SAGE recordings of webinars on academic writing and the journal submission process

SAGE has shared the recordings of two useful webinars about academic writing, and the journal submission process for its journals:

Session 1: Preparing your manuscript, using SAGE Research Methods

In this session, we’ll start by considering what high-quality, academic journals are looking for in a publishable research article, and what are the key criteria they will consider. We’ll then focus on the process of academic writing, with helpful strategies and areas of focus to ensure your writing is as good as it can be. Finally, we’ll look at the concept of ‘journal submission guidelines’. You may be wondering, what specific formatting and manuscript rules will my chosen journal expect, and how can I comply with them? We’ll answer this question for you before the session finishes!

Note
This session will include resources from SAGE’s unique library database, SAGE Research Methods, which acts as an invaluable resource for researchers at any stage in their research journey. Participants interested in trying out what they see during the session will be able to sign up for a free 30-day trial to the database, but this is not mandatory for the webinar.

Session 2: Choosing the right journal for your research article

Now that you’re feeling confident about the quality and format of your manuscript, it’s time to submit it – but where? In this session, we’ll look at the criteria you can use to create a journal shortlist suitable for your particular research, and the kinds of things you’ll want to consider. We’ll look at the differences between subscription and Open Access journals, and we’ll introduce you to a cool – and free – tool to help you quickly and easily find potential SAGE journals that match your manuscript title and abstract! We’ll also revisit those journal submission guidelines from the previous session, and give you sneak-peek into what happens once you’ve submitted your paper.

Trial access to the video database JoVE

JoVE is the world-leading producer and provider of science videos with the mission to improve scientific research and education. Millions of scientists, educators and students at thousands of universities, colleges, hospitals and biopharmaceutical companies worldwide use JoVE for their research, teaching and learning.

Trial access contains access to:

JoVE Journal (scientific video journal, peer-reviewed, multi-disciplinary, indexed in PubMed and Web of Science);
JoVE Encyclopedia of Experiments;
JoVE Core (video textbooks which explain concepts taught in undergraduate courses through high-impact animations and real-life experiments);
JoVE Science Education (a video library dedicated to teaching the practice and theory of scientific experiments through engaging and easy-to-understand visual demonstrations);
JoVE Lab Manual (all-in-one solution for teaching undergraduate lab courses through engaging, comprehensive, and curriculum-focused videos for both instructors and students).

The database is available to University users until 31 December, 2022.

Access to standards

An agreement was signed between Vytautas Magnus University and the Lithuanian Standards Board regarding access to the electronic versions of the standard texts. Members of the University community have the right to find and review electronic versions of the standards of Lithuanian Standards Board (hereinafter referred to as “LST e-standards”) through:

Vytautas Magnus University Research Management System (VMU CRIS, vdu.lt/cris; menu – LST);
University Virtual Library (vb.vdu.lt, menu – Standards);

The agreement on access to LST e-standards contains two circumstances, which the University undertakes to ensure:

electronic versions of standards texts are only available to members of the University community, i.e. authenticated users;
authenticated users may not save and / or download electronic versions of the texts of the standards.

The standard is subject to copyright, therefore it is forbidden to copy, reproduce, reprint and distribute the standards – both in full and in part – in any form and by any means (electronic, mechanical, including photocopying, microfilming, etc.). Infringement of this requirement shall result in administrative and criminal liability in accordance with the procedure established by legal acts.

Lithuanian Standards Board grant the right to authenticated users to reproduce up to 50 per cent of the content of the standard in paper or digital form and to use it in teaching materials or for other scientific purposes without the right to distribute it as handouts or by other means. The text of the standard to be reproduced must be accompanied by the remark “Reproduced from [standard designation]” with the permission of Lithuanian Standards Board. Copyright is protected by Lithuanian Standards Board.

Webinar “Citizen Involvement in Open Science: Roles, Levels and Opportunities”

Webinar “Citizen Involvement in Open Science: Roles, Levels and Opportunities” will bring together professional researchers, amateur researchers, librarians and other memory institutions professionals, as well as other interested parties, to explore opportunities for better collaboration and more active involvement of citizens in science related activities and projects.

The LibOCS project team invites You to the international webinar “Citizen Involvement in Open Science: Roles, Levels and Opportunities”. During the webinar the participants will get an idea of one of the most relevant components of open science – citizen science, its various aspects and opportunities to participate in initiatives, projects and activities that promote it. Webinar will be best chance to know more about project LibOCS activities and first results.

Where: Zoom platform (Once you register, you will receive an email with the session details and the link to the online meeting room.)

When: Thursday, May 26th

Time: 15:00 pm EEST (duration ~ 60 min)

Target audience: Staff members from the Baltic universities and research institutes, scientists, doctorate students, lecturers, amateur researchers, implementers of amateur science projects, employees of academic and public libraries and professionals of other memory institutions as well as other interested parties.

Working language: English

Registration is required for this event. REGISTER FOR THIS WEBINAR

Registration information will be used only for the organization of the webinar, and deleted after the event.

The event will be recorded. This recording will then be publicly available on the YouTube channel of the Library of the University of Latvia and LibOCS website. If you do not want your video and audio recordings to be published, you can turn off both your camera and microphone during the entire event.

More information about the project is available on the project website.

The project is implemented by the support of Erasmus+ Strategic Partnership program. Project Number: Nr. 2021-1-EE01-KA220-HED-000031125

Contact details:
Gita Rozenberga
The Library of the University of Latvia
LibOCS project (Latvia)
E-mail: gita.rozenberga[@]lu.lv

VMU Library participates in the Erasmus + project for citizen science research in the Baltic States

In order to develop research on open and citizen science in Lithuania, Vytautas Magnus University Library participates in the Erasmus+ project “University Libraries Strengthening the Academic-Society Connection through citizen science in the Baltic States (LibOCS)”.

The project has started in early 2022 and will run until mid-2024. The initiator of the project is the University of Tartu. The participants of the project are also Tallinn University of Technology (TalTech), the University of Latvia, business partners from Germany (Immer Besser GmbH) and Greece (Web2Learn) and Kaunas University of Technology.

Citizens’ science is one of the activities of the open science movement, where research projects are initiated or carried out with the help of amateur researchers (citizens).

The primary goal of the project is to raise public awareness and involvement in citizen activities in the Baltic countries (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania), to integrate citizen and open science activities in Baltic universities, and to increase knowledge exchange and cooperation between university librarians.

The most important tasks of this project are: 1) to study what encourages and hinders the involvement of citizens in open science activities and to share insights about the activities of academic libraries in citizen science; 2) to initiate and maintain a dialogue between researchers and librarians of higher education institutions in the Baltic countries; 3) to organize trainings aimed at improving the skills of citizen and open science of the academic and library staff of higher education institutions of the Baltic States; 4) develop open access tools for librarians to be available as open educational resources (OER).

More information about the project: VMU Research Management System

SAGE Researcher Webinar Series: preparing for publication

SAGE Publishing is excited to welcome to a virtual event in May, designed to help researchers prepare for publication. These two webinars will cover key topics that will help to select the best journal for the research, optimise the writing of research article, and prepare manuscript for submission.

These will be:

Preparing your manuscript, using SAGE Research Methods – Weds 11th May 11.00 AM

Choosing the right journal for your research article – Weds 18th May 11.00 AM

Please see below link for more information, dates, short description and registration buttons.

https://view.highspot.com/viewer/624c436fffac8dc6abc4ebd8

Free access to eBooks and journals articles on Ukraine and Russia

De Gruyter in partnership with the publishing partners are opening up a curated collection of titles pertaining to Ukraine and Russia. The publishers are offering free access to more than 115 eBooks and 13 journal articles in European History, International Relations, Law, Modern History, Political Science, Slavic Literature, and Sociology to ensure that everyone who is looking for background information on the region and the history of the conflict has the opportunity to educate themselves.

The selected eBook titles and journal articles from 13 renowned academic presses will be available free access until June 30, 2022.

Title list and more information

New version of research management system has been installed

Technologically updated VMU research management system (VMU CRIS) platform has been installed. The updated technological platform is based on the essential achievements – it is a new user interface, implemented in the modern Angular JS platform together with Node JS, system functions REST API, workflow, new archive information unit storage object model. The updated technological platform enables better and more efficient integration both with other University information systems and with external information systems and service delivery platforms, ensures better speed, new content creation opportunities and services provided.

New technological possibilities enable the entire cycle of preparation, uploading, storage and dissemination of the University scientific output to be realized in one platform – VMU CRIS. Re-engineering of the publication database (PDB) was carried out and from 2022 the metadata of scientific output are being prepared in the VMU CRIS platform instead of the previously used library information system ALEPH. Science publications immediately after their metadata are made available to users through both PDB and the subsystem for generating PDB scientific output reports (no need to wait for synchronization). During the cataloguing process, the metadata of scientific publications can be imported from external, world-known systems, such as Clarivate Web of Science, Scopus, PubMed, CrossRef (DOI), ORCID, etc., thus optimizing the process of describing scientific output. The process of submitting scientific output to the archive has also been optimized by using the possibilities of the workflow for submitting new information to the archive, refusing many previously manually performed actions and automating them. Along with CRIS software, all the basic software has also been updated: Linux, PostgreSQL DBMS, Apache Tomcat, Apache Solr, etc. Updating the base software allows better performance and greater security of information on the Internet.

In 2021 VMU CRIS accumulated over 109 thousand University publications, journal articles, studies final works, doctoral dissertations and metadata records of other documents. Publications Database (PDB) contains over 69 thousand (3.8 thousand in 2021) scientific publications, peer-reviewed journal articles, books – over 13 thousand (3.2 thousand in 2021), studies final works, doctoral dissertations (ETD) – over 21 thousand (2.6 thousand in 2021). Nearly 6.7 thousand publications about the former Aleksandras Stulginskis University and Lithuanian University of Education Sciences were transferred to the newly created collection of bibliographical records.

Each year VDU CRIS is enriched with full-text documents. Almost 35 thousand full-text documents (621 e-books, 51 e-journal archive (23 of which are currently published by VMU), over 12 thousand articles, over 21 thousand ETD and 724 other documents and 11 datasets are accumulated in this repository. 84% of these documents are accessible on the Internet, 15% on the Intranet. 71% of the publications and other records accumulated in VMU CRIS are with full-text documents or external links (over 14.6 thousand) to full-texts. The University successfully implements “Open Access Guidelines for Scientific Publications and Research Data of Vytautas Magnus University” approved in 2020, where University open access principles to be followed by researchers are set.

More than 1.5 thousand active scientist profiles have been created in VMU CRIS, almost 44% of which are filled with detailed information about their professional, scientific and pedagogical qualifications, recognition, awards, participation in organizations, guest lectures, subjects taught and other activities. The system has developed descriptions of 664 projects carried out by the University, 139 departments and 44 scientific clusters. The first research data are being collected and stored. Cross-links have been established between publications, scientists, departments, projects and other information units.

In recent years particularly rapid increase of the use and dissemination of VMU CRIS content has been observed. In 2021 VMU CRIS portal was visited by 344 thousand unique users, who made almost 1.2 million views and downloaded almost 2.3 million full-text documents.

New library service platform installed

To improve the infrastructure and material resources necessary for studies and research, the library implemented new generation library services platform Alma (ExLibris), operating on cloud computing basis. This platform replaced the library information system Aleph (ExLibris) used for over 20 years. The transition from one system to another took the whole of 2021 and covered all areas of the library activities and involved all library staff. Preparatory system installation works, data changes in the old system, data migration specifications, new system configuration works, data migration and configuration testing were carried out. Nearly 300 thousand bibliographic records and nearly 1 million copies of items were migrated and nearly 400 thousand holdings were formed. User synchronization with the University systems was made, user data API was programmed, 12.5 thousand active users were loaded. Other platform installation and adaptation works, translation of system interface into Lithuanian, staff training have been carried out. All staff have acquired the necessary qualifications to work with the system, two employees have obtained system administration certificates. The new service platform was launched on 20 December 2021

Publishers for Ukraine | Ukraine Digital Book Collection

Exact Editions is providing access to a digital collection of non-fiction books related to the history and culture of Ukraine in support of the Ukrainian people during these difficult times.

The collection currently contains 18 books from Yale University Press, Edinburgh University Press, Reaktion, Hurst, Central European University Press, Cambridge Scholars Publishing and Open Book Publishers. The books are written by specialists in European history, Russian studies, political science, Islamic history, art and film. Access the Books now

Freely available online until April 15th 2022.