The JISC Information Environment and eResearch team have been working on a grant funding call which should be released on or around 4th October. There will be a briefing day in London on 11th October; more information to follow about that. Those who keep a close eye on the JISC website and in particular the … Read more
We’ve just published an account of Open Access and JISC’s contributions to it over the years: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/programmerelated/2010/openaccessmainbrochure.aspx It covers how OA meets institutional and sector demands for sustainable efficiency and effectiveness in scholarly communication, how work in the UK fits into a wider international picture, and how it works for stakeholders including researchers, institutions and … Read more
There have been discussions over the years about the potential of repositories to play a role in research management systems, supporting universities’ ability to report, for example, for the Research Assessment Exercise. A few universities have gone down that road a long way, while others have not. Indeed, various surveys (eg infoNet work) suggest that … Read more
It can seem to go somewhat against the spirit of repositories, to be concerned with managing (ie controlling) access to them. Surely repositories are for sharing material? Well, yes, often. But there are reasons why repositories need to work with the developing access management federation in the UK, for example to enable depositors to benefit … Read more
An international workshop in Amsterdam in March, funded by JISC, SURF and DRIVER, discussed work needed to improve interoperability between repositories. Four areas of work were focused upon: – citation services – interoperable identification systems – repository handshaking (interoperable deposit systems), and – repository organisation (supporting repositories around the world) There’s more information and an … Read more
What makes a “good” API”? Can we say anything about good practice in providing or using machine interfaces to third party services on the web? UKOLN have consulted widely and suggest, among other things, that providers of APIs should make it useful, keep it simple, follow standards and use consistent naming structures. For API users … Read more
This morning, JISC released the report by John Houghton and Charles Oppenheim on the economic costs and benefits of three different models of scholarly communication – subscription, ‘gold’ open access and self-archiving with overlay services. The findings suggest that there are both considerable cost savings to be made by the HE sector by moving to … Read more
The JISC is calling for proposals relating to the ‘Information Environment’ and ‘Virtual Research Environments’. This blog post relates only to those elements of the Call relating to the Information Environment, that is Strands A1-A6: Automated metadata generation & text mining (JISC contact: Balviar Notay b.notay@jisc.ac.uk or Amber Thomas amber.thomas@jisc.ac.uk) Developing e-infrastructure to support research … Read more
This question comes up reasonably often: what is / should be the relation between institutional and subject OA repositories? There are some surprisingly strong views on this question. A JISC report just completed takes a very pragmatic line, simply asking where are the areas of common interest and where can the two types of repository … Read more
At one end of the spectrum there are standards such as SWAP (Scholarly Works -DC- Application Profile) and CERIF. At the other end of the spectrum we have unstructured tags and full-text indexing. A new JISC report looks at this question from the point of view of resource discovery (there are many others, of course). … Read more