Open Standards
I recently attended two completely separate but thematically related events on the nature of openness within digital technology. The first of these was a lecture by Jonathan Zittrain entitled ‘The Future of the Internet And How to Stop It’ - organised by the Oxford Internet Institute. His central contention was that we are increasingly seeing corporations designing technology that cannot easily be manipulated by its users to allow them to do new and unanticipated things. The phrase he uses for such prescriptive technology is ‘non-generative’, one example of this being (in Zittrain’s opinion) the Apple iPhone. (You can read more about this at http://futureoftheinternet.org/)
The second event took place in the Hague a couple of weeks ago and was convened by an organisation which calls itself Digistan (http://www.digistan.org/). This group is also concerned about the degrees of openness apparent in the digital realm and has placed a clear statement of intent on their website in the form of ‘The Hague Declaration’. (http://www.digistan.org/hague-declaration:en)
This decalaration calls on governments to:
1. Procure only information technology that implements free and open standards
2. Deliver e-government services based exclusively on free and open standards
3. Use only free and open digital standards in their own activities
Strong stuff … and interesting, particularly when you consider that a representative of the Netherlands government was at the meeting and handing out copies of a booklet entitled ‘The Netherlands in Open Connection: An action plan for the use of Open Standards and Open Source Software in the public and semi-public sector’ (http://appz.ez.nl/publicaties/pdfs/07ET15.pdf).
It’s got me thinking about where JISC stands in relation to all this. I had another look at the JISC standards catalogue which is currently hosted by UKOLN (http://standards-catalogue.ukoln.ac.uk/index/Standards_Approach). It states:
“Despite the acknowledged importance of open standards, it was also recognised that the selection and use of open standards is not always easy. There is an awareness that not all open standards gain widespread acceptance and that adoption of open standards before they have proven their reliability and gained widespread acceptance can be costly.”
So there you go, we’re firmly on the fence! But there again, we do state that we have a policy of asking projects to either use open standards or justify whey they aren’t, which sounds exactly like the way the man from the Dutch government was talking at the start of the meeting. “Comply or Explain” was his approach. So perhaps we aren’t so far away afterall. One thing that certainly emerged from this meeting for me was that it would probably be helpful to have some kind of framework for determining how open a standard actually is. Perhaps something for inclusion into the next phase of development for the standards catalogue?
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.
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?
The Research Data Management Forum
This week I went to an early meeting of the Research Data Management Forum, co-sponsored by the Digital Curation Centre and the Research Information Network. The management and curation of research data is both a hot topic and a major challenge – not always a happy combination. This meeting of the Forum was open to anyone, and a diverse group attended, including several directly involved in managing research data and several more, like me, who have an interest supporting that work. In many ways the challenge of managing the digital data deluge is beyond the capacity of a single forum, and at times the list of unanswered questions prompted by the discussion threatened to sink the enthusiasm of even the keenest curator. There seems to be so much that needs doing. However, the main message I took away was the urgent need for more and better evidence: What are the benefits of curating and sharing research data? What are the benefits of having people in UK higher education skilled in data management? To whom do these benefits accrue? The evidence may be of a variety of kinds. Certainly, case studies can help show where these benefits arise and to whom in particular cases. However, what’s also needed is some serious economic modelling of the kind recently deployed by Professors Newbery and Bently and Rufus Pollock in their recent report on ‘Models of Public Sector Information Provision’ and, in a different context, by John Houghton and his colleagues on ‘Research Communication Costs in Australia’.
To supplement this message, and assuming the evidence shows that data curation and sharing is beneficial to UK higher education, to the UK more widely, and to research in general, the question arises what’s in it for researchers? In many disciplines data sharing is not common, and this can be for good reasons. The forthcoming report on ‘data publication’, commissioned by the Research Information Network, Natural Environment Research Council and JISC, will document the picture in some detail. A missing piece in the puzzle is the full citation of specific datasets, which is uncommon. Should this become common, metrics could be derived from aggregated citations to indicate the extent to which datasets were referenced, and academic credit (and therefore incentive) could follow. The difficulty is less in principle (for example, datasets from the UK Data Archive should already be cited whenever used, and can be easily) but in practice; it just rarely happens. JISC is funding several projects that might help – CLADDIER, StoreLink and OJIMS are the most obvious examples, but it’s not necessarily something that a JISC project alone can address.
Posted by: Neil Jacobs