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Article The Deakin Library blog

September 4, 2025

Library Research News: September 2025 Edition

In this issue

Deakin leading CAUL major negotiations 

The Council of Australasian University Librarians (CAUL) has partnered with Universities Australia (UA) and Universities New Zealand (UNZ) to establish a new sector-wide approach to open access negotiations with the world’s four largest academic publishers – Elsevier, Wiley, Taylor & Francis and Springer Nature. These negotiations aim to secure more sustainable, transparent and inclusive publishing agreements for 2026 and beyond. Key priorities include addressing legacy pricing inequities, curbing escalating open access (OA) costs, and providing certainty for researchers through uncapped OA publishing entitlements.  

Deakin’s Vice Chancellor, Professor Iain Martin has been nominated by UA as the inaugural Chair of CAUL’s OA Negotiation Strategy Committee which comprises senior academic leaders from both Australia and New Zealand, and will ensure senior academic involvement in setting strategy and overseeing the negotiations approach. 

As CAUL’s Chair, Content Procurement, Deakin’s University Librarian, Hero Macdonald, has also played a lead role in establishing this new sector-wide approach and is leading CAUL’s negotiation strategy. 

As a member of CAUL, Deakin Library participates in multiple agreements with major publishers to support Deakin researchers in publishing open access. Open access broadens the reach of research, helping translate findings into practice and enabling other researchers to build on existing work. It can also boost visibility, leading to higher citation rates and greater impact.   

CAUL negotiations officially commenced in late July and are expected to conclude by November 2025. The Library will be providing regular updates to Deakin’s research community throughout the negotiations. Find out more on the CAUL website, see the Times Higher Education article and joint UA/UNZ/CAUL statement for more details. 

For more information about publishing agreements, check out the Open Access: Publishing Agreements help guide or contact your librarian.  

Research Metrics Dashboard enhanced with OpenAlex metrics  

The Research Metrics Dashboard has been enhanced with the integration of OpenAlex publication and author metrics, reflecting the Library’s commitment to advancing open scholarship. 

The dashboard provides a summary report of your research outputs and associated metrics, encompassing both bibliometrics and altmetrics. With the addition of OpenAlex data, the dashboard offers a broader coverage of scholarly outputs, capturing both traditional and non-traditional research outputs. 

As OpenAlex is a free, open-source index, note its inclusion may result in higher publication counts and metrics that differ from those captured by subscription databases such as Scopus or Web of Science. It’s also important to be aware that open access status of publications in the OpenAlex section may occasionally be inaccurate due to delays or inconsistencies in the Unpaywall database. 

To ensure your dashboard contains the most accurate information, we recommend keeping your author profiles up to date. The Researcher and author profiles help guide has also been updated to include new instructions for managing your OpenAlex author profile.  

For further information, please contact your librarian.  

Open Journals at Deakin updates 

We are delighted to share updates from two of Deakin’s community-controlled (diamond) open-access journals: 

Papers: Explorations into Children’s Literature recently published a new issue Vol 29 No 1. Papers is a fully peer-reviewed research journal with a commitment to publishing globally relevant, academically rigorous writing about all aspects of the study and practice of children’s and young adult writing. 

TESOL in Context has also launched their 2025 Special Issue, Vol 33, No 2, focused on English as an Additional Language or Dialect (EAL/D) and Initial Teacher Education. This issue was guest edited by Dr Mei French (University of South Australia) and Associate Professor Julie Choi (The University of Melbourne). 

To view the full collection of Deakin-hosted open access journals, visit Open Journals at Deakin. 

Elements update brings improved navigation 

On 20 August Elements was successfully updated to Version 7.0. 

Elements is the system for registering and describing the research outputs of Deakin’s research staff. Elements is designed to reduce the amount of time and effort researchers spend on managing their publications. It does this by harvesting published outputs from online data sources.  

Find An Expert, Deakin’s staff profile system, is a module of Elements, so all research outputs in Elements are displayed there. They are also fed into Deakin Research Online (DRO), Deakin’s research repository.  

The most significant change arising from this upgrade was to how navigation works in Elements. Users will notice that where the menu used to come down from the top of the screen it now folds out from the left side.  

You can update your Find An Expert profile by clicking on the Account icon to find links to your Profile and Account settings. See the Library’s updated Find An Expert guide for more details. 

To optimise Elements to find your publications, users can click on Profile & Work, where you can edit your Research Identifiers and Search Settings (previously called ‘Name-based search’). Under this sub-menu users can also manage Publications, Grants, and Teaching and Professional Activities. See the revised Updating Elements guide for more information. 

If all else fails, Elements provides a handy search field at the top of the menu area so users can easily find the functionality they are looking for.  

Hot tip: Finding theses 

Looking for theses to support your research? Where to search for theses depends on where the thesis was submitted and published. For a comprehensive guide to finding both Deakin and non-Deakin theses, visit the ‘Finding theses and dissertations’ page of the Grey Literature help guide. 

Theses can support your understanding of the research landscape through a deep focus on a single topic and original contribution to knowledge. They allow you to review past research and find ideas for your own work. They can also assist in identifying research methodologies, theoretical approaches, and writing expectations specific to your field or institution, and include comprehensive literature reviews, guiding you to seminal works in your area of study. 

For further assistance with locating theses, please contact your librarian.  

Event roundup 

Graduate researcher workshop series 

Our current series of graduate researcher workshops are underway, with the following workshops now available to book:  

Systematic Literature Search for STEMM  
Tuesday 9 September, online, 10.00am-12.00pm    

Research Data Management  
Tuesday 14 October, online, 10.00-11.30am   

Publishing and Open Access   
Tuesday 11 November, 10.00am-12.00pm   

Responsible use of genAI in research  
Tuesday 2 December, 10.00-11.00am 

You can also explore previous workshop recordings below.    

Deakin GenAI Hub workshop series 

Deakin GenAI Hub has launched a new series of workshops designed to build your AI literacy in your work, research, and study.  

Sign up now for one of our upcoming workshops:  

GenAI Basics
Tuesday 9 September, online, 11.00-11.45am 

AI Learning Group: Welcome to the Hub and the Framework
Thursday 18 September, online, 11.00-11.45am 

Using AI in Research
Tuesday 23 September, online, 11.00-11.45am 

GenAI Limitations
Tuesday 30 September, online, 11.00-11.45am 

GenAI Prompts
Thursday 16 October, online, 11.00-11.45am 

All Library events can be discovered on the Library’s What’s On page. Additional professional development for researchers is also available via Deakin eResearch: training and events.   

Details for all upcoming library events will be made available on the Library events page. 

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Library Research News is a regular publication from the Library, publishing library-related news for Deakin researchers. To stay in the loop, please subscribe to Article.  

To access library research services, please contact your librarian or navigate to Research via the library website. Scholarly Services Librarians bring discipline-specific expertise related to the following key areas:  



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