Category: College News & Updates

Imperial staff and students have full access to Overton

Following the College-wide trial for Overton, Imperial has now subscribed to the product.

All staff and students have full access to Overton. If you are within Imperial’s IP range, you will be able to browse Overton and see policy documents without logging in. However, we encourage to create a personal account to use all Overton’s functionalities. Get in touch with Yusuf Ozkan (y.ozkan@imperial.ac.uk) to request the registration link.

We will arrange a walkthrough session with the Overton team and let you know once the date is confirmed. In the meantime, you can check out the following resources:

1) A short video introducting Overton

2) Getting Started  section on Overton’s Knowledge Base to help get users oriented to the platform

3) You can also sign up to Overton’s newsletter  which contains new features and other useful information for users.

Overton is a policy document database and helps find the impact of academic research outputs within policy documents. It facilitates searches for policy documents, guidelines, think tank publications, and working papers. The product collects data from nearly 200 countries in various languages. Overton also tracks the impact of research outputs on policy by identifying references, people, and organisations. It reveals where research articles are cited or mentioned in policy documents.

You can contact Yusuf Ozkan, Research Outputs Analyst (y.ozkan@imperial.ac.uk) for your questions.
—

Societal Engagement Reading Group

Are you interested in public engagement or outreach? You’re invited to join the Societal Engagement Reading Group as we discuss papers and articles exploring current thinking around public engagement, schools outreach and other related areas. Meeting regularly throughout the year (every 6 weeks), this reading group is open to all members of Imperial staff and doctoral students to have a friendly discussions about the chosen reading for the meeting and our work. Our next meeting is on Wednesday 07/02/2024.

Engagement or outreach practitioners and those who are keen to embed public engagement/outreach within their work may find this group particularly useful, as it’s an opportunity to reflect on the evidence base for engagement and draw from research to inform our practice.

  • We meet online via Teams, with occasional meetings in-person with invited speakers.
  • Readings are shared at least a month before each meeting but if you don’t have time to read it all, you are still welcome to join us and take part in the conversation.
  • Group members are encouraged to suggest readings and are welcome to volunteer to facilitate discussions (if they would like to).

If you would like to join the group and be included in calendar invites and Teams links for upcoming meetings, please complete this short form.

If you have any questions or would like to know more, please contact us and check out our webpage for more details

Upload your research seminar through Cassyni, for free

Cassyni is a platform for universities to organise, run, and publish online seminars in which researchers talk about their latest work. Seminar recordings are enhanced using Cassyni’s proprietary AI technology to produce high quality transcripts, extract slides, and resolve references to scholarly works contained in the talk, linking seminars to the wider scholarly literature. The enhanced recording is then published with a DOI making it part of the scholarly record.  

Funded through the Imperial Experience Project, in 2023-2024, the Graduate School is piloting a collaboration with Cassyni, to provide all Imperial PhD students the opportunity to publish a seminar about their research, for free, helping to increase the impact and visibility of their work and build research connections.

Once published your seminar will receive a citable DOI giving you another research output to add to your academic CV, helping you to stand out to future employers and increasing the impact of your research.

Find out more and access the dedicated Imperial sign-up portal

Apply for the Imperial Award

The improved Imperial Award is open to all students at Imperial, and can help you:

  • Develop practical self-reflection skills
  • Improve your ability to pitch yourself to various audiences
  • Gain a formal recognition from the College

The Imperial Award is designed to help you make the most of your experiences while at University by reflecting on them against the skills (attributes) valued by employers, and the wider community (such as leadership, problem solving and creativity).

Graduate School course mapping to Imperial Award

The following course mapping has been made by the tutors and programme leads for the Graduate School courses to highlight courses that may assist in recognising and developing attributes for the Imperial Award.

This list is not exhaustive but allows those attending these courses to consider the highlighted attribute when preparing their submission for the Imperial Award.

***

“Imperial award gives you the opportunity to realise how much you’ve gone through, reflect on yourself, and more importantly makes you passionate to do more and make a difference! Being recognised not only by your educational achievements but also by your life experiences is something very unique and wonderful.” – PGT IA Achiever (2020)

Find out more

Advice, support and funding for publishing open access books

We recommend that authors ask fellow academics in their department for discipline-specific advice on where to publish monographs and edited collections. For authors with a particular interest in publishing open access, the Directory of Open Access Books is a good resource for finding trusted publishers, and can be searched by subject, language, and publisher.

If you are funded by one of the research councils that make up UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), their new Open Access Policy requires that monographs, books chapters and edited collections agreed with publishers from 1 January 2024 are made open access with a Creative Commons licence within 12 months of publication. This can be via a publisher’s website, platform or a repository, such as Spiral. Please contact the Open Access team (openaccess@imperial.ac.uk) for more information if this applies to you.

If you hold a grant from the Wellcome Trust, their policy requires that you approach them about making any books or book chapters you author available from NCBI Bookshelf and Europe PMC. Where an open access publishing fee has been charged, works should be immediately available without embargo and licensed to support their re-use, preferably with a CC BY licence.