This half-hour session will include the following two short talks:
Developing scholarly communications support staff: a collaborative approach (Helen Dobson) The number of scholarly communications support roles in Higher Education Institutions has increased significantly over recent years and this has happened without a blueprint for developing staff to carry out their responsibilities. Roles vary across the sector and most development happens "on the job". The Scholarly Communication Competencies Coalition (SC3) is a group of representatives from UK universities and professional associations - including ARMA, the British Library, Jisc, RLUK, UKSG, UK-CORR, CORE, CILIP, SCONUL and Vitae - that was formed in 2017 to consider how a collaborative approach could address this issue. SC3 meets quarterly and has delivered a number of interactive workshops at national and international events. Through these activities, the group has been working to coordinate skills-development opportunities provided by member organisations, and to create resources that will be useful for managers in hiring and developing staff, or as career pathway guidance for individuals who already work in this area or who are interested in doing so. This presentation will outline the work of SC3 so far and will introduce the key outputs to date.
The Jisc RDM toolkit: moving from a national focus to international collaboration (Andrea Chiarelli) This talk will describe the Jisc Research Data Management (RDM) toolkit, an open resource targeted at research support staff, IT specialists and researchers from all disciplines and career stages. The toolkit is intended as a signposting tool that the research data community can use to educate itself on the basics of RDM, open science and open research, and also to identify new topics of interest. Content is updated on a quarterly basis to ensure that it is current, and the web design is continually assessed to ensure that it meets user requirements.
The toolkit represents collaboration at a variety of levels. It can help to foster collaboration between the various resources that it links. Additionally, it encourages the community to work together in order to build shared knowledge and expertise, which may have the effect of reducing the need for individual resources and therefore allow staff to spend their time on other things rather than creating RDM training material. Finally, we are managing the toolkit through international collaboration in the form of a working group with twenty experts from the UK, USA, Australia and Iran. In this talk, we will share our experience of working together to develop this community resource and we hope to hear feedback on how we can take this resource to the next level.
