'A truly exciting time' | Research Information

"Danny Kingsley, deputy director at Cambridge University Library, looks back at her early days at Australian National University – and forward to the many challenges facing librarians...

My PhD looked at why researchers overwhelmingly said that open access was a good idea, yet only 10 to 15 per cent of research was openly available. My findings (spoiler alert) were that disciplinary differences are incredibly important and that whatever solution you offer to the research community will need to be easy to use, not the risk status quo and demonstrate clear improvement to, and greater benefit than, the current system. (I’m not sure we have cracked that, by the way.)...

One of the advantages of working at Cambridge has been that it provides a huge stage: rightly or wrongly, what happens at Cambridge is big news. So we have been able to accelerate progress across the sector by acting openly, transparently and inclusively....

The nine strong open access team [at U of Cambridge] process more than 1,000 articles a month into our institutional repository, and answer thousands of queries from our research community. ...

[T]he significant focus on open access and, increasingly, open research, potentially puts the library once more at the heart of the institution...."