the level of energy and enthusiasm amongst the early career research community I think what I would say about the the established researchers is it comes back to research culture for me you know they may be well established they may be secure but how important is supporting encouraging and rewarding early career researchers for the right things how important is that to them how important it is it's to a PI to encourage their their the next generation to think about publishing openly and and how can we move away from the kudos and the prestige of publishing in a particular journal and instead think about the kudos and prestige and career reward associated with making your research open that's what I'd like to see of our senior researchers really think about how important it is to support the next generation and help and help them you know in in their careers as they start to move up and what I hope we'll then get is an established set of new academics who are really really behind this as an important part of the research culture they work in. Yeah I think that's right Simon and I would I would just add that sometimes it can be because they just don't have the time to investigate new ways of doing things so one of the things that we're quite keen to do is is set up almost like reverse mentoring because I know that having spoken to just to people at quite senior level they haven't published open access themselves but they're really keen to find out more from colleagues who have so that sharing of experience I think even internally and people at different career stages I think will help enormously so that that can be a two-way thing. Great well thank you both to Simon and Sarah for that really very rich discussion much appreciated and really exciting things happening both at York and White Rose and at Aberdeen and we certainly wish the new Aberdeen press or revised and revitalized university press all the best. We've given the hardest job perhaps today to our colleague Chris Banks who is going to summarize for us the discussions that we've had this afternoon. I'm hoping I can see Chris, Chris will join us shortly I think. Maybe I've caught Chris by surprise and so I'm sorry I know there's Chris brilliant so for those of you who don't know Chris, he's the director of library services and assistant provost at Imperial College London really deeply embedded in all of the OA discussions within the UK through membership with the Gisk UK content negotiation strategy group. They helped to lead on the recent negotiations with Elsevier. She chairs the Gisk UK content expert group as a member of the Sconell content strategy group also a member of the UK OA monograph working group and most importantly for me she's a very valued member of the ROUK board. Chris over to you. Thank you very much David and if Sarah was last then I am first after last and if you say with the challenge of summarizing what has been a very rich discussion today. I'm going to do this just through just a series of little musings that may not have a particular narrative thread through them but they're at least grouped together under under some headings and I started off with with why me because because David very helpfully pointed out all the things that I've been doing in the open access arena particularly externally but I'm afraid I'm also the person that was jointly responsible for mothballing Imperial College Press and I'm also from an institution that publishes very few books of the nearly 4,000 outputs that we had to the ref only two were books. However I have a deep interest in my background as humanities. I have two books with my name on the spines others and I also still see this world through a learning society one which publishes both journals and monographs and I'm seeking to work with them to to understand what open access might mean for that very small very small learning press so I do try to see these things from a wide number of angles not just that from a band one disk institution in the UK. So first of all just musings generally on a monographs. I've long said that I still think that I've seen more innovation in in a transition to open access and I'm kind of heartened by Martin's view that there probably are limited models but I've certainly been very heartened right from the beginning even before there were significant mandates that we've had more innovation but I think I've also seen more resistance from some in the academic community and also from some in the publishing community and where I'm sitting at the moment I kind of think a little bit about COVID and masks if we get as many complaints about why we have to wear masks because why we don't have to wear masks maybe we're doing something right so I'm trying to work out whether we've got the balance right here yet whether but on the innovation side we're seeing that being driven both by funders and by the research community and increasingly so by the research community which I see is a really good thing. I would agree with Martin that the REF policy is key my experience and data from the from the previous REF policy still shows me that that policy was the single biggest driver of open access engagement on the journal articles front and I hope that it can do the same for monographs and I hope it's crafted in such a way as to add that extra incentive and then on the on the business about us collectively selecting packages to support the one note of caution I would enter here would be our experience with UKRR so the United Kingdom Research Reserve and the journal de-duplication and also the various collective collection studies that have been undertaken both by OCLC and others and more recently through collection mapping tools which kind of continue to reinforce the rareness is common amongst our collections so I would I'm cautious about us collectively selecting those those packages and contents to support. I think about sustainability and what we are sustaining I would hope that we are sustaining opportunities for publishing and opportunities for all the publishing perspective of institution and career stage. I hope we're sustaining quality and it was it was interesting to hear Tasha's comments on on metrics up with certainly with monographs those are very very definitely lagging metrics and therefore not necessarily at an item level as an indication of quality but hopefully we will also have means of assessing quality of publication values and particularly new ones because at the moment in the same way that journal title is has been used you know badly or for good reasons as a proxy for quality so I think we use publishing houses at the moment as a proxy for quality. I hope we're sustaining diversity and reach I hope that we are maybe thinking very hard about the extent to which we should be sustaining those profit margins and we certainly need to look to sustain library budgets and what those budgets can support a question I would ask would be on global sustainability. I wonder whether our and I don't know what the answer is but whether our UK actions are in danger of driving a further global disparity and I worry that we're moving from a disparity for reading opportunities to a disparity of publishing opportunities and I think that's why I like the kind of subscribe type models because actually they minimize those dangers of that disparity. Using on our library budgets journals we've moved for a long time our journals have been purchased on adjusting case for read so we we've had our subscriptions to journals before we actually know and we pay upfront for stuff that we don't yet know what is going to be published. But of course we're now moving to a just-in-time model when we particularly where we move when we're looking at article processing charges. Molagras on the other hand we've we've acquired on a just-in-time basis for reading and we've been gradually moving into that just-in-case with book packages and certainly are also maybe moving there for open access. We know that for for different institutions budgets are generally stretched and sometimes significantly devolved making those high-level strategic investments a challenge for some of our institutions and also we've got the issue where we've got more readers than there are authors and funding authorship rather than we ship presents us with different charges especially if we continue to take as well but here in today I think there's that we are doing anything other than that and then going back to Martin's comment about the money is not in the right place even if it is in the system and I think the other kind of curveball that's hitting us at the moment and I'm encouraged by what Will Harris says but the extent to which our e-book crisis is a limited opportunity to do forward with open access. Keep it on copyright licensing and rights retention because why would I not do that? I'm welcoming that concentration of focus on IPR It's interesting in our institution that IPR the focus has often been on scientific and commercializable if that's a word work and we've let that considerable monetization and monopolistic approaches to journal articles and brands happen just in the sideline and that's that we're now seeking to address and when we look at licensing IPR we've got very different disciplinary variations in terms of where IPR might arise with a much closer link between the research output and potentially marketable commodity in humanities and social sciences whilst very very noisy licensing and copyright and rights retention have have absolutely come to the fore over recent years probably initially with our own work on the on the UK SCL but more recently with with funders actually taking that opportunity to embed rights requirements in there or rights assertion requirements in their policies and whilst that's noisy those funder calls I think are helping raise the issue further for individual researchers and their institutions and that current tension between funder publisher and institution approaches I'm really hoping will help drive that engagement further and to the advantage of open access and then finally so what what can we do we've got our challenges and our opportunities I think with our challenges one of the things we might want to do is look through a different lens and look at the risk of not moving forward with open access and with open science and open research and at my own institution that becomes a really easy cell in the sense that the risk that I outline is the fact that we now have practically half a billion pounds worth of research funding that comes into the institution with open access requirements so you've got that on the one hand and you've got the very welcomed funder focus on research culture and openness and collaboration as there's the kind of balancing for that we have got a challenge of bandwidth particularly for smaller institutions and I think those of us at larger institutions need to remember that and need to give them all the support that we can and need to put ourselves in their shoes and what this means to them and we have got the behavior of some publishers being a challenge but actually I see that that is probably driving an opportunity because we're now seeing our own researchers recognizing that some of those publisher actions are distasteful so on the finally I'll try and end on some opportunities I'm really heartened that the number of models might be small I'm heartened by the rise of trade researchers and the energy of researchers and those that are interested in open access on advocacy I think we're well on that journey I think as soon as Plan S was published we recognized that that immediately kind of flung together our our collection development and our open access departments in a way that whilst confusing for both start has led to deeper conversations and and the fact that we can no longer think separately about new content and about open access they are they are both becoming intertwined and we need to work further with our colleagues to get that cross library understanding of that but finally leadership we are seeing incredibly encouraging academic funder publisher and library leadership and I really hope that this is the time to harness that I hope that is suitable as a wrap-up thank you


Ayla, like he mentioned, I just graduated from GA. So GA sort of gives a ton of courses. I was in their full-stack web development course, and we picked up a bit on Ruby and Rails from them. So my presentation is sort of more geared toward beginners like myself. People who have sort of picked up a bit on Ruby and Rails and are sort of guiding themselves through their own learning process. And just wondering, just show of hands, who would consider themselves a beginner at this point? Yeah? So not like you have low self-esteem, but really you've been coding 10 years, but like real beginner. Yeah, like a couple of weeks, a couple of months. So the one thing I've kind of realized is when I went back to the apps I developed like as a beginner-beginner, I sort of had to redefine my learning process of it just because I was used to sort of starting up with just getting something that works on the screen. If it works it's good, brush my hands off and fine. But when you go back you realize, okay the code's a bit shoddy, it doesn't make a lot of sense to other people that are looking at my app. And so I now have to start from a place where I wanna know where to put my code, how I would define it, how it would make sense to someone else, how I could scale it, and how I could build features on top of what I'm making and not be so afraid of breaking it or breaking the app, which was where I was before. One thing I might wanna show you is the kinds of apps that we've built. So basically how GA works is you usually start off learning something like for maybe a week or two of Rails, for example, a language or a framework, and then we're given a week to work on a project. So this is something that we came up with. This is like an individual project. So not completely, not overly complex, but it's meant to sort of test out different concepts that we learn. So this is meant to be sort of more of like a real time Pinterest kind of meets, I don't know, Eventbrite kind of thing. So if somebody is at an event and they wanna know what's going on right there and then they can kind of just say like hi and you see it come up. So this is sort of like action cable and use. So this is sort of an example of something that we could build. And this was an individual project. And I don't know if you wanna see more. I think I'll just stick to that for now. But yeah, so going even back to that app and trying to build on it, I did realize I do have to think a little bit more about the architecture and a little bit more about how I'm learning just because you do go into Rails, really learn Ruby first, and then we went to Rails. But as I was getting pretty in-depth in Rails, I kind of forgot a bit about Ruby because Rails is its own animal and it kind of pulls you in. It's really seductive, it starts to work and you're really okay with just leaving the code there but the truth is you should understand more about the architecture and about how you're going to create your app because eventually when you do want to add things, you might end up screwing around with your app and it might fail you. So what I'm probably gonna do is go through the mistakes that I've been making and hopefully some of you might be able to take away something from this. So my first mistake that I sort of came across was the idea that, I don't know, I'm guessing most of you have heard of skinny, controller, fat model, and I hadn't really thought about it that way to tell you the truth. I was putting a lot in my controller. It was like Rosie or Donald fat and models like Giselle skinny. It was really sparse and I never really thought of, I knew you can kind of sense even as a developer, even as a beginner you might build intuition by what would be dry code but would be clean code and I'd say definitely hone on that skill, that intuition of feeling like something, even if you don't know the actual concept behind it, there usually is something that you can find online that addresses what your concern is. So one of the things I felt was, okay it's kind of weird that my controller is really clumped up and it looks really messy and of course this can't be the right way to do this and lo and behold I find, yeah it's not, I was doing it completely wrong and this sort of stems back from the way I was thinking about how I was making my apps in the first place. You do like the idea of it just working and sometimes you do just leave the code alone but I think eventually I did have to end up thinking about what I should be putting in each of the slots of this framework. So the controller is meant for something. It's meant to be the middleman. It's meant to do specific things. Same way the model's meant to do specific things and spreading that responsibility out and putting too much in the controller or putting too much in the specific slot might end up complicating everything and whoever else reads your code might not be expecting to see what they see. So that was something that I realized that I was sort of making as a mistake. Second mistake, lack of developer discretion. So right, I relied quite a bit on gems just because I mean you get introduced to jQuery plugins and gems and you get super excited because they're free, you can use them and everything and I'm a girl that's like going window shopping but everything's free and it's really, really cool but eventually the gems I chose sometimes even broke on me and that was really my fault because I chose those gems and I never really did my due diligence on them so I had to sort of address that addiction in my own way and what I sort of do now is sort of walk through these different set of criteria. One of them would be pretty simple, like look at Ruby Toolbox or websites like that, make sure that it's been updated recently or that a lot of people are using it. I mean, if a lot of people depend on it it makes a lot more sense for you to go with it rather than you phishing out like a random gem and just because it looks good on their demonstration on the site doesn't mean it's gonna work for you and doesn't mean like it's always gonna work in all situations and I learned that the hard way, really embarrassing talk I used to give with my app and it would break and I'm like oh my gem sorry, so that can happen. In terms of how complex it is, sometimes I bring in gems to do things for me and I could really do them myself so I might use Devise for something but really I could build my own off system and I don't need Devise and I don't need all the other functionality that it adds so if you could build something on your own and if you don't really need that extended functionality I think probably better to just build it on your own or in the other sort of spectrum, other end of the spectrum if you feel like there are edge cases that you might not be able to catch so I'm not too experienced yet so I might wanna bring a gem in to help me catch edge cases so those are cases where you might wanna bring in a gem and lastly, look at the code so if you're looking at any kind of plugin or a kind of gem don't be afraid to just delve into the code and see if it smells bad, if there's something off with it if it doesn't look right to you or if you think you see loopholes or something wrong then you don't have to use it. Mistake three, thinking of model classes is a long title. I think the point I was getting to here was yeah, part of what I was talking about earlier at that point I was harking back to I started off with a bit of Ruby, went to Rails and a lot of the time I was caught up in this framework with Rails that kind of prevented me from realizing really it's built on Ruby and we should be able to use Ruby like in conjunction with Rails and not it shouldn't work against you so one thing that I sort of hadn't really thought of before and maybe other beginners may not have thought of before is use your models as classes you don't have to just think of it as direct relationships to your database you can have non-active record models and they could really help just help you extract what you need to extract from your current model and at least compartmentalize some of your logic if that makes sense and one of the other things someone had put up an article on when to use these and I've been learning them and I would get kind of confused this is the kind of where do you put it question and I get really confused about where to put it sometimes because I would develop a framework in my head, use it forget about it, go back and be like where did I put it and why did I put it there so I think developing a framework that you know like a new trust that you're gonna follow it when you end up building more and more apps you kind of know and understand why you're putting things where they are you know where to look for them and you're not gonna be like a crap why was I thinking this so even if you are a beginner and you don't know all of these different tools yet I realize sometimes coming in from learning about the architecture before you learn about the actual implementation of it might actually help because then you don't kind of run into the problem of practicing so much and then making a huge mess and not really knowing what you're getting out of the tools in the first place yeah and this sort of comes out it's like a same thread of thought so I really love this idea of being able to create like subfolders that address the actual controller or model in question if you're creating what we call a plain old Ruby object and you're kind of extracting that functionality you're putting it in something else this is sort of a really great way to like really know what your code is associated with so if you have like a dashboard in your app and you want your list of users to you know be able to be paginated or you could like filter them or sort them in some way you could easily make sure that it refers always refers to like the right thing and so this is a really good tip that I sort of got off from someone else it might help you and this is more okay mistake five learning process so when I was picking up even on Ruby and Rails I mean I love reading textbooks I feel like it's really efficient way of getting a lot of information in your head at once but I don't know if you guys ever experienced this you would read something or watch a tutorial on anything really and in the moment you think okay I've got this I'm gonna remember this forever and ever it's gonna be amazing and I'm never gonna forget it and it's gonna be etched in here because in the moment you think you're so sure and then two weeks later you're like I don't remember I have no idea and so I sort of realized probably a better way to go about it is to start with learning something and then asking you're gonna you're about to have questions about what you learn and your book or tutorial can't answer everything I've kind of realized if you were to like answer your questions right away they don't become these growing concerns in the back of your head that always pop up if you keep you know coding and building new apps so go to Stack Overflow go to documentation try to get them answered and then build something small to test it out and I mean something really bare bones that has to do with that specific concept so at GA the one thing that really helped me was any single time we had a concept and it had to do with you know maybe something small even with you know any kind of framework they were trying to demonstrate something they would just build something small and they would show it and basically it's a demonstration of how it works and I realized I kept going back to those same apps just to learn or get a refresher of those concepts because a lot of the time you think you have it all up here but really it's not and you don't want to go to like page 274 of that textbook that you highlighted just to like recap something you want something you can easily reference on your laptop and just go back too quickly so even if I was saying doing Rails for a while but I wanted to go back to Node.js and I want to know for example I don't know like how to make the Ajax calls with put or delete requests or something like that I know I have an app to go back to that exemplifies it really simply really easily and I don't have to you know look it up anywhere it's right in front of you you get to see it play out really easily so I realized having something like that to refer to would be a really good idea I could show you like a really simple example of that actually let's see so this would be the most simple example of something that really explains more of like a design concept than something I would really explicitly learn but it was a book I was reading I forget the name but he was basically trying to explain in a really simple way what it means to have single responsibility like one of the main things I learned from him was if you ever have a model and you want to find out whether or not you're putting too much in it just pose it a question and make sure if the like actual question makes sense then it would make sense to keep it in a model or a class it doesn't make sense it's better to sort of you know externalize it in another class so for here it might be hi gear would you be able to get me your wheel diameter so that sounds kind of iffy like that doesn't really make a lot of sense sure yeah sure yep is that good do you want to book the question no okay um yeah so this is sort of his way of explaining it if you're asking gear for a method that really has more to do with the wheels that wouldn't really make sense you could put all of these attributes all of these different methods in here you really could do that it'd be okay but eventually it might not make a lot of sense so this is a really small scale way of exemplifying that but I'm sure like as I build bigger apps it's a really easy thing to come back to to sort of refresh something as simple as single responsibility um going to road right so this is sort of like the other end of the spectrum so on the one hand I might end up reading too much and getting lost in those details on the other like on the other end I might end up building too much in the sense that rails really is the sort of magical thing I love that you can create something and get the results right away but what can sometimes catch me off guard is that it abstracts away too much from my learning process just because if you keep using certain things without really pining on the code and trying to find out you know what the real concepts behind what you're doing are um if something were to scale something were to break you're far more in the dark than you were before so I would say it's definitely more of a balance between being able to code and do something and actually exemplify it in code but also read up enough and like make sure you understand what you're doing and don't just get lost in the creation of it without with like you know skipping a few steps rails allows you to skip like way too many steps so I would definitely I mean a lot of rails developers at least at this point the ones I've talked to are saying just try to pick up more on Ruby sometimes you get lost in rails and you forget about Ruby and that's definitely at that's where I am so anyone who's kind of up this hill and is right about where I am I'd say pick up advanced Ruby and really try to that's what would let you get into the source code and really understand what you're doing more and I think it also gets you out of the the main MVC architecture that you sometimes get trapped in and you think that's the only way to do it because that's how I know to do it that's what rails taught me but if you know Ruby more you know that might not be best at all times there are ways and things you can build up upon that architecture that could really work for you so yeah that's my two cents and thank you for listening