Information Science

Profile

I am a senior lecturer in the Department of Information Science at Loughborough University. My research has been focused on the disciplinary shaping of scholarly communication and digital scholarship. I recently led the PEER funded Behavioural Research project investigating the perceptions, motivations and behaviours of authors and users in relation to open access repositories. Other recent relevant research activities include being a co-investigator on a Research Information Network (RIN) funded project investigating the publication and dissemination behaviour of researchers and also on a JISC funded project measuring the benefits of open access to publicly funded research data in the UK.

I received my Ph.D. in Information Science in 2003 from the University of Brighton and since then have held postdoctoral research fellowships at the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, Amsterdam, and in the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina, Chapel-Hill. Before joining the Department of Information Science I was a research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute.

Research

I have led the Scholarly Communications research group in the Department of Information Science at Loughborough University since 2009. My current areas of research are concerned with scholarly communication; domain analysis; digital scholarship; Open Science; e-Research; genre analysis; and researchers' information behaviours.

Recent research funding:

• PEER Behavioural Research: Authors and users vis-à-vis journals and repositories. Aims to investigate the role of publicly available repositories in scholarly communication, with a special focus on researchers' perceptions of repositories, and their attitudes towards using them. Part of the EU funded PEER project, the project started in April 2009 and ended in September 2011. The Final Report can be found at: http://www.peerproject.eu/fileadmin/media/reports/PEER_D4_final_report_29SEPT11.pdf.
• Identifying benefits arising from the curation and open sharing of research data produced by UK Higher Education and research institutes. Funded by JISC the project ran from June to October 2008. The final report is available at: (http://ie-repository.jisc.ac.uk/279/)

Publication and Dissemniation Behaviour of Researchers and the Influence of Research Assessment. Funded by RIN, in conjunction with JISC, the project ran from January to August 2009. The Final Report ‘Communicating knowledge: How and why UK researchers publish and disseminate their findings’ is available at: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/publications/communicatingknowledgereport.pdf

Current PhD projects in the area of scholarly communication and digital scholarship:

Patrícia Rocha Bello Bertin - Information governance for the agricultural research sector in Brazil – funded by Embrapa (Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation).

Catherine Eastwood - Research article abstracts in the social sciences: a genre-based analysis – AHRC Studentship.

Winnie Tam - Disciplinary information practices and data curation: a study of music and sociology –AHRC Studentship.

Lesley Chikoore  - The influence of disciplinary practice on the viability of open science – AHRC Studentship.

PhD research topics

External activities

• Fellow of the Higher Education Academy
• Member of the Programme Committee, ASIS&T European Workshop, Turku, Finland, June 2013
• Member of the scientific committee, Digital document and Society Conference. Zagreb, Croatia, April 2013
• Editorial Board Member Publications
• Reviews completed for Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Information Processing and Management, Library & Information Science Research, Science and Public Policy, Journal of Information Science, Information Communication and Society
• Scientific committee member 4th Conference Digital document and Society, Zagreb, Croatia. April 29-30, 2013
• JISC Steering Group e-Infrastructure: Community Engagement and Support, 2008
• Research Associate of the Oxford Internet Institute, Oxford University (2007 - 2010)
• Workshop Co-Chair for the Third International Conference on e-Social Science. Ann Arbor, Michigan, US. October 7-9, 2007
• ESRC rapporteur for the E-Society Programme, 2007

Featured publications

• Spezi, V., Fry, J., Creaser, C., Probets, S., and White, S.U. (2013) Researchers’ Green Open Access Practice: A Cross-disciplinary Analysis.Journal of Documentation.69(3).
  
• Borrego, Ã., and Fry, J, (2012) Measuring researchers' use of scholarly information through social bookmarking data: A case study of BibSonomy, Journal of Information Science, 38(3), 297-308.
  
• Fry, J., Probets, S.G., Creaser, C., Greenwood, H., Spezi, V., and White, S. (2011) PEER Behavioural Research Final Report: Authors and Users vis-à-vis Journals and Repositories. Official report for the PEER Executive. September 2011.
  
• Creaser, C., Fry, J., Greenwood, H.R., Oppenheim, C., Probets, S.G., Spezi, V.C.L., and White, S.U. (2010) Authors’ Awareness and Attitudes Towards Open Access Respositories. New Review of Academic Librarianship, 16(S1), pp. 145-161.
  
• Fry, J., Schroeder, R., and Den Besten, M. (2009) Open Science in e-Science: Contingency or Policy? Journal of Documentation. 65(1), pp. 6-32.