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Mo Can Do

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Thinking of growing a moustache? November, or Movember, is the ideal time, as your mo can play an important role in promoting men’s health (it can look good, too).

Conceived in Melbourne in 2003 to raise funds for prostate cancer research, Movember is now an international movement and the leading global organisation tackling prostate cancer, testicular cancer, and male suicide and other mental health issues.

Not thinking of growing a moustache? There are other ways you can take part in Movember to help men live happier, healthier, longer lives.

If you’re interested in learning more about the history of Movember, watch this entertaining TED Talk by the movement’s co-founder Adam Garone – just one of numerous moustache-related resources available through QUT Library.

 

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November 11 is Remembrance Day

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November 11 is Remembrance Day, which commemorates those who lost their lives in war, conflict and military service for Australia.

Traditionally, a silence is observed at 11am on the 11th of November, which comes from the “the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month”: the time and date that the armistice between the Allies and Germany ended the First World War in 1918.

Remembrance Day is also observed in other nations, sometimes by another name like Memorial Day or Veterans Day.  The day is observed in the USA, Commonwealth countries including Canada, New Zealand, South Africa and many Caribbean nations, France, Belgium and Serbia.

Originally known as Armistice Day, Remembrance Day was first meant to commemorate those who died in WWI. But since WWII, the day came to include people who had died in later wars too.

Remembrance Day traditions generally focus on members of the armed forces and military who died in conflict, but other people may be commemorated too. Casualties of conflict or peacekeeping missions include civilian nurses and medical staff, members of auxiliary services (including women’s auxiliaries), humanitarian volunteers, war correspondents and police officers assisting in peacekeeping activities.

Red poppy flowers are used in Remembrance Day traditions, and are a common symbol of commemoration of those killed in conflict. Red poppies grew in the churned-up soil of the Western Front in WWI, and their bright red colour eerily evoked the spilled blood of fallen soldiers.

Remembrance Day ceremonies commonly include the Last Post bugle call, which was used on the battlefield to announce the end of the day’s activities and the time for sleep. It is now also used at remembrance ceremonies and military funerals to signify that the soldier’s duty has ended and they can rest in peace.

Take a moment to view the display at the Kelvin Grove Library on level 3 (pictured above) and feel free to borrow any displayed items.

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Get your game on!

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International Games Week 2019 - November 3-9 It’s time for International Games Week (IGW). IGW is an initiative “…around the world to reconnect communities through their libraries around the educational, recreational, and social value of all types of games.” https://games.ala.org/international-games-week/

Personally, I love playing games. Not with people’s feelings and emotions, but with a board and some tokens or some cards, or a bat and ball. I like games I play on my mobile device too, but not as much as the ones I play face to face. I love the strategizing where I’m trying to be the best zombie killer, the cooperative games where I’m helping to stop a pandemic from wiping out the world and the storyteller, who’s taking my character through a series of challenges imagined by the castle-master. I enjoy the team games like Pictionary or Charades that test my creativity and quick thinking and the more active ones like table tennis (I know that this is an Olympic sport, but the way my friends and I play, it’s a game) or Marco Polo (for those of you who don’t know what this is, see here for a definition/rules for game play). I’m not always the best player but I’m always willing to have a go.

QUT Library gets involved in the action too. At all the Libraries there are games to help you get your mind off your exam prep, relax a little and enjoy a bit of socialisation, ready for the next study session. The Law Library has chess, KG Library has giant Jenga and table tennis (Ping Pong) and GP Library has table tennis too! If the digital games really are more your thing, you can borrow Xbox or Playstation games to take home or use the Games Lab if you’re at KG Library. See which games are available in Library Search.  So get your game on and get those endorphins flowing!

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Exam time in the Library

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Exam time already and the library is here to help 

The library is the ideal place to study and is open extended hours again during Swot Vac and Exams.

Gardens Point and Kelvin Grove Library opening hours

  • Monday – Saturday: 7am-2am
  • Sunday: 9am-2am.
  • Both Libraries will close at 10pm on Friday 15 November.

The Law Library has normal opening hours

  • Monday -Thursday: 8am-10pm
  • Friday: 8am-8pm
  • Saturday – Sunday: 10am-5pm

More detailed information about the Library extended opening hours and services can be found here

Research and referencing support is still available, particularly useful if you have any assessment extensions

Gardens Point and Kelvin Grove both have Drop in sessions, check here for times and places.

Students can also book individual sessions for help with researching and referencing, appointments can be booked here.

More information about support services can be found on your Digital Workplace/HiQ

A couple of last minute exam tips:

 

 

Good luck from everyone here at the QUT Library!

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Five Open Access Tips for 21st century researchers: Tip #5 Access Open Research

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This #OAWeek we are introducing five tips on how to make your research open and find open research. Yesterday we looked at growing your impact with QUT ePrints. Today we’re looking at accessing open research.

What would you do if your library subscription access was suddenly cut off?  How would you continue your research?

Hopefully you’ll always have somewhere to work that has access to subscription databases, but the prospect is frightening, and a stark reminder that much of the world’s publicly funded research is locked behind oppressive publisher paywalls.

Don’t panic, help is at hand, and this Open Access week, if you haven’t already,  have a look at some of the world’s biggest Open Access content curators unpaywall.org, openaccessbutton.org and CORE.

Unpaywall is an open database of almost 25 million scholarly articles harvested from more than 50,000 publishers and repositories.  You can install it onto your browser and it will find open versions of articles, wherever they are.

CORE is the world’s biggest collection of open access research with more than 135 million papers from around the world.  Its mission is to facilitate free unrestricted access to research by aggregating all open access research from repositories and journals.

Open Access Button is a research finder providing instant delivery of open access articles from open sources or direct from authors. It also has a browser extension.

So take note of these tools and access open research – if you no longer have access to our extensive databases!

 

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Five Open Access Tips for 21st century researchers: Tip #4 Grow your impact with QUT ePrints

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This #OAWeek we are introducing five tips on how to make your research open and find open research. Yesterday we looked at publishing wisely, and today’s tip is Grow you impact with QUT ePrints.

QUT ePrints is our institutional repository of research outputs, showcasing the research of QUT staff and postgraduate students. It was established in 2003, when QUT endorsed the world’s first institutional open access policy. Last year QUT ePrints celebrated a truly momentous occasion, surpassing 25 million downloads. The 25th millionth download, a law article by Professor Rosalind Mason, exemplifies this year’s OA Week theme, Open for whom: Equity in Open Knowledge, with the download coming from Namibia.

QUT ePrints now hosts close to 100,000 works which have been downloaded nearly 28 million times! Depositing records and full text is the most important way that QUT researchers can comply with QUT’s open access policy and that of the two big Australian funders — all for free.  But more than that, QUT’s repository allows anyone anywhere to access your research. And if your research is more likely to be discovered and read, your research is more likely to be cited

QUT ePrints allows anyone anywhere to access your research.

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Five Open Access Tips for 21st century researchers: Tip #3 Publish wisely

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During #OAWeek we have been introducing five Open Access tips for 21st Century Researchers. Today we are taking a look at Tip #3: Publish wisely.

Tools and repositories such as Think Check Submit, the Directory of Open Access Journals and OpenDOAR can help you identify trusted journals for your research.

Think Check Submit takes the guess work out of where to publish. Through a range of tools and practical resources, Think Check Submit helps researchers identify trusted journals for their research. It aims to educate researchers, promote integrity, and build trust in credible research and publications.

The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is a community-curated online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals. It contains just under 14,000 journals, containing over 4,372,000 articles. DOAJ allows you to search by subject, publisher, or licence type. The Directory aims to increase the visibility and ease of use of open access academic journals—regardless of size and country of origin—thereby promoting their visibility, usage and impact.

OpenDOAR, the Directory of Open Access Repositories, is a global directory of Open Access repositories and their policies. Launched in 2005, it enables the identification, browsing and search for repositories, based on a range of features, such as location, software or type of material held. OpenDOAR provides access to more than 4,300 different repositories from all over the world.

If you have any questions about strategic publishing, feel free to contact your Liaison Librarian or the Library Research Support Team at library.research@qut.edu.au

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Five Open Access Tips for 21st century researchers: Tip #2

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Open your work with a Creative Commons Licence

 

This #OAWeek we are introducing five tips on how to make your research open and find open research. Yesterday we looked at ORCiD; today’s tip is Open your work with a Creative Commons licence.

Open Access is the free, online availability of research outputs with reuse rights. This is where Creative Commons (CC) licences come in. An open licence is the difference between research outputs being available for free on the internet and being free to reuse. A CC licence shows how a work can be reused, how it can be distributed, adapted, remixed, built upon, or commercialised.

If you are publishing your research in an Open Access journal, you will retain the rights to reuse your own work. If you are handing over your copyright to the publisher of a subscription journal however, consider first publishing your images, figures, tables, or other supplementary material with a CC licence. This will allow you to reuse these research outputs in other publications, without the need to seek permission from the publisher. Researchers Sara Hanzi and Hans Straka have written about how they went about publishing their images of tadpoles and froglets with a CC licence on figshare.

Remember, open access accelerates the pace of discovery by exposing research findings to a wider audience. By harnessing the power of networks to share research findings with practitioners who can apply the new knowledge, open access also accelerates the translation of research into benefits for the public.

You can read more about Open access and CC licences on the Creative Commons Australia website here: https://creativecommons.org.au/open-access/.

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Five Open Access tips for 21st century researchers: Tip #1

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It’s #OAWeek and we’ll be introducing a set of key tools for researchers throughout the week. To kick it off we’re talking about researcher identifiers, specifically ORCiD.  These Identifiers – basically the essential descriptive metadata of a researcher – will be become increasingly important as open access evolves into a longer-term vision of open scholarship – a future that could be summed up as an interconnected, equitable, global scholarly ecosystem of well-curated, interoperable, trusted research articles, data and software supported by a diversity of open publishing models.

ORCiD, and other identifiers are now the key connectors of research to researchers. More than 7 million researchers globally have an ORCiD. Here, more than 2000 researchers have an ORCiD associated with QUT. We use it to link QUT researchers to their work in online systems.

ORCiD can do much more than just link traditional research to researchers. It can link researchers to other scholarly activities, such as reviews. When kept up to date, it’s a living record of all a researcher’s academic activities. And there is a link to equity – this year’s theme of OAweek. By providing a unique, global identifier, it ensures that everyone, everywhere, no matter how common or rare their name, can be equally visible.

And because it’s such a powerful connector, it has been integrated into a number of tools, including this one by Adrian Barnett, which can format publication lists and even show which ones are open access. Give your ORCiD a little love this #OAweek.

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Anti-Poverty Week

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Anti-Poverty Week 13 – 19 of October 

Anti-Poverty Week supports the Australian community to have an increased understanding of poverty and to take action collectively to end it.

For more information about poverty in Australia visit the Anti-Poverty website.

QUT library also has a large number of resources about poverty and you can check them out here.

Seek help @ QUT

If you find yourself in need of financial assistance while you’re studying with QUT, we offer a number of support services to help get you through, just click here.

The QUT Guild Foodbank can also provide basic food items to get you through, they stock non-perishable items, fresh fruit and veg and hygiene products.