The top concerns of researchers
What do researchers care about? It’s probably uncontentious to say that they care about access, cost, copyright and quality. There’s a report published last month from the JISC Scholarly Communications Group that goes into a bit more detail:
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/aboutus/workinggroups/topconcernsreport.doc
There are perhaps few surprises - the concerns might be paraphrased as ‘lack of access’, ’some funding arrangements inhibit access’, ‘copyright is confusing’ and ‘new types of quality assurance are untested’. One key tool that should help address several, but not all, of of these concerns is a licence to publish. There’s a JISC-SURF one here, but there are certainly others that do much the same thing - ie, help authors retain rights they may need to use and share their papers. It’ll be interesting to see how it gets taken up.
Jorum to move to Open Access
Jorum has recently been awarded £2.4m by JIIE to do what so many people have said needs doing: it is going open access! The new service (“JorumOpen”) will operate under a Creative Commons License and will not require user registration to access and download its content. Users that have already contributed content through existing licences will be contacted to ask if they wish to sign a new open access licence or continue to store their content under the same terms in a parallel service (“JorumPrivilege”).
The new services (collectively known as “Jorum2”) will start being rolled out this Autumn. There will be a range of added value services - such as a development bay to explore integration with VLE’s and to allow users to experiment with learning object reuse - as well as continued R&D. The full press release is attached.
www.jorum.ac.uk
Is this an effective development community?
The information environment, and repositories in particular, were highlighted by Sir Ron Cooke (JISC chair), in his opening keynote at the JISC conference. (See the online conference proceedings.)
He described the vision of a national e-infrastructure supporting the “body of knowledge” at the centre. He told delegates that “[his] nightmare is the challenge of the super-abundance of digital data” and stressed the importance of positioning our repositories very carefully in this landscape of abundant information. From a seemingly different perspective, the closing keynote by Angela Beesley described the work of the Wikimedia foundation, which includes Wikipedia but also other interesting projects I had not heard of before. Their vision is of open access, of making as much knowledge as possible available to the world. Their solution is less about infrastructure and more about mass, scaleable workflows. Her answer to “can you trust user-generated content?” was a refreshingly firm “no. but you can trust the process”.
So how do we develop a layer of scholarly information (for research, learning and teaching) where individuals can find, use and share trusted information, supported by an agile infrastructure provided by institutions, publicly funded shared services, commercial services and wikipedia? It’s a heady mix. I took heed from Ron’s warning that “it’s often easier to have the vision than to have the stamina to battle against institutional inertia or even resistance”.
I think that’s the key challenge for us now, in the world of digital libraries and e-infrastructure. How do we ensure that we’re building firm foundations instead of castles in the sky? How do we avoid going down routes that are technically interesting but offer no tangible benefits to staff and students in institutions?
An important part of the answer is in how we, as a development community, work together to make sure we’re doing the right sorts of things in the right way in the right order. This was the focus of the Rapid Community Building session I went to in the afternoon . The Users and Innovation Development Model marries up the requirements analysis process with the development process to encourage constant sense-checking and quality assurance. We need this on a grand scale if we’re to continue developing in the right direction. The Emerge project is about sharing ideas to support this virtuous cycle and the overall impression I had was of creative chaos! Not everyone wants to work in the web2.0 way. But perhaps if every cluster of developers has an enthusiastic communicator then the community will get more of the benefits sooner.
I’ll finish with a quote and a question.
Quote, with thanks to George Roberts in the community building session:
“Much of what works is already there” Cooperrider and Srivastva (1987)
Question … Is it true? How do we review what works? How do we address the gaps? The IE team really wants to hear from projects how we can improve the development cycle, from identifying useful projects through to embedding outputs. What sorts of things can we all do to make this process work better?
Research data and the JISC IE
We’re hoping to present some themed web pages on the innovation work being funded under the JISC Information Environment area, including one on research data. I thought I’d use this blog to offer preview / pilot that page. I’m not sure if that’s an acceptable use of a blog, but I’m sure I’ll find out.
The aim of the JISC IE work on data is to promote and enable new ways of finding, using and sharing research data. Because there are huge variations in what ‘data’ is, and in disciplinary cultures and practices around it, there is likely to be a ‘mixed economy’ of infrastructure and services to support its management.
There has been a large number of reports on data recently, some of which are helpfully listed in a recent presentation by Michael Jubb of the Research Information Network. Three key documents are the report from the then Office of Science and Innovation on ‘e-infrastructure’, which set out a high-level vision, a set of principles for data stewardship developed by the Research Information Network, and the ‘Dealing with Data‘ report from JISC/UKOLN, which made practical recommendations.
In terms of current practice, two projects promise to paint a clear picture from different perspectives. A study of ‘data publication’ practice among researchers has been funded by JISC, the Research Information Network and the Natural Environment Research Council. A different project, SCARP, is exploring disciplinary attitudes and approaches to data deposit, sharing and re-use, curation and preservation.
JISC and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council have jointly funded the Digital Curation Centre (DCC), which is a centre both of innovation and of guidance. Members of the DCC are developing a Data Audit Framework, which will enable universities to assess what data is being held on their computer systems, and who is responsible for it. The Data Audit Framework will be piloted in a number of universities in 2008.
There is a suspicion that the sector lacks sufficient skilled people to manage research data effectively. A report is due shortly that will review the position and make recommendations on how this might be addressed. The DCC will run a summer school this year to begin to address this issue. Of course, investment will only follow if a business case can be made, and a part of making that case is assessing the costs of preserving data. A methodology is being developed that will enable estimates to be made, though of course without assessing the benefits of keeping data, it is only half the story.
The UK is fortunate to have both the UK Data Archive (co-funded by JISC and the Economic and Social Research Council) and the data centres supported by the Natural Environment Research Council. These services offer expert advice and infrastructure for data management. A feasibility study is underway into the possibility of a UK Research Data Service as a collaboration between some UK universities, to fill in some of the gaps between such data centres. In addition, the DISC-UK Datashare project is looking at how UK higher education can increase its capacity to curate and share research data.
Finally, it is worth noting that JISC also funds work under the heading of ‘e-Research’, which is also focused on research data, including grid and semantic enabling of datasets.
Open Repositories 2008, and Web Science
Having missed most of the presentations at the Open Repositories conference in Southampton this week, my reflections on the event have been prompted more by the Southampton-MIT collaboration described by Wendy Hall and Nigel Shadbolt before the conference dinner, the Web Science research centre. Initiatives such as this (see also, for example, the Oxford Internet Institute), with their focus on an interdisciplinary understanding of the web as a ‘first class’ research object, are particularly timely. I was struck by a potential parallel: an Australian colleague had earlier told me how researchers and technologists there are working to create an interdisciplinary research data resource on breast cancer; on the one hand there are similarities (the alliance of researchers and technologists brought to bear on a research topic), but there are differences. It could be argued (though not all would agree) that the web is a product of social interaction in a way that breast cancer is not. That is, technology (including the infrastructure underpinning science) is ‘social relations made concrete’. Incidentally, those social relations include interventions by those studying or evaluating science practice, so that ‘web science’ is a reflexive undertaking in a way that the study of breast cancer is not (again, not all would agree, see the ‘Science Wars’ entry on Wikipedia).
Some examples from the conference: Johan Bollen presented the outstanding and topical LANL MESUR work on metrics. Fifteen years ago, Steve Woolgar* alerted us to the social, as well as the academic, reasons for the persistence of citation metrics as a tool in research evaluation. This mash-up of social and academic relations is likely now to be embedded in a technical infrastructure for research, so that it is important that the social aspects are well understood before that infrastructure is ‘fixed’. For example, should we be concerned about the potential of this infrastructure for surveillance?
One of the most successful parts of the conference was the ‘Repository Challenge’ (and I don’t just say that because JISC sponsored it!). Some 19 teams of developers competed in building potentially useful tools from existing services and components. It’s perhaps telling that many of those shortlisted focused on ingest, getting material more easily into repositories. In particular, the aim seemed to be to make ingest invisible. What does this say about the relations between the repository community and scientists?
Finally, I was struck by the number of times within a single evening that the conversation turned to the key role played by seemingly rather prosaic aspects of university organisation. Two examples: (i) Talking with a developer who wanted to use Amazon’s S3 storage services, the almost insurmountable obstacle was the difficulty in getting access to an institutional credit card (the only means of payment). (ii) Talking with a scientist-informatician, it became clear that the move in the UK to a single pay spine for all those working in a university does not mean that the boundaries around traditional academic disciplines are any less rigid – he wants to employ people with both science and informatics skills, but they have no comfortable home within the set of university roles as currently defined.
The range of these concerns, from research evaluation policy to whether or not a developer can use the departmental credit card, shows that ‘web science’ (as a practice and a topic for research) operates on a broad front, not all of which is especially elevated. If we’re to appreciate the ways these interconnect, then the need for some insight from disciplines such as anthropology seems obvious.
*Woolgar, S. (1991) Beyond the citation debate: towards a sociology of measurement technologies and their use in science policy. Science and Public Policy, 18(5), 319-326.
Posted by: Neil Jacobs
Changing faces in the JISC IE Team
On 9th May Phil Vaughan will be leaving the JISC to join the British Library and work on UK PubMed Central. Phil has managed the Tools and Innovation programme and the JORUM learning objects repository work while at JISC. As part of this Phil has worked with the JORUM team in thinking through a range of service models that will offer a platform for the sharing of learning objects. We all wish Phil well and hope to see him around in his new role managing UK PubMed Central programme.
Along with sad news there is also good news! Amber Thomas came back to work at JISC last month after her maternity leave. So as well as being a mother now she is working part-time. She will be managing the Tools and Innovation Programme, the JORUM and the Repositories Support Project. So she’ll be busy! Welcome back Amber.
Posted by: Rachel Bruce
Hello world
Spring seems to have sprung in London today, so it seems an appropriate day to launch the JISC Information Environment team’s newborn blog.
What’s an information environment?
Well, that’s a good question with a long answer. The best place to start is the JISC webpage.
This blog will communicate information for and about the JISC funded projects that are overseen by the information enviroment team. The contents may also be relevant to people who share our interest in the following areas:
- digital repositories
- preservation
- resource discovery
- shared services
- scholarly communication
Posted by: Andy McGregor