Durham Research Online’s new home: Worktribe Outputs

In early August, after seemingly never-ending preparations, meetings, and putting together of guidance and process reviews, the Open Research team were able to go live with our brand new services on Worktribe. The Outputs module and the new repository platform for Durham Research Online will allow us to support our academic colleagues right through their research process – from ensuring researchers are compliant with requirements from the University and their funding bodies when they have research accepted for publication, to making that research as widely accessible as possible, often to people who may not be able to access it otherwise.

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Gary Bankhead and the River Wear Assemblage at the Museum of Archaeology

A post by Gemma Lewis, Curator (Museum of Archaeology and Biosciences)

Since 2008, Gary Bankhead has been diving under Elvet Bridge in Durham City, bringing to the surface over 13,500 objects. The objects date from the 12th century to the modern day, although the majority date to the 17th century. The objects range from dentures to pilgrim badges, and from a toy of Homer Simpson to Tudor buttons. The collection has been described as ‘a major research facility, probably the largest collection of late- and post-medieval finds in the North of England: a unique regional/national resource’. In 2010, Gary created the Dive into Durham project, to research, catalogue and display this important assemblage of objects. To date, Gary has uncovered 454 buttons, 36 pieces of ammunition, 329 buckles, 344 cloth seals, 512 (pre-decimal) coins, 149 trade tokens, 3,459 brass pins, and many more objects. The numbers are staggering, but it is not the quantity that it is important, it is the potential of these objects to change our understanding of the history of Durham.

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Durham Research Online: Our 2022 Twitter Highlights

By Martin Gleghorn, Repository Coordinator

One of our favourite parts of the job is getting to shout about the amazing research we see Durham academics doing, so we thought we’d have a look back at some of our highlights from the past year from our Twitter account – give us a follow @DRODurham. Some of these articles were published during 2022; others we were able to make fully available in DRO for the first time; some we just felt were particularly interesting and relevant to what was going on in the world that day…

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Open Access Week 2022: A Conversation with Beyza Ustun

As part of our recent Open Access Week celebrations, Beyza Ustun, a final year PhD student from Durham’s Psychology Department, kindly spared time to discuss her recent research with the Open Research Team. Beyza’s PhD research focuses on the effects of prenatal flavour exposure on fetal and infant behaviours.

Your recent piece of research ‘Flavor sensing in Utero and Emerging Discriminative Behaviors in the Human Fetus’, has recently gained a lot of attention on the news, blogs, and social media. How would you summarise this piece of research in a nutshell?

We have shown the first direct evidence that babies react differently to various smells and tastes while in the womb by looking at their facial expressions. We found that the “laughter-face” facial reaction was significantly more often seen when exposed to carrot and the “cry-face” reaction when exposed to kale. This shows that fetuses in the last 3 months of pregnancy are mature enough to distinguish different flavours transferred from the maternal diet.

Image shows the “change in the fetus’ expression to “laughter-face” after tasting carrot.
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Open Access Week 2022: A Conversation with Nayanika Mookherjee

On Monday 17th October, Nayanika Mookherjee, Anthropology met with Kelly Hetherington, Repository Officer, to talk about her research – shortly before heading to India for a research trip.  She talks to us in detail about her research and some of the Open Access Publications that have resulted… including an Open Access graphic novel and film.

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Open Access Week 2022 – A Conversation with Jeremy Schmidt: Associate Professor, Department of Geography

A post by Katie Skellett, Open Access Publications Officer

What is Open Access Week? Open Access Week is a global event, aimed at promoting and informing the academic and research community about the benefits of open access. Open Access is the free & immediate online access to the results of scholarly research, and the granting of rights to share, use and re-use those results.

You can see other Open Access Week activity at Durham University by following our blog here

You can also find out more about Open Access at Durham University here.

Remember: any full text research publication you access from Durham Research Online, an author at Durham has made the effort to ensure that research is available for free to anyone, with the assistance of colleagues from Durham University Library and Collections, and departmental administrative staff across the University.

As some readers might already know, the theme of Open Access Week 2022 is ‘Open for Climate Justice’.

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‘Making a Difference at Durham’ event

On Thursday 15 September, University Library and Collections staff attended the first ‘Making a Difference at Durham’ event. This was a chance for colleagues from across the University to come together to engage in discussions and hear about the range of resources, activities and benefits the University has to offer. For many staff, this was the first time they had seen colleagues from other areas of the University in person since the pandemic. 

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Learning about ULC’s Learning and Engagement Team

By Kelly Hetherington, Repository Officer at University Library and Collections.

On Wednesday 11 May, the University Library and Collections Learning and Engagement Team invited staff from the rest of our vast department to come and learn about what they do on their team.

Seeing as my role involves so much computer work, I jumped at the chance to have a trip out for the following reasons:

  • The session was held at the Oriental Museum – a lovely change of scene from home working / Bill Bryson Library office because it is full of fascinating artefacts.
  • Our colleagues there regularly hold sessions for school children.  This means they are fun, engaging, and lovely so I knew the session would be interesting and I’d learn something new.
  • This was a session about ‘object centred engagement’ – we’d be able to touch real life old artefacts! (More on this later).
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The Triple A project: how open access research is helping children

Every month, statistics about Durham Research Online (DRO) – our institutional publications repository – are published here. As part of this, we pick a publication of the month.

In November, there was an online talk given by members of the Department of Psychology’s Centre for Neurodiversity and Development about their project: Triple-A: Attention, Arousal and Anxiety in the classroom. The project draws attention to the fact that classrooms are busy, noisy and multi-sensory places and some children, often those who are ‘neurodivergent’ (e.g. have conditions such as autism), can face difficulties in this environment. The project is dedicated to raising awareness of these difficulties and helping develop tools to support children and educators. The talk was recorded and is available here. To celebrate the public talk, we picked a fully open access article, related to the research:

Distraction, distress and diversity : exploring the impact of sensory processing differences on learning and school life for pupils with autism spectrum disorders by Elizabeth K. Jones, Mary Hanley and Deborah M. Riby

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