By Dr Gareth Cole, Open Research and Discovery Lead

As I enter my last week at Loughborough I wanted to reflect on what has changed both within Loughborough and the wider sector in the decade I have been here. 

First, some numbers… I have been here just over ten years. I’ve had four line managers, two permanent positions and one acting up position. I’ve line-managed eight staff (sorry if I’ve forgotten anyone…). I’ve attended 25,000,000 meetings (an estimate but…) and sent (according to Outlook) 32,153 emails. More seriously, our Research Repository has just passed 50m downloads and is approaching 73m views. We have 59,383 items in our repository, of which “only” 25,377 are journal articles. 3,592 are figures, 1,343 are datasets, 396 are media. This shows the change in type of output over the past ten years. 

What I’ve hoped we’ve accomplished as a wider Library staff in that time is to embed the concept (if not always the reality!) of openness in the work of an increased number of academics and researchers (as well as professional services staff). 

Open is no longer a niche area in the sector; it is now a core aspect of our sector’s work and my type of role, whatever each university calls it(!) (Open Research Lead, Scholarly Communications Manager, Open Research Manager etc.) is now established at many UK universities. Senior managers appreciate the work we do as a sector and open was, in my opinion, one of the first areas to really try to change (and improve?) Research Culture before we called it Research Culture. Research Data Management was a thing before governments told us to delete old photos; and open was always about equality, diversity and inclusiveness. If you want to know what the future looks like, see what folk working in “open” were doing and saying five years ago (although I might be a bit biased here…)!! 

One of my main tasks when I started at Loughborough was to launch and advocate for our data repository. Working with others, we have gone from very few (not zero to be fair) items and outputs which weren’t text based to a position where at least 7% of the outputs in the repository are non-textual. This sounds low but the work it has taken us to move the dial that much (as a university and as a sector) has been immense and I don’t think we should take lightly quite what a difference it has made. Here’s hoping the next 7% increase doesn’t take as much work! I passionately believe that datasets, images, videos, data, sources (whatever you want to call this “stuff”) should be seen as an equal of any textual output. 

Open access may also have moved slower than many of us would have liked but in the ten years I’ve been at Loughborough, we’ve gone from zero Read and Publish (or Transitional) Agreements through lots (the technical term for the number we have…), through to a time where Jisc are now trying to negotiate the next-gen deals with a move away from volume based models. We can and must do more but let’s not forget how much we have accomplished. Moving academia is like turning an oil tanker, pulling an aircraft carrier, tied to an oil rig but we are doing it, and it is making a difference. 

Challenges remain…so-called Longform (I personally hate the phrase!) outputs and how we can move to a sustainable, fair, and equal way to make them open; general funding considerations; the challenge of innovative models; recognising non-textual outputs as equal outputs to textual and many more. 

However, none of these are insurmountable and the future is definitely open. I leave Loughborough’s open work in exceptionally safe hands and to my immediate team, a massive thank you for your help, support, understanding, and positive attitude (even when I kept saying “no”!). I continue my journey and adventures in this space as Exeter’s Open Research Manager.