What is your role here at Flinders?
Library Specialist (Scholarly Communication).
What initially drew you to working in the Flinders Library team?
The biggest draw to working both at Flinders and in the Library were one and the same – people and access to knowledge. I was keen to work with students, be based on a lively university campus, help in creating a welcoming atmosphere, and play a role in advocating for equity in access to information. The Library has a great reputation as the place to go if you need help or aren’t sure where to go. I’ve been here for almost nine years, and I try to channel that energy in all my work.
Tell us a bit about how your work helps support Flinders researchers across the journal publishing process.
My work is about supporting researchers to make informed decisions about where they’d like to publish their research, how to navigate open access pathways, and unpacking the wider scholarly communications ecosystem. In practice this looks like lots of talking, lots of coffee, delivering workshops, meeting with researchers, attending Communities of Practice, and liaising with publishers (to name a few!). To break it down even further, my current to-do list includes working on this year’s Open Access Week event, organising a publishing workshop with a Nature editor, and helping to update the University’s Open Access Policy. Essentially, if you want to chat bibliodiversity and responsible open access, I’m your girl.
One of the biggest pieces of work I do is around our Read & Publish agreements, which allow Flinders authors to publish open access without needing to pay an Article Processing Charge. Part of my role is to support researchers to navigate these agreements and the biggest way I do this is by helping to maintain our Read & Publish journal search list, and overseeing our Read & Publish queries.
What has been your career highlight to date?
This is an easy one. Earlier this year I travelled to Darwin and Alice Springs on behalf of the Library with colleagues from the RDS team to deliver the Research Support on the Road program. It was great to meet people in person and get a feel for what it’s like to do research in different areas and what tweaks I can make in how I work so that the support and services we provide are usable and equitable to all Flinders staff, no matter where they are located. I came home completely taken with the Northern Territory and grateful for the colleagues who shared their time with me, and who I was fortunate enough to travel with.
What do you enjoy about working at Flinders?
Great work friends, great walking spots, great atmosphere. The variation and chaos-based nature of my role constantly keeps me on my toes, and being part of a wider team doing some amazing work is incredibly rewarding. The people and different roles that I’m exposed to is a great source of joy – often I’ll be checking a paper’s open access status and find myself down the rabbit hole of some very cool research. I’m tempted almost daily to completely change my career and go back to uni to study something completely different. When I finally work out what I want to do when I grow up, it’ll most certainly be because I bumped into someone interesting in the line for lunch, or read a paper that consumed me.
Tell us about your ideal weekend.
My ideal weekend would be almost wholly dedicated to reading/picking-out/ruminating-on/debating romance novels (four separate hobbies) – preferably in my garden, and with a coffee. I’d encourage frequent interruptions from my kids (aged two and four), with their latest enquiries, which most notably of late include: “when will the sun crash into the earth?” and “do koalas eat people?”.