About the Centre for Research Communications

The CRC was founded in April 2009 as a University research centre for research and development work with local, national and international partnerships. The CRC has global impact in the R&D that it carries out in the development of projects and global reach in the provision of services in the field of research communications. The CRC builds on the work of SHERPA in helping the establishment and development of instiutional repositories across higher education institutions in the UK.

Projects

Current project work includes:

• SHERPA/REF the CRC has been approached by HEFCE to create an author-facing service to support them in complying with the open access requirement for a future REF exercise, with the intention of launching a service in summer 2015.
• JoRD which is investigating publisher policies on the research data that underlies articles and research outputs, with a view to scoping a possible future service in the area.
• OARR this project is rewriting the structure and functionality of our open door service, ready for a launch of our new upgraded service in 2015

The CRC has worked on a number of significant projects in opening access to scholarly communication:

• The Repositories Support Project (RSP) ran from November 2006 to July 2013. This helped UK higher education institutions to establish and develop institutional repositories, providing open access to their research outputs. During its life, the RSP ran 116 events with over 2,500 delegates, produced over 70 publications, and conducted nearly 100 consultancy visits. The resources from this work are available on the website. http://www.rsp.ac.uk/
• RCS (research communications strategy project). This acted as a strategic advisory project for senior institutional managers on changes in research communication, and informed JISC strategy in funding and developments in the area. http://crc.nottingham.ac.uk/projects/rcs
• OpenAIRE and OpenAIRE Plus. The University of Nottingham is the UK representative of the OpenAIRE consortium. This work acts as a coordinating body for repository development across all European Union member states. http://www.openaire.eu/ This is coming to an end in March 2015.
• NECOBELAC. This project was a collaborative European project to advocate and establish open access for healthcare information between Europe, Latin America, and Caribbean countries. http://www.necobelac.eu/

SHERPA Partnership

The CRC houses the work of SHERPA (http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/), which is a body which has been active in open access research communications for six years. There is a SHERPA partnership of over 30 research-led institutions in the UK.

SHERPA Services

There are four principal SHERPA services supporting work for open access information — RoMEO, JULIET, OpenDOAR and FACT. SHERPA has previously been awarded the SPARC Europe Award for Outstanding Achievements in Scholarly Communication for our work in open access, particularly for these services. http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/news/award.html

RoMEO provides information on publishers copyright contracts, as an advisory service for academic authors wishing to archive their work on line. http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo

JULIET provides information on funders open access policies, as an advisory service for academic researchers wishing to check the requirements of their grants http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/juliet

OpenDOAR is the global directory of open access repositories of academic materials (just over 1500 currently registered) http://www.opendoar.org/

FACT is a service for UK-based authors to assist them in complying with open access policies from a number of UK-based research funders. http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/fact