Themed Collections promote UCL Research

ScienceOpen has worked with its partner, UCL Press, to create themed collections that bring together research by University College London (UCL)-affiliated authors. These collections promote the University’s research output in a unique and interactive format and are accessible on the newly launched UCL Research Collections webpage and can also be found directly through ScienceOpen’s discovery platform. The collections are powered by ScienceOpen, utilizing the collection infrastructure of the platform. The research collections bring together thousands of records of UCL-authored published articles, pre-prints, book chapters, conference proceedings, working papers and reports from a global database into specific themes that are easily explorable in a user-friendly interface.  

With the shift to open access, the library’s role in curating knowledge is also expanding. UCL has been at the forefront of experimenting with new tools and ScienceOpen is very proud to be working with them to create new kinds of flexible, interactive research collections within our discovery environment. We look forward to expanding this partnership and working with more university libraries this year.

Stephanie Dawson, ScienceOpen CEO

The UCL COVID-19 Research Collection

The first themed collection was launched in 2020 to collate UCL’s COVID-19 research and serves as a space to collect all UCL records for research on the pandemic into one place. With over 1,000 publications listed receiving over 23,000 views, the collection continues to grow as new content is added. This collection automatically updates by pulling in records from the institutional repository, UCL Discovery, and affiliation metadata from records aggregated by the ScienceOpen platform. The automated setup easily manages the stream of new COVID-19 material being published and opens it up for exploration and interaction. To read more about the creation of the UCL COVID-19 Research Collection, go here.

The UCL Sustainable Development-Related Research Collections

As well as the collection of all UCL’s COVID-19 research outputs, a second collection of UCL sustainable development-related research launched in December 2020. Divided into the 17 separate United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), users can view UCL research related to each of the goals and filter each collection by keywords, date of publication, Altmetric score, or other options. The UCL SDG collections can be accessed from UCL’s new SDG website that highlights a range of activity at UCL in support of the SDGs, which went live last autumn.  

The collections demonstrate the vast and diverse amount of research at UCL that is helping to achieve the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). It should also facilitate future collaborations by helping researchers to identify others across UCL’s different disciplines who are working to solve similar challenges related to the SDGs.

Simon Knowles, Head of Coordination (SDGs), UCL Press

Collecting Relevant Research through Metadata

Each themed collection uses metadata (catalogue descriptions) to pull in research from a range of outlets—from traditional commercial journals to pre-print servers. Where the research is open access, the platform makes the full text of the publication available. Further UCL research collections are in development and will be announced in the near future, so stay tuned!  

If you are interested in utilizing ScienceOpen’s collection infrastructure to create thematic, flexible, & interactive research collections within our discovery environment for your own library or institution, get in touch with either Stephanie Dawson (stephanie.dawson@scienceopen.com) or Stuart Cooper (stuart.cooper@scienceopen.com) today!