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Sally Rumsey

cOAlition S OA Expert / JISC

Sally Rumsey is Jisc’s cOAlition S OA Expert. She was, until Dec 2019, Head of Scholarly Communications & RDM, Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford. From 2006 she managed the University’s repository service for research outputs, Oxford University Research Archive (ORA and ORA-Data https://ora.ox.ac.uk), advised on scholarly communications, and drafted University policies and documents about open access. She liaised with Oxford researchers to define library support requirements for Open Scholarship.

Sally is a member of the UKSCL (Scholarly Communications Licence) group and represented Oxford University on LERU (League of European Universities) OA Info-Group. Recent presentations include numerous about cOAlition S Rights Retention Strategy. She was previously e-Services Librarian and manager of the repository at the London School of Economics.

 

Sally, what’s the biggest challenge you have encountered during your Open Access journey?

Accepting that change in attitudes and habitual practice takes time – for example, open access to research findings which, 16 years ago was a new idea to many researchers, but is now commonly accepted. With such experience, I am confident the same will happen before long with authors’ habitually retaining their rights to use their own works immediately.

If you could have any superpower, which one would you choose and why?

Not strictly a superpower – but it seems like it when watching the professionals: I’d really love to be able to dance like the pros: classical ballet, the jive, or, my absolute favourite, tap dancing!