Senior Scholarly Communications Assistant

Job description
Job summary

If you believe progressive, transparent and accountable research practices can transform the way research evidence is used in society, come join the Library Services Scholarly Communications Management team at Imperial College London as we foster a research culture that recognises and incentivises those practices.

As Senior Scholarly Communications Assistant, you will primarily contribute to the successful delivery of our research data management (RDM) service, working daily with academic staff and researchers. You will build engagement with the service and provide advice and guidance to the College’s research community across all our campuses, assisting the Research Data Manager. RDM is critical to the data transparency in open research, and you will be helping researchers draw up data management plans and advocating good practice.

You will help equip researchers with an understanding of Open Research (OR) principles and the confidence to embed OR practices into their work, assisting the Open Research Manager: Academic Engagement. In 2023, you will support researcher engagement with the university’s innovative institutional rights retention policy and development of the Open Research network, Advocacy and training related to OR will be a significant part of this role, and you will get experience of supporting responsible metrics, open access publishing and copyright literacy.

Duties and responsibilities

You will help academic and research staff to manage their research, publication outputs and research data in accordance with open principles, including:

• advising on data management planning
• helping academic and research staff and students in making research data and publication outputs openly available
• managing workflows for the curation of and deposit of relevant metadata to the College’s data and outputs repositories
• answering academic and research staff enquiries
• delivering relevant training for library and other research support staff and academics/researchers
• creating advocacy materials for Open Research assisting in reporting on scholarly communications activities for internal and external audiences

Open research practice includes open access publishing, open data, open methodology, open source, open peer review and open educational resources, and you should have the opportunity to learn more about all these aspects.

Essential requirements

You will have experience of working in an academic environment, preferably within higher education. You will have excellent administrative skills, with experience of using Excel, and working with statistical data. A good team player, with excellent customer service and communication skills, you will be able to assist in developing and delivering training. You may have advocacy or outreach experience, and any knowledge of scholarly communications and Open Research, such as open access publishing, research data management, copyright and/or bibliometrics will be valued but not essential for application.

If you have experience in other areas such as open access and copyright; reproducibility and transparency; research culture; recognition, metrics and incentives; research visibility and impact; or communications and engagement, this diverse role could be for you.

Further information

This is a full-time, open-ended post.

The supporting statement section should set out how your qualifications, experience and training meet each of the selection criteria. Please provide one or more paragraphs addressing each criterion. The supporting statement is an essential part of the selection process and thus a failure to provide this information will mean that the application will not be considered. An answer to any of the criteria such as “Please see attached CV” will not be considered acceptable.

The College has a Race Equality Charter action plan in place, running initially for 3 years from 2021, receiving the bronze award in November 2021. There are several staff representation networks: 

The Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) Centre provides advice, guidance and training for all staff to raise awareness of equality, diversity and inclusion, with senior leadership support including that of the Assistant Provost for EDI.  

Library Services have hosted internal staff events focussed on the topic decolonising and what that means for libraries and library staff.  

• There is an active online channel where staff share readings and events.  
• Library staff have worked with colleagues on a visualisation tool to raise awareness of geographic bias in reading lists, and in 2022 began co-teaching a workshop which encourages discussion of reading lists and the curriculum for academic and teaching staff.
• Library staff work with Imperial As One to support and maintain the Imperial As One reading list. 

Library staff are actively encouraged to attend external and internal training and development events on equality, diversity and inclusion.  

• There are internal talent development programmes: IMPACT for Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic staff or those who identify as being from a minority ethnic group, and Calibre for staff who identify as neurodiverse or disabled, or who have a long term physical or mental health condition.  
• The Imperial Essentials staff training programme includes a key module on equality, diversity and inclusion. 

Should you require any further details on the role please contact: Wayne Peters – [email protected]

The College is currently trialling a Work Location Framework until early 2023.  Hybrid working may be considered for this role and the role holder may be expected to work 60% or more of their time onsite, with 40% the minimum time spent onsite.  The opportunity for hybrid working will be discussed at interview.

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