Congratulations to Ling Zhou who won the Library & IT quiz for the pre-sessional Passport students. The Passport students spent the morning in group activities finding and using Library resources to support their assignments. The online quiz then tested the students’ knowledge of additional Library and IT services available to help.
Very well done to our quiz winner!
Posted by Marion Kennedy on 24 June 2019
https://informs.hw.ac.uk/2019/06/24/congratulations-to-our-quiz-winner/
SAE Technical Papers will give you access to journal articles about vehicle transport, including cars, aerospace, and autonomous and unmanned vehicles. As well as automotive papers, this resource also has information useful to 
students studying other areas of science, engineering or business management, such as robotics, manufacturing, and energy.
You can access SAE Technical Papers with your normal Heriot-Watt username and password. There’s around 58,000 full-text journal articles in this database, and it also gives information about another 150,000+ articles, which may be available through Interlibrary Loan if you are in third year or higher.
Our trial of this database will end on 30th April 2019. Please send any feedback to Kirsty Thomson k.s.thomson@hw.ac.uk
Posted by Kirsty Thomson on 13 March 2019
https://informs.hw.ac.uk/2019/03/13/trial-of-automotive-engineering-resource/
Evaluation of Online Sources (Webinar)
Date: 5 February 2019
Time: 13:00-14:00
Location: Own Computer
Audience: All Welcome
Open Access and the REF: What you Need to Know
Date: 5 February 2019
Time: 13:15-14:15
Location: Library Teaching , Edinburgh Campus Library
Campus: Edinburgh
Audience: Staff and PGR Only
Presentation Skills
Date: 5 February 2019
Time: 14:15-15:15
Location: Anderson Room, Edinburgh Campus Library
Campus: Edinburgh
Audience: All Welcome
Writing in Paragraphs
Date: 5 February 2019
Time: 12:15-13:15
Location: Anderson Room, Edinburgh Campus Library
Campus: Edinburgh
Audience: All Welcome, most suited to UG students
Poster Design (Webinar)
Date: 6 February 2019
Time: 12:00-13:00
Location: Own Computer
Audience: All Welcome
How to Survive your Dissertation
Date: 6 February 2019
Time: 12:00-13:00
Location: Student Wellbeing Centre, Hugh Nisbet Building
Campus: Edinburgh
Audience: All Welcome
Pure: Managing Content
Date: 6 February 2019
Time: 14:15-15:15
Location: Library Teaching Room, Edinburgh Campus Library
Campus: Edinburgh
Audience: Staff Only
Understanding Turnitin for Students
Date: 6 February 2019
Time: 14:15-14:45
Location: Anderson Room, Edinburgh Campus Library
Campus: Edinburgh
Audience: Most suited to UG and PGT Students
Word: Page Layouts and Numbering
Date: 6 February 2019
Time: 12:15-13:15
Location: Library Teaching Room, Edinburgh Campus Library
Campus: Edinburgh
Audience: All Welcome
Citing & Referencing Harvard (Webinar)
Date: 7 February 2019
Time: 09:15-10:15
Location: Own Computer
Audience: All Welcome
Endnote Desktop
Date: 7 February 2019
Time: 10:15-11:45
Location: Library Teaching Room, Edinburgh Campus Library
Campus: Edinburgh
Audience: All Welcome
Literature Searching for EPS subjects
Date: 7 February 2019
Time: 12:15-13:15
Location: Anderson Room, Edinburgh Campus Library
Campus: Edinburgh
Audience: All Welcome
MindMap with MindGenius
Date: 7 February 2019
Time: 12:15-13:15
Location: Library Teaching Room, Edinburgh Campus Library
Campus: Edinburgh
Audience: All Welcome
Critical Reading of a Journal Paper
Date: 8 February 2019
Time: 12:15-13:15
Location: Mary Burton Building, Room G.33
Campus: Edinburgh
Audience: All Welcome
Posted by mirrenmcleod11 on 29 January 2019
https://informs.hw.ac.uk/2019/01/29/power-hours-w-c-5th-february/
Information Services Allen McTernan Building Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) Maintenance
As part of our ongoing infrastructure maintenance schedule, we are required to replace the batteries in the main data centre UPS, which provides backup power to the majority of services housed in Allen McTernan, in the event of a power outage.
This work will take place on the 17th December and will last one working day.
Whilst this work is ongoing the existing services will be powered directly from the mains supply, but we will have no battery backup in the event of a mains power failure.
Services should therefore be considered at risk during Monday the 17th and Tuesday the 18th of December.
All services run from Allen McTernan should be backed up in advance of this date.
Any questions, please submit a ticket to the Help Desk ITHelp@hw.ac.uk
Posted by cdonlan on 05 December 2018
https://informs.hw.ac.uk/2018/12/05/information-services-allen-mcternan-building-uninterruptible-power-supply-ups-maintenance-17th-18th-december/
Heriot-Watt University’s Theses Repository, ROS, has over 30,000 items and contains full-text copies of all Heriot-Watt University PhD theses awarded from 2009 onwards.
The top downloaded thesis was submitted in 2015, and has over 24,000 downloads:
Molwus, Jurbe Joseph (2014) ‘Stakeholder management in construction projects : a life cycle based framework‘, PhD thesis, Heriot-Watt University.
Stats on theses downloaded can be obtained from a service called IRUS-UK, which aggregates statistics from UK repositories.
The visualisation below shows downloads by country in September 2018. With a large downloads of theses in the areas of construction and energy production, Heriot-Watt’s reputation as a global university with a strong engineering and technical focus is borne out by the usage of our research. For more information, contact open.access@hw.ac.uk
Posted by Linda Kerr on 25 October 2018
https://informs.hw.ac.uk/2018/10/25/all-about-ros-theses-repository/
The Research Excellence Framework (REF) is the system for assessing the quality of research in UK higher education institutions. Its outcomes inform the allocation of approximately £2 billion of public funding per year for universities’ research. The REF is conducted jointly by Research England (RE), the Scottish Funding Council (SFC), the Higher Education Funding Council for Wales (HEFCW) and the Department for the Economy, Northern Ireland (DfE).
To be eligible for submission to REF 2021 the funding councils mandate that the research outputs specified below must be discoverable, free to read and downloadable by anyone with an internet connection. Researchers can usually access the journals they need via their institution and might think they are Open Access, but in reality this is only made possible by costly subscriptions their institution acquired.
REF Open Access policy applies to journal articles and conference contributions (with an International Standard Serial Number – ISSN) which were accepted for publication after 1 April 2016.
What do I need to do?
1. Create a record for your output in Pure (our institutional repository) upon acceptance for publication – full date of acceptance is mandatory.
2. Upload the Accepted Author Manuscript (AAM) to the record you created no later than 3 months after acceptance.
3. The Research Support team will do the rest.
Green Open Access
The route described above is what we call Green Open Access. Once the AAM has been deposited in our Institutional repository it may be subject to a publisher embargo period. The Research Support Team, in the process of validating records, sets embargo periods and licenses. After the embargo period (most commonly 12 months) elapses, the AAM automatically becomes freely available in Heriot-Watt Research Portal for everyone to discover (as seen on the right).
What is an Accepted Author Manuscript (AAM)?
AAM is the version of the paper that has been peer-reviewed and the changes and revisions required by the reviewers have been incorporated, but before any typesetting or formatting has been applied by the publisher. Typically, it is without page numbers, volume and issue information and any publisher’s insignia.
What is Pure?
Pure is the University’s current research information system, highlighting Heriot-Watt University research activity to the wider community. Pure provides a single location to store information about Heriot-Watt University research staff, publications, research data, activities and collaborations.
For any questions about Open Access or REF contact us at open.access@hw.ac.uk
For further reading, please visit:
Posted by Marko Mlakar on 24 October 2018
https://informs.hw.ac.uk/2018/10/24/open-access-and-the-ref/
ORCID iDs are unique persistent digital identifiers for researchers and scholars. They provide a unique identifier to ensure your research outputs and activities are correctly attributed to you and avoid any ambiguity with similarly named researchers.
An ORCID iD stays with you throughout your career – no matter if you change employer, funder, name, or field of research. You have control over the information that is held in your ORCID record and whomever it is shared with.
ORCID iDs are increasingly being used by publishers, funders and HEIs in award application systems. In the future, this will make it easier and quicker to share your information about research outputs and activities between systems and services, increasing accuracy and reducing the need to enter the same information multiple times.
Six ways to make your ORCID work for you Alice Meadows
Frequently Asked Questions about ORCID
Postgraduate Research Students:
Research Staff:
Email: open.access@hw.ac.uk or Tweet us @OpenResHWU
All entries by 16th November 2018
*Academic staff can create an ORCID ID from within Pure or synchronise your ORCID and Pure profiles.
Linking your Pure profile to ORCID—New or Existing ORCID
Log into Pure:
Posted by Lesa Ng on 23 October 2018
https://informs.hw.ac.uk/2018/10/23/what-is-an-orcid-identifier-and-why-should-you-register-for-one/
Open Access Week is an international celebration of the benefits of Open Access to scholarship. The theme this year “reflects a scholarly system in transition. While governments, funders, universities, publishers, and scholars are increasingly adopting open policies and practices, how these are actually implemented is still in flux. As open becomes the default, all stakeholders must be intentional about designing these new, open systems to ensure that they are inclusive, equitable, and truly serve the needs of a diverse global community.”
Although a recent major driver to open access is the requirement for the next REF, that accepted manuscripts should be deposited in an institutional repository (Pure) no more than three months after acceptance, examples of good open access practice can be found in many places: depositing preprints in repositories such as arXiv; creating and publishing Open Access journals, such as the Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Equality and Diversity (IPED) journal, published by the School of Social Sciences and using Open Journal Systems software; and creating and sharing open research data.
The Research Support Team in Information Services provides support to research staff and students on making their research more openly available. We provide advice via webpages and Power Hours, and individual tailored advice. We can help you:
Throughout this week, we will post on different aspects of open access: how to create unique identifiers (ORCID IDs, digital object identifiers (dois)), how to publish open data, meet REF Open Access compliance, and on digital theses.
We are keen to hear your experiences, questions and opinions on what open access means for you and your research. There will be a competition with a prize!
The first resource we are sharing is the film Paywall: the Business of Scholarship, a documentary which focuses on the need for open access to research and science, questions the rationale behind the $25.2 billion a year that flows into for-profit academic publishers, examines the 35-40% profit margin associated with the top academic publisher Elsevier and looks at how that profit margin is often greater than some of the most profitable tech companies like Apple, Facebook and Google.
Get in touch
The Research Support team in IS is:
We can be reached on open.access@hw.ac.uk
For advice on Pure – purehelp@hw.ac.uk
For advice on open data – openresearchdata@hw.ac.uk
Posted by Linda Kerr on 22 October 2018
https://informs.hw.ac.uk/2018/10/22/open-access-what-you-need-to-know/
Endnote Desktop
Date: 22 October 2018
Time: 10:15-11:45
Location: Anderson Room, Edinburgh Campus Library
Campus: Edinburgh
Audience: All Welcome
Literature Searching for MACS Subjects
Date: 22 October 2018
Time: 12:15-13:15
Location: Anderson Room, Edinburgh Campus Library
Campus: Edinburgh
Audience: All Welcome
Citing and Referencing Harvard
Date: 22 October 2018
Time: 14:15-15:15
Location: Library Teaching Room, Edinburgh Campus Library
Campus: Edinburgh
Audience: All Welcome
Poster Design
Date: 23 October 2018
Time: 12:15-13:15
Location: Anderson Room, Edinburgh Campus Library
Campus: Edinburgh
Audience: All Welcome
Research Data Management
Date: 24 October 2018
Time: 14:15-15:15
Location: Library Teaching Room, Edinburgh Campus Library
Campus: Edinburgh
Audience: Staff and PGR only
Endnote Online
Date: 25 October 2018
Time: 12:15-13:15
Location: Library Teaching Room, Edinburgh Campus Library
Campus: Edinburgh
Audience: All Welcome
Presentation Skills
Date: 25 October 2018
Time: 15:15-16:15
Location: Anderson Room, Edinburgh Campus Library
Campus: Edinburgh
Audience: All Welcome
Finding Patients
Date: 26 October 2018
Time: 12:15-13:15
Location: Anderson Room, Edinburgh Campus Library
Campus: Edinburgh
Audience: All Welcome
See our website for further skills development opportunities
Posted by mirrenmcleod11 on 16 October 2018
https://informs.hw.ac.uk/2018/10/16/power-hours-w-c-22-october-2018/
InformS 