NHSF Chairman’s Report 2016

At the Research Strategy Summit in Stirling on 10 November NHSF Chairman, Alastair McCapra, reported on activity in 2016, highlighting the good progress that has already been made against many of NHSF’s goals for 2016-17. A summary of this report is given below.

Open access:  Earlier this year the Forum adopted a policy in favour of open access publication.  We’ve backed it up by creating a Gold Open Access Fund which will pay for up to six papers a year to be immediately made free to access on publication.  We announced this at a public meeting at which the Shadow Minister for Culture and the Digital Economy, Chi Onwurah MP was our main speaker.  

Effective use of infrastructure: We have continued to expand our Kit Catalogue, the list of equipment which member institutions are willing to share or lend to others.  This keeps the cost of heritage science research down and promotes new partnerships between members of the Forum. This year we have supplemented the catalogue with a checklist to aid the preparation of a Memorandum of Understanding to support shared use and loans, if members have need of one.  

Policy: We corresponded with ministers about the potential impact of Brexit on heritage science, urging the government to make a firm commitment that all heritage science research projects currently supported by EU programmes should be funded through to their natural completion.  We also contributed evidence to the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee’s enquiry on the same subject.  

Research Strategy: We held our national research strategy summit in Stirling on 10 November.  This considered the top priorities for future research against the backdrop of the existing National Heritage Science Strategy and our more recent ‘Filling the Gaps’ report. It asked for contributions to the priorities to inform NHSF’s work in 2017 and beyond.

Wikipedia: Lastly, we’ve agreed a partnership with Wikimedia UK which aims to significantly improve the number and quality of Wikipedia articles on heritage science, as well as adding images, datasets and other assets to other wiki sites. This is a piece of work we are beginning in 2016 and will continue over the coming year.