Overview of content related to 'data set'

Gold Open Access: Counting the Costs

lisrw — Mon, 03 Dec 2012 20:23:29 +0000

Theo Andrew presents new data on the cost of Gold OA publishing at the University of Edinburgh.

Research Councils UK (RCUK) have recently announced a significant amendment to their open access (OA) policy which requires all research papers that result from research partly or wholly funded by RCUK to be made open access [1]. To comply with this policy, researchers must either; a) publish in an open access journal, termed Gold OA, which often incurs an article processing charge (APC); or, b) ensure that a copy of the post-print is deposited in an appropriate repository, also known as Green OA.

A subsequent clarification from RCUK stated that Gold OA is the preferred mechanism of choice to realise open access for outputs that they have funded and have announced the award of block grants to eligible institutions to achieve this aim [2]. Where a Gold OA option is unavailable, Green OA is also acceptable; however, RCUK have indicated that the decision will be ultimately left up to institutions as to which route to take [3].

Since RCUK are the major funder of research in the United Kingdom, this new policy will not only have a major impact on how researchers publish their work, but also huge implications for their budgets. Many research institutions funded by RCUK are currently investigating how they will implement this policy and are looking at the costs for open access publication, and how they can support the adoption of open access within their organisation. The ball is very much in the court of institutions to decide how to play the open access game.

One of the key factors that will affect institutions is the cost that publishers will set for their APCs. So far RCUK have steered clear of suggesting an appropriate fee, leaving individual publishers to determine the market level of the APCs as per the current situation. Meanwhile there seems to be a huge variability in costs. There is a general expectation that over time APCs will settle to a reasonable rate and similarly journal subscriptions will lower to reflect the gradual change in business model from subscription fees to APCs. Most publishers have not yet been upfront about what impact they will have on journal subscriptions, if any, and it is hard to access and assess real-life data. RSC Publishing is one notable exception since it has introduced a system of waiving a proportion of APC fees based on institutional subscription costs.

Much of this transition period to full open access will have to be navigated through uncharted territory, where no one has a clear handle on the costs involved. The rationale of this article is to present data on article processing charges gathered over the past five years, report on trends seen within this data, to suggest some approaches and to generally contribute to and inform the policy discussion.

The Problem

To put some rough-and-ready figures on the table, the University of Edinburgh publishes in the region of 4,000-4,500 peer-reviewed journal articles per year; this figure does not include other publication types like working papers not affected by the RCUK policy. Assuming an average Article Processing Charge (APC) of £1500 [4], the total publication costs to make all of these outputs Gold would be in the region of £6m. It is clear that even with guaranteed funding from HEFCE, and other funders of research, large research-intensive universities will not be able to pay for all of their research to be published under Gold OA. How to allocate funding to researchers will be a difficult choice that many institutions are currently asking themselves - will it be on a first-come-first-served basis, funder-specific, or will REF-submitted material take priority?

Equally problematic are the difficulties we face in fully assessing an institution’s total spend on open access. Whilst it is possible to find out through aggregate sources like Web of Science how many articles are published in fully open access journals. It is virtually impossible to find out the number of open access articles published in hybrid journals as there is currently no flag in the metadata which indicates the open status of the paper. A hybrid journal is a traditional subscription journal that offers open access to individual articles upon payment of an APC. Of course it is possible to find hybrid open access content through EuropePMC.org; however this will only give a snapshot for the biomedical and life sciences. With current systems and processes it is virtually impossible to gauge this spend accurately.

Cost Data

Unfortunately, financial data about open access publishing is scarce. The University of Edinburgh (UoE) has recently implemented account codes to allow the finance systems to track this spend going forwards; however, finding out costs retrospectively remains problematic. Furthermore, institutions are not typically in the habit of publishing this data with others. The institutions that have shared data show a degree of variability. In 2010, the foremost initial supporter and enabler of Gold Open Access publishing in the UK, the Wellcome Trust, found that the average cost of publication under the author-pays model was $2,367 (approximately £1,500) [4]. RCUK in their recent press release on block grants for open access estimate the average APC as £1,727 plus VAT [2], whilst, based on figures in the Finch Report, the University of Nottingham paid on average £1,216 [5].

All these figures are useful as they give a ballpark figure upon which further estimates can be based. The precise cost of individual APCs levied by publishers is generally unavailable in a form which easily enables further analysis. Typically this information is available from publisher’s Web sites; however, aggregating the data is cumbersome as there is no consistent way to interrogate the Web sites and APCs commonly vary from title to title in the publishers’ portfolio. There have been some commendable attempts to gather this information, for example the SHERPA RoMEO listing of Publishers with Paid Options for Open Access [7]. Here about 100 publishers have been surveyed and their APCs are listed. A large cost variance exists for some publishers’ records as individual journals often have different APCs, and also institutional subscriptions/memberships can reduce costs in a non-uniform way. It takes a lot of effort to gather these data and keep them it up to date. Other approaches have tried to crowd-source this activity, for example Ross Mounce’s survey of open access publishers, publications, licences and fees. Here approximately 130 publishers’ web sites were surveyed to find out what licences are being used on the open access content; the cost being a secondary focus of the survey. Analysis of these data shows less than 5% of publishers claiming 'open access' are fully compliant with the Budapest Declaration on Open Access [7].

The data we present here is an attempt to enrich the data available to interested parties and make them available in a reusable format for further analysis. It comprises articles funded by the Wellcome Trust at the University of Edinburgh between 2007 and 2012. In total there are 260 articles published in a mixture of open access journals and traditional subscription journals with an open access option (sometimes known as hybrid). All of the journals charged an article processing fee. Overall, the total cost incurred was £452,713.40. The mean article processing charge was £1,741.21, with the median value £1,644.22. The full data can be accessed online at the Edinburgh DataShare repository [8].

Upskilling Liaison Librarians for Research Data Management

lisrw — Thu, 06 Dec 2012 19:27:43 +0000

Andrew Cox, Eddy Verbaan and Barbara Sen explore the design of a curriculum to train academic librarians in the competencies to support Research Data Management.

For many UK HEIs, especially research-intensive institutions, Research Data Management (RDM) is rising rapidly up the agenda. Working closely with other professional services, and with researchers themselves, libraries will probably have a key role to play in supporting RDM. This role might include signposting institutional expertise in RDM; inclusion of the topic in information literacy sessions for PhD students and other researchers; advocacy for open data sharing; or contributing to the management of an institutional data repository.

Motivations for the Development of a Web Resource Synchronisation Framework

lisrw — Mon, 03 Dec 2012 15:58:46 +0000

Stuart Lewis, Richard Jones and Simeon Warner explain some of the motivations behind the development of the ResourceSync Framework.

This article describes the motivations behind the development of the ResourceSync Framework. The Framework addresses the need to synchronise resources between Web sites. Resources cover a wide spectrum of types, such as metadata, digital objects, Web pages, or data files. There are many scenarios in which the ability to perform some form of synchronisation is required. Examples include aggregators such as Europeana that want to harvest and aggregate collections of resources, or preservation services that wish to archive Web sites as they change.

The ARK Project: Analysing Raptor at Kent

lisrw — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 17:21:49 +0000

Leo Lyons describes how University of Kent librarians are benefitting from Raptor's ability to produce e-resource usage statistics and charts.

It is indisputable that the use of e-resources in university libraries has increased exponentially over the last decade and there would be little disagreement with a prediction that usage is set to continue to increase for the foreseeable future. The majority of students both at undergraduate and post-graduate level now come from a background where online access is the de facto standard.

SUSHI: Delivering Major Benefits to JUSP

lisrw — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 17:54:19 +0000

Paul Meehan, Paul Needham and Ross MacIntyre explain the enormous time and cost benefits in using SUSHI to support rapid gathering of journal usage reports into the JUSP service.

A full-scale implementation of the Journal Usage Statistics Portal (JUSP) would not be possible without the automated data harvesting afforded by the Standardized Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative (SUSHI) protocol. Estimated time savings in excess of 97% compared with manual file handling have allowed JUSP to expand its service to more than 35 publishers and 140 institutions by September 2012. An in-house SUSHI server also allows libraries to download quality-checked data from many publishers via JUSP, removing the need to visit numerous Web sites. The protocol thus affords enormous cost and time benefits for the centralised JUSP service and for all participating institutions. JUSP has also worked closely with many publishers to develop and implement SUSHI services, pioneering work to benefit both the publishers and the UK HE community.

JUSP: Background to the Service

The management of journal usage statistics can be an onerous task at the best of times. The introduction of the COUNTER [1] Code of Practice in 2002 was a major step forward, allowing libraries to collect consistent, audited statistics from publishers. By July 2012, 125 publishers offered the JR1 report, providing the number of successful full-text downloads. In the decade since COUNTER reports became available, analysis of the reports has become increasingly important, with library managers, staff and administrators increasingly forced to examine journal usage to inform and rationalise purchasing and renewal decisions.

In 2004, JISC Collections commissioned a report [2] which concluded that there was a definite demand for a usage statistics portal for the UK HE community; with some sites subscribing to more than 100 publishers, just keeping track of access details and downloading reports was becoming a significant task in itself, much less analysing the figures therein. There followed a report into the feasibility of establishing a ‘Usage Statistics Service’ carried out by Key Perspectives Limited and in 2008 JISC issued an ITT (Invitation To Tender). By early 2009 a prototype service, known as the Journal Usage Statistics Portal (JUSP) had been developed by a consortium including Evidence Base at Birmingham City University, Cranfield University, JISC Collections and Mimas at The University of Manchester; the prototype featured a handful of publishers and three institutions. However, despite a centralised service appearing feasible [3], the requirement to download and process data in spreadsheet format, and the attendant time taken, still precluded a full-scale implementation across UK HE.

Release 3 of the COUNTER Code of Practice in 2009 however mandated the use of the newly-introduced Standardized Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative (SUSHI) protocol [4], a mechanism for the machine-to-machine transfer of COUNTER-compliant reports; this produced dramatic efficiencies of time and cost in the gathering of data from publishers. The JUSP team began work to implement SUSHI for a range of publishers and expanded the number of institutions. By September 2012, the service had grown significantly, whilst remaining free at point of use, and encompassed 148 participating institutions, and 35 publishers. To date more than 100 million individual points of data have been collected by JUSP, all via SUSHI, a scale that would have been impossible without such a mechanism in place or without massive additional staff costs.

JUSP offers much more than basic access to publisher statistics, however; the JUSP Web site [5] details the numerous reports and analytical tools on offer, together with detailed user guides and support materials. The cornerstone of the service though is undeniably its SUSHI implementation, both in terms of gathering the COUNTER JR1 and JR1a data and - as developed more recently - its own SUSHI server, enabling institutions to re-harvest data into their own library management tools for local analysis.

JUSP Approach to SUSHI Development and Implementation

Once the decision was made to scale JUSP into a full service, the development of SUSHI capability became of paramount importance. The team had been able to handle spreadsheets of data on a small scale, but the expected upscale to 100+ institutions and multiple publishers within a short time frame meant that this would very quickly become unmanageable and costly in staff time and effort - constraints that were proving to be a source of worry at many institutions too: while some sites could employ staff whose role revolved around usage stats gathering and analysis, this was not possible at every institution, nor especially straightforward for institutions juggling dozens, if not hundreds, of publisher agreements and deals.

Two main issues were immediately apparent in the development of the SUSHI software. Firstly, there was a lack of any standard SUSHI client software that we could use or adapt, and, more worryingly, the lack of SUSHI support at a number of major publishers. While many publishers use an external company or platform such as Atypon, MetaPress or HighWire to collect and provide usage statistics, others had made little or no progress in implementing SUSHI support by late 2009 - where SUSHI servers were in place these were often untested or unused by consumers.

An ultimate aim for JUSP was to develop a single piece of software that would seamlessly interact with any available SUSHI repository and download data for checking and loading into JUSP. However, the only client software available by 2009 was written and designed to work in the Windows environment, or used Java, which can be very complex to work with and of which the JUSP team had limited expertise. The challenge therefore became to develop a much simpler set of code using Perl and/or PHP, common and simple programming languages which were much more familiar to the JUSP team.

23rd International CODATA Conference

lisrw — Sat, 15 Dec 2012 12:41:16 +0000

Alex Ball reports on a conference on ‘Open Data and Information for a Changing Planet’ held by the International Council for Science’s Committee on Data for Science and Technology (CODATA) at Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan on 28–31 October 2012.

CODATA was formed by the International Council for Science (ICSU) in 1966 to co-ordinate and harmonise the use of data in science and technology. One of its very earliest decisions was to hold a conference every two years at which new developments could be reported. The first conference was held in Germany in 1968, and over the following years it would be held in 15 different countries across 4 continents.

euroCRIS Membership Meeting, Madrid

lisrw — Thu, 13 Dec 2012 09:07:57 +0000

Rosemary Russell and Brigitte Jörg report on the bi-annual euroCRIS membership and Task Groups meetings which took place in Madrid on 5-6 November 2012.

euroCRIS membership meetings [1] are held twice a year, providing members and invited participants with updates on strategic and Task Group progress and plans, as well as the opportunity to share experience of Current Research Information System (CRIS)-related developments and seek feedback. A CERIF (Common European Research Information Format) tutorial is usually included on the first morning for those new to the standard, and the host country reports on local CRIS initiatives in the ‘national’ session.

Hydra UK: Flexible Repository Solutions to Meet Varied Needs

lisrw — Thu, 13 Dec 2012 19:24:07 +0000

Chris Awre reports on the Hydra UK event held on 22 November 2012 at the Library of the London School of Economics.

Hydra, as described in the opening presentation of this event, is a project initiated in 2008 by the University of Hull, Stanford University, University of Virginia, and DuraSpace to work towards a reusable framework for multi-purpose, multi-functional, multi-institutional repository-enabled solutions for the management of digital content collections [1]. An initial timeframe for the project of three years had seen all founding institutional partners successfully implement a repository demonstrating these characteristics. Key to the aims of the project has always been to generate wider interest outside the partners to foster not only sustainability in the technology, but also sustainability of the community around this open source development. Hydra has been disseminated through a range of events, particularly through the international Open Repositories conferences [2], but the sphere of interest in Hydra has now stimulated the holding of specific events in different countries: Hydra UK is one of them.

The Hydra UK event was held on 22 November 2012, kindly hosted by the Library at the London School of Economics. Representatives from institutions across the UK, but also Ireland, Austria and Switzerland, came together to learn about the Hydra Project, and to discuss how Hydra might serve their digital content collection management needs. 29 delegates from 21 institutions were present, representing mostly universities but also the archive, museum and commercial sectors. Five presentations were given on Hydra, focusing on the practical experience of using this framework and how it fits into overall system architectures, and time was also deliberately given over to discussion of more specific topics of interest and to allow delegates the opportunity to voice their requirements. The presentations were:

Introduction to Hydra
Hydra @ Hull
Hydra @ Glasgow Caledonian University
Hydra @ LSE
Hydra @ Oxford

Introduction to Hydra

Chris Awre from the University of Hull gave the opening presentation. The starting basis for Hydra was mutual recognition by all the founding partners that a repository should be an enabler for managing digital content collections, not a constraint or simply a silo of content. Digital repositories have been put forward and applied as a potential solution for a variety of use cases over the years, and been used at different stages of a content lifecycle.

Figure 1: LSE Library
(Photo courtesy of Simon Lamb, University of Hull.)

To avoid producing a landscape of multiple repositories all having to be managed to cover these use cases, the Hydra Project sought to identify a way in which one repository solution could be applied flexibly to meet the requirements of different use cases. The idea of a single repository with multiple points of interaction came into being – Hydra – and the concept of individual Hydra ‘head’ solutions.

The Hydra Project is informed by two main principles:

No single system can provide the full range of repository-based solutions for a given institution’s needs,
o …yet sustainable solutions require a common repository infrastructure.
No single institution can resource the development of a full range of solutions on its own,
o …yet each needs the flexibility to tailor solutions to local demands and workflows.

The Hydra Project has sought to provide the common infrastructure upon which flexible solutions can be built, and shared.

The recognition that no single institution can achieve everything it might want for its repository has influenced the project from the start. To quote an African proverb, ‘If you want to go fast go alone, if you want to go far, go together’. Working together has been vital. To organise this interaction, Hydra has structured itself through three interleaving sub-communities, the Steering Group, the Partners and Developers, as shown by Figure 2.

Figure 2: Hydra community structure

The concept of a Hydra Partner has emerged from this model of actively working together, and the project has a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) process for any institution wishing to have its use of, and contribution and commitment to Hydra recognised. Starting with the original four partners in 2008, Hydra now has 11 partners, with two more in the process of joining. All have made valuable contributions and helped to make Hydra better. Hydra partnership is not the only route to involvement, though, and there are many in the Hydra developer community who are adopters of the software, but who have not reached a stage where partnership is appropriate.

The technical implementation of Hydra was supported through early involvement in the project by MediaShelf, a commercial technical consultancy focused on repository solutions. All Hydra software is, though, open source, available under the Apache 2.0 licence, and all software code contributions are managed in this way. The technical implementation is based on a set of core principles that describe how content objects should be structured within the repository, and with an understanding that different content types can be managed using different workflows. Following these principles, Hydra could be implemented in a variety of ways: the technical direction taken by the project is simply the one that suited the partners at the time.

Hydra as currently implemented is built on existing open source components, and the project partners are committed to supporting these over time:

Fedora: one of the digital repository systems maintained through DuraSpace [3]
Apache Solr: powerful indexing software now being used in a variety of discovery solutions [4]
Blacklight: a next-generation discovery interface, which has its own community around it [5]
Hydra plugin: a collection of components that facilitate workflow in managing digital content [6]
Solrizer: a component that indexes Fedora-held content into a Solr index

These components are arranged in the architecture shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3: Hydra architecture

A common feature of the last three components in the list above is the use of Ruby on Rails as the coding language and its ability to package up functionality in discrete ‘gems’. This was consciously chosen for Hydra because of its agile programming capabilities, its use of the MVC (Model–View–Controller) structure, and its testing infrastructure. The choice has been validated on a number of occasions as Hydra has developed. However, it was noted that other coding languages and systems could be used to implement Hydra where appropriate. This applies to all the main components, even Fedora. Whilst a powerful and flexible repository solution in its own right, Fedora has proved to be complex to use: Hydra has sought in part to tap this capability through simpler interfaces and interactions.

IFLA World Library and Information Congress 2012

lisrw — Tue, 11 Dec 2012 13:16:31 +0000

Marieke Guy reports on the 78th IFLA General Conference and Assembly held in Helsinki, Finland over 11-17 August 2012.

The Sunday newcomers session chaired by Buhle Mbambo-Thata provided us with some insight into the sheer magnitude of IFLA (as most people seem to call it) or the World Library and Information Congress (to give the formal name) [1]. This year’s congress had over 4,200 delegates from 120 different countries, though over a thousand of these were Finnish librarians making the most of the locality of this year’s event.

International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries (TPDL) 2012

lisrw — Sun, 16 Dec 2012 13:44:54 +0000

Anna Mastora and Sarantos Kapidakis report on TPDL 2012 held at Paphos, Cyprus, over 23-27 September 2012.

The 16^th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries (TPDL) 2012 [1] was another successful event in the series of ECDL/TPDL conferences which has been the leading European scientific forum on digital libraries for 15 years. Across these years, the conference has brought together researchers, developers, content providers and users in the field of digital libraries by addressing issues in the area where theoretical and applied research meet, such as digital library models, architectures, functionality, users, and quality.

Online Information 2012

lisrw — Sun, 16 Dec 2012 17:10:56 +0000

Marieke Guy reports on the largest gathering of information professionals in Europe.

Online Information [1] is an interesting conference as it brings together information professionals from both the public and the private sector. The opportunity to share experiences from these differing perspectives doesn’t happen that often and brings real benefits, such as highly productive networking. This year’s Online Information, held between 20 - 21 November, felt like a slightly different event to previous years.

Making the Most of a Conference

lisrw — Tue, 31 Jul 2012 15:05:33 +0000

Stephanie Taylor writes about how she made the most of a conference to promote and inform the work of a project.

I’ve been working with repositories in various ways for over five years, so I have, of course, attended the major international conference Open Repositories before. I have never actually presented anything or represented a specific project at the event, though. This year was different. This year I had a mission - to present a poster on the DataFlow Project [1] and to talk to people about the work we had been doing for the past 12 months and (I hoped) to interest them in using the Open Source (OS) systems we had developed during that period.

Moving Ariadne: Migrating and Enriching Content with Drupal

lisrw — Fri, 27 Jul 2012 16:47:36 +0000

Thom Bunting explains some of the technology behind the migration of Ariadne (including more than 1600 articles from its back issues archive) onto a Drupal content management platform.

Tools and strategies for content management are a perennial topic in Ariadne. With more than one hundred articles touching on content management system (CMS) technologies or techniques since this online magazine commenced publication in 1996, Ariadne attests to continuing interest in this topic. Authors have discussed this topic within various contexts, from intranets to repositories and Web 2.0, with some notable surges in references to 'content management' between 2000 and 2005 (see Figure 1 below). Although levels of discussion are by no means trending, over recent years it is clear that Ariadne authors have taken note of and written about content management tools and techniques on a regular basis.

In the light of this long-established interest, it is noteworthy that Ariadne itself migrated into a content management system only recently. Although the formatting of its articles did change a few times since 1996, Ariadne remained 'hand-coded' for more than fifteen years. None of its articles had been migrated into a database-driven content management system until March 2012, when issue 68 was published.

As mentioned in the editorial introduction to that first issue, launching the new content management arrangements, and as discussed in some more detail below (see 'Technical challenges in content migration'), the considerable size of Ariadne's archive of back issues was daunting. With more than 1600 articles in hand-coded 'flat'-html formats, the process of migration itself required careful planning to result in a seamless, graceful transition into an entirely new content management arrangement. Over time, the sheer size of the Ariadne corpus had made it both increasingly rich in content and increasingly more challenging to convert retrospectively into a database-driven CMS as the total number of articles published within this online magazine steadily expanded.

In looking back over the recent process of migrating Ariadne onto a CMS platform, this article discusses some tools and techniques used to prepare content for transfer, testing, and then re-launch. After explaining some of the background to and objectives of this work, this article focuses on key features of content management supported by Drupal.

Figure 1: Ariadne timeline of references to content management

Requirements Analysis: Planning the Way Forward

Based on surveys of readers and authors conducted in late 2010, the Ariadne management team analysed the range of feedback, drew up sets of re-development requirements, and then considered the options available.

The following table provides an overview of key findings regarding the range of enhanced functionality and features considered:

Overview of findings derived from survey responses
enhanced functionality or feature	interest recorded in surveys
browsing by keywords	73.4% of respondents
updated look and feel	62.3% of respondents
browsing by title	50.0% of respondents
enhanced use of search engine	48.0% of respondents
improved display for portable devices	34.0% of respondents
more summative information on articles	32.1% of respondents
improved navigability from article level	32.1% of respondents
improved social media options	29.5% of respondents
browsing by author	28.0% of respondents
improved RSS feeds	27.0% of respondents

In addition to these findings derived from surveys, the management team also recognised the need for some other functionalities to support monitoring of Ariadne's on-going engagement with various domains and institutions across the UK and beyond.

Additional features to support monitoring of engagement
identification of author domains (higher education, further education, research, commercial, etc)	to support analysis of Ariadne connections and reach across various sectors
identification of authors by organisation	to support analysis of Ariadne connections and reach in UK and worldwide

Taking into account the key findings derived from survey questions as well as the additional functionality identified as useful in monitoring UK and worldwide engagement, the Ariadne management team drew up sets of re-development requirements and considered how to proceed. Migration into a content management system represented the obvious way forward, as it became clear that Ariadne's previous tradition of 'hand-coded' production (dating from the early days of the Web) had little chance of coping gracefully with the new sets of requirements.

In a review of CMS options available, it also became clear that Drupal [1] was well positioned as a content management system (or, emphasising its highly modular and extensible design, content management framework [2] ) to supply required functionality and features.

The Second British Library DataCite Workshop

lisrw — Sun, 29 Jul 2012 18:54:47 +0000

Alex Ball reports on a one-day workshop on metadata supporting the citation of research data, held at the British Library, London, on 6 July 2012.

On Friday, 6 July 2012 I made my way to the British Library Conference Centre for the second in a series of DataCite workshops [1]. The theme was Describe, Disseminate, Discover: Metadata for Effective Data Citation. In welcoming us to the event, Lee-Ann Coleman, Head of Scientific, Technical and Medical Information at the British Library, said there had been some doubt as to whether anyone would turn up to an event about metadata, but as it happened there were 36 of us, drawn from across the UK and beyond.

Eduserv Symposium 2012: Big Data, Big Deal?

lisrw — Mon, 30 Jul 2012 17:48:45 +0000

Marieke Guy attended the annual Eduserv Symposium on 10 May 2012 at the Royal College of Physicians, London to find out what are the implications of big data for Higher Education Institutions.

The annual Eduserv Symposium [1] was billed as a ‘must-attend event for IT professionals in Higher Education’; the choice of topical subject matter being one of the biggest crowd-drawers (the other being the amazing venue: the Royal College of Physicians). The past few years have seen coverage of highly topical areas such as virtualisation and the cloud, the mobile university and access management.

The Institutional Web Management Workshop (IWMW) 2012

lisrw — Tue, 31 Jul 2012 12:54:44 +0000

Kirsty Pitkin reports on the 16th Institutional Web Management Workshop held at the University of Edinburgh's Appleton Tower between 18 - 20 July 2012.

The 16th Institutional Web Management Workshop (IWMW 12) took place at the University of Edinburgh's Appleton Tower – a building with a stunning panoramic view over the volcanic city. The event brought together 172 delegates and attracted an additional 165 viewers to the live video stream of the plenary sessions over the three days.

JISC Research Information Management: CERIF Workshop

lisrw — Sun, 29 Jul 2012 19:46:13 +0000

Rosemary Russell reports on a two-day workshop on research information management and CERIF held in Bristol over 27-28 June 2012.

Table of Contents

Workshop Scope and Aims
The New CERIF Support Project at the ISC, UKOLN
UK CERIF Landscape
UK Involvement in euroCRIS and Other International Initiatives

A workshop on Research Information Management (RIM) and CERIF was held in Bristol on 27-28 June 2012, organised by the Innovation Support Centre [1] at UKOLN, together with the JISC RIM and RCSI (Repositories and Curation Shared Infrastructure) Programmes. It was a follow-up to the CERIF Tutorial and UK Data Surgery [2] held in Bath in February.

Workshop Scope and Aims

The aim was to bring together people working on the various elements of the UK RIM jigsaw to share experience of using CERIF and explore ways of working together more closely. While the first day focused specifically on RIM, the second day widened to explore synergies with the repositories community. Participants therefore included JISC RIM and MRD projects and programme managers, support and evaluation projects, Research Councils, funders and repository infrastructure projects. There were around 30 participants [3] in total, with some variation across the two days, given the different content. The event was chaired by Josh Brown, RIM Programme Manager and Neil Jacobs, Programme Director, Digital Infrastructure, both at JISC. All presentations as well as breakout session outputs are available via the UKOLN ISC Events site [4].

The New CERIF Support Project at the ISC, UKOLN

The UK community was pleased to welcome Brigitte Jörg [5] to the meeting, in the first week of her new role at UKOLN’s Innovation Support Centre as National Coordinator for the CERIF Support Project. Brigitte is already well known to British practitioners working with CERIF – both in her role as as CERIF Task Group Leader [6] at euroCRIS and as advisor to several existing JISC projects. We look forward to working with her on further initiatives – her CERIF expertise will be a huge asset for Research Information Management support and coordination in British Higher Education.

UK CERIF Landscape

There is certainly extensive RIM-related activity in the UK currently, which looks set to continue. The landscape was outlined in the scene setting sessions by myself, based on the CERIF adoption study [7] carried out earlier this year. The rate of CRIS (Current Research Information System) procurement has increased very rapidly in the last few years, particularly during 2011. For example the first Pure system in the UK was procured jointly by the Universities of Aberdeen and St Andrews in May 2009; now there are 19 UK universities using Pure. Since all CRIS on the market are CERIF-compatible (to a greater or lesser extent) this means that a large number of UK institutions are CERIF users (again, to varying degrees) – around 31% [7]. The two other CERIF CRIS being used in the UK are CONVERIS (Avedas, Germany) and Symplectic Elements (UK-based); only one UK CERIF CRIS is being developed in-house, at the University of Huddersfield. There is therefore a significant potential user base for the many CERIF-based services discussed over the course of the workshop. Particularly as more institutions reach the end of their CRIS implementation phase, they are going to be looking for opportunities to exploit the interchange benefits offered by CERIF.

UK Involvement in euroCRIS and Other International Initiatives

As a reflection of the intensity of UK CRIS activity, the UK has the largest number of institutional members of euroCRIS – 25. The next country in terms of membership is Germany, with just 13 members (and then the Netherlands, with seven). It is also notable that there were six UK papers (up from three in 2010) at the recent euroCRIS conference in Prague (all openly accessible from the euroCRIS website [8]), reflecting the growing UK presence at international level. This indicates the significant impact of JISC programmes - both RIM and MRD (Managing Research Data). At euroCRIS meetings other European countries have expressed some envy of the resources currently available in the UK to support RIM development!

Book Review: Managing Research Data

lisrw — Sun, 29 Jul 2012 13:51:34 +0000

Sally Rumsey reviews a book which describes and explains the topics of interest central to practitioners involved with research data management.

Higher Education institutions (HEIs) in the UK are planning and implementing infrastructure and services to manage research data more urgently than they did for research publications. One policy framework sent to UK vice-chancellors from a major UK funding body (EPSRC), which set out clear expectations of responsibilities for data management at institutions within a given timetable, appears to have been the spark that prompted research data management (RDM) to be taken up by the upper echelons of management, and concrete activities set in place to start addressing the problem.

Data Citation and Publication by NERC’s Environmental Data Centres

lisrw — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 14:06:59 +0000

Sarah Callaghan, Roy Lowry, David Walton and members of the Natural Environment Research Council Science Information Strategy Data Citation and Publication Project team describe their work in NERC’s Environmental Data Centres.

Data are the foundation upon which scientific progress rests. Historically speaking, data were a scarce resource, but one which was (relatively) easy to publish in hard copy, as tables or graphs in journal papers. With modern scientific methods, and the increased ease in collecting and analysing vast quantities of data, there arises a corresponding difficulty in publishing this data in a form that can be considered part of the scientific record.

Editorial Introduction to Issue 68

lisrw — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 15:17:06 +0000

The editor introduces readers to the content of Ariadne issue 68.

I am pleased to introduce you to the content of Issue 68, and to have the opportunity to remind you that you have a far larger number of channels into the publication’s content.

IMPACT Final Conference 2011

lisrw — Sun, 26 Feb 2012 13:36:33 +0000

Marieke Guy reports on the two-day conference looking at the results of the IMPACT Project in making digitisation and OCR better, faster and cheaper.

The IMPACT Project (Improving Access to Text) [1] was funded by the European Commission back in 2007 to look at significantly advancing access to historical text using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) methods. As the project reaches its conclusion, one of its key objectives is sharing project outputs.

Data Science Professionals: A Global Community of Sharing

lisrw — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 19:36:45 +0000

Sylvie Lafortune reports on the 37th annual conference of the International Association for Social Science Information Services and Technology (IASSIST), held over 30 May – 3 June 2011 in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

The IASSIST [1] Conference is a long-standing annual event which brings together researchers, statistical analysts as well as computer and information professionals interested in all aspects of research data, from discovery to reuse. This 37^th meeting spanned five days where participants could attend workshops, IASSIST business meetings and a myriad of presentations. This year, the event focused on the sharing of tools and techniques which ‘improves capabilities across disciplines and along the entire data life cycle’.

eSciDoc Days 2011: The Challenges for Collaborative eResearch Environments

lisrw — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 20:20:52 +0000

Ute Rusnak reports on the fourth in a series of two-day conferences called eSciDoc Days, organised by FIZ Karlsruhe and the Max Planck Digital Library in Berlin over 26-27 October 2011.

eSciDoc is a well-known open source platform for creating eResearch environments using generic services and tools based on a shared infrastructure. This concept allows for managing research and publication data together with related metadata, internal and/or external links and access rights. Development of eSciDoc was initiated by a collaborative venture between FIZ Karlsruhe – Leibniz Institute for Information Infrastructure and the Max Planck Digital Library (MPDL) and was funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research.

MyMobileBristol

editor — Sun, 03 Jul 2011 23:00:00 +0000

Mike Jones, Simon Price, Nikki Rogers and Damian Steer describe the rationale, aims and progress of MyMobileBristol, highlighting some of the challenges and opportunities that have arisen during the project.

The MyMobileBristol Project is managed and developed by the Web Futures group at the Institute for Learning and Research Technology (ILRT), University of Bristol [1]. The project has a number of broad and ambitious aims and objectives, including collaboration with Bristol City Council on the development or adoption of standards with regard to the exchange of time- and location-sensitive data within the Bristol region, with particular emphasis on transport, the environment and sustainability.

Looking for the Link Between Library Usage and Student Attainment

editor — Sun, 03 Jul 2011 23:00:00 +0000

Graham Stone, Bryony Ramsden and Dave Pattern introduce the JISC-funded Library Impact Data Project (LIDP).

DataCite UK User Group Meeting

editor — Sun, 03 Jul 2011 23:00:00 +0000

Alex Ball reports on the 2nd UK User Group meeting for DataCite, held at the British Library in London, in April 2011.

DataCite [1] is an international not-for-profit organisation dedicated to making research data a normal, citable part of the scientific record. It is made up of a membership of 15 major libraries and data centres, which, along with four associate members, represent 11 different countries across four continents. The approach taken by DataCite currently centres on assigning Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) to datasets; it is a member of the International DOI Foundation and one of a handful of DOI registration agencies.

A Double-edged Sword: What Are the Implications of Freedom of Information for the HE Sector?

editor — Sun, 03 Jul 2011 23:00:00 +0000

Amy Gibbons reports on the second in a series of workshops organised by the Research Information Network to explore the impact of the Freedom of Information Act on the Higher Education sector, held at University College London on 1 April 2011.

UK Reading Experience Database

editor — Sun, 03 Jul 2011 23:00:00 +0000

Bethan Ruddock reports from the launch event for the UK Reading Experience Database, held at the Betty Boothroyd Library, the Open University, Milton Keynes, on 24 February 2011.

I was invited down to the Open University (OU) Betty Boothroyd Library in Milton Keynes for the launch of the UK Reading Experience Database (UK RED) [1]. I had been asked to attend to talk about the LOCAH Project and Linked Data, but I was also looking forward to learning about the RED Project.

This was the first of two launch days, and was designed for librarians, archivists, and information managers. A second launch day for teachers in Higher Education was to be held in London the next day.

What Is UK RED?

The tagline for UK RED is 'the experience of reading in Britain from 1450 to 1945', and the database brings together reading experiences, making them both searchable and browsable. What is a reading experience? It is evidence of anyone alive between the mid-15th and 20thcenturies having read and interacted with a book or other piece of writing, such as magazines, newspapers, letters - even playbills and advertisements. Ownership alone is not enough; there must be something to show that the person in question actually read the work or at least part of it.

This information can be found in a number of places - a printed book review would be an obvious example. The RED team also find many entries in diaries. Such entries can range from simple lists of books that someone has read over the course of a year, to detailed descriptions of when and where they read a particular book, and how they felt about it. Often diary entries are not actually about the book; it is mentioned in passing and in the context of a number of other activities.

While the owner's name on the flyleaf is not itself enough to justify a 'reading experience', annotations to the text are, as they show that the person has actually interacted with the text. Of course, you then have to consider whether the person whose name is on the flyleaf is the same as the person doing the annotating!

RED is much more than a list of 'people who have read books'. The database aims to bring out as much information as possible about the reading experience. The interface to submit a new entry allows you to specify where the reading was taking place, all the way down to a particular room in a particular house. It also aims to identify if the reading was silent or aloud, alone or with other people; whether the book was owned by the reader, a library book, borrowed, or even stolen. All these data are then used to build up a rich database of information on who was reading what (and how!) in Britain.

UK RED is not just concerned with reading experiences within Britain: team members also look at the reading experiences of citizens abroad. Edmund King, Research Associate, Reading Experience Database, OU, told us that, as a consequence, there are fascinating examples of what captured British soldiers were reading in prisoner-of-war (POW) camps as well as examples of what they were not allowed to read. Books in Welsh and Pakistani were banned, as well as atlases and anything about the Russian revolution. I do not know if there are corresponding records for what prisoners in UK POW camps were forbidden to read, but it would be very interesting to find out.

Open Educational Resources Hack Day

editor — Sun, 03 Jul 2011 23:00:00 +0000

Kirsty Pitkin reports on a two-day practical hack event focusing on Open Educational Resources (OER), held by DevCSI and JISC CETIS in Manchester on 31 March - 1 April 2011.

The Open Educational Resources Hack Day event was designed to bring together those interested in rapidly developing tools and prototypes to solve problems related to OER. Whilst there is a growing interest in the potential for learning resources created and shared openly by academics and teachers, a number of technical challenges still exist, including resource retrieval, evaluation and reuse. This event aimed to explore some of these problem areas by partnering developers with the creators and users of OER to identify needs and potential solutions.

Institutional Challenges in the Data Decade

editor — Sun, 03 Jul 2011 23:00:00 +0000

Marion Tattersall, Carmen O'Dell and John Lewis report on Institutional Challenges in the Data Decade, organised by the Digital Curation Centre (DCC) in partnership with the White Rose University Consortium and held 1-3 March 2011 at the University of Sheffield.

Book Review: Envisioning Future Academic Library Services

editor — Sun, 03 Jul 2011 23:00:00 +0000

John Azzolini reviews a timely collection of essays that highlights the values of institutional leadership and resourcefulness in academic librarianship's engagements with Web 2.0.

Since networked information technology has initiated a breathtaking transformation of knowledge practices, librarians have had a generous supply of thought leaders whose lifetime experience has permitted them to issue credible translations of the 'writing on the wall'. Recently, however, there seems to be many more analysts (and soothsayers) and much more anxious observation and published interpretation of such writing. And the message comes in a red ink, in bold, and with distinct portent, when not downright ominous.

Developments in Virtual 3D Imaging of Cultural Artefacts

editor — Sun, 30 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Richard Collmann describes how experience using a portable Virtual 3D Object Rig in cultural institutions has led to significant improvements in apparatus design and workflow.

The collapsable, portable electromechanical Virtual 3D (V3D) Object Rig Model 1 (ORm1) (Figures 1, 2, 3) was developed to meet an obvious need found after an important Australian cultural artefact - a nineteenth-century post-mortem plaster head-cast of the notorious bushranger Ned Kelly [1] - was Apple QTVR-imaged (QuickTime Virtual Reality) using a large static object rig at the University of Melbourne over 2003/4. The author requested that this moving and hyperlinked image be constructed as a multimedia component of a conjectured cross-disciplinary undergraduate teaching unit. The difficulties encountered in obtaining permission from the cultural collection involved to transport this object some 400 metres to the imaging rig located on the same geographical campus suggested to the author that a portable object imaging rig could be devised and taken to any cultural collection anywhere to image objects in situ.

In the early to mid-19th century these physical records were taken for phrenological research purposes, however by the late-C19 this quasi-science had been largely discredited. The underlying reasons for these practices had been forgotten; the recording and keeping was absorbed by reason of habit into accepted routine procedure; as just a part of the workflow within the State criminal justice execution process. This procedure would be rejected out of hand nowadays, but this 19th century habit of retaining physical artefacts is fortunate for the present-day cross-disciplinary historian.

As mentioned, the author wished to use the head cast as the pivotal focus for cross-disciplinary undergraduate teaching purposes with contributions from the perspective of History of Science, Australian Colonial History, Sociology and Criminology. It was considered by the subject contributors that such a cross-disciplinary teaching module could well benefit from a Web-based multimedia approach.

Saving the Sounds of the UK in the UK SoundMap

editor — Sun, 30 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Maureen Pennock and Chris Clark introduce an innovative initiative from the British Library to map a 12-month soundscape of the UK.

The impact of the digital age upon libraries has been profound, changing not only the back office, services, and the range of materials available to users, but also the public face of libraries and the relationship between the library and its users. Within this changed relationship, collaboration, participation, and online social networks play an increasingly important role in the user experience, especially in large university and national libraries. At the same time, a shift is taking place in the type of collection items held in libraries, and the percentage of born-digital materials acquired is increasing on a daily basis.

The British Library is no exception, making use of a wide range of online services and tools to engage with users and enhance access to the collections, both digitised and born-digital. Numerous initiatives are currently taking place across the Library to engage with users and address these changes, and one in particular has sought to capitalise on both the increase in participatory networks and the opportunities afforded by born-digital material. This initiative is the UK SoundMap, an online crowd-sourcing activity driven by the British Library in partnership with the Noise Futures Network to engage and build the community in development of a new born-digital audio-visual research resource [1][2].

Unlocking and Integrating Audio-Visual Content at the British Library

The UK SoundMap is being carried out as part of a wider project by the British Library's Sound & Vision Department: Unlocking & Integrating Audio Visual Content (UIAVC). The UIAVC project seeks to address changing user needs in a multi-media research environment by establishing the building blocks for a redefined and integrated sound and moving image service within the Library. Other, complementary initiatives in the project include:

Modernising and enhancing interactive features in the existing Archival Sound Recordings (ASR) portal, which currently provides access to over 45,000 selected recordings of music, spoken word, and human and natural environments [3].
Establishing a New Music Network to select and capture content from musicians whose work is produced outside the usual commercial channels
Exploring and piloting new R&D Tools to improve resource discovery through new search and analysis tools for speech and music [4]
Increasing the amount of digital audio and video content accessible to users at the Library (i.e. onsite), and remotely

Overall, the project is key to meeting the Library's audio-visual strategy, which aims to unlock and integrate audio-visual content across the library according to user needs. The initiatives interrelate to a significant degree as they each follow the content path from acquisition to curation to integrated delivery. They each focus on digital content (both born-digital and digitised analogue content), they embrace both onsite and remote (Web) access, and collectively they express the commitment the Library now has towards integrating audio-visual media within the research experience.

International Digital Curation Conference 2010

editor — Sun, 30 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Alex Ball reports on the 6th International Digital Curation Conference, held on 7-8 December 2010 in Chicago.

The International Digital Curation Conference has been held annually by the Digital Curation Centre (DCC) [1] since 2005, quickly establishing a reputation for high-quality presentations and papers. So much so that, as co-chair Allen Renear explained in his opening remarks, after attending the 2006 Conference in Glasgow [2] delegates from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) offered to bring the event to Chicago.

Beyond the PDF

editor — Sun, 30 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Jodi Schneider reports on a three-day workshop about the future of scientific communication, held in San Diego CA, USA, in January 2011.

'Beyond the PDF' brought together around 80 people to the University of California San Diego to discuss scholarly communication, primarily in the sciences. The main topic: How can we apply emergent technologies to improve measurably the way that scholarship is conveyed and comprehended? The group included domain scientists, researchers and software developers, librarians, funders, publishers, journal editors - a mix which organiser Phil Bourne described as 'visionaries, developers, consumers, and conveyors' of scholarship.

Book Review: Introducing RDA

editor — Sun, 30 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Katrina Clifford reviews a work covering the long-heralded change in the cataloguing rule set - RDA (Resource Description and Access).

The world of information description and retrieval is one of constant change and RDA (Resource Description and Access) is often touted as being one of the most radical changes on the horizon. Early discussions were often couched very much in terms of the principles behind the move from AACR2 (Anglo American Cataloguing Rules) and the principles of a FRBR (Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records)-based system. We gradually move closer to the Library of Congress' decision on whether to adopt RDA or not, raising questions of what adoption will mean in terms not just of day-to-day cataloguing but the wider retrieval world. Therefore, it is not just cataloguers who may feel they need to gain an understanding of exactly what RDA is and what moving to it will involve. The title of Chris Oliver's book, Introducing RDA: A Guide to the Basics, will, as a result, catch the eye of people from many spheres of information work.

Content of the Book

Although this book is just over 100 pages long, I would say it is not necessary to start at the beginning and work your way through the book to get the most out of it. If you're looking for something that places RDA squarely within the historical context of information retrieval and the rationale behind its development then the first two chapters give a comprehensive overview in relatively few pages. Chapter 1, 'What is RDA?' introduces the idea of RDA being designed as a result of an increasingly varied range of resources in need of description, especially those that are digital in nature. Additionally there is the need to search multiple datasets at once, including those beyond libraries, in allied institutions such as museums and archives. Chapter 2, 'RDA and the international context', as implied by the title explores the relationship of RDA to international documentation standards such as ISBD (International Standard Bibliographic Description) and how it copes in terms of handling language issues of catalogue records. It is just a brief overview however, all the ideas are discussed in one or two paragraphs each. Together, these two initial chapters would easily fill in the background for an uninitiated professional, such as a library school student and indeed they show that RDA is built upon many of the key concepts touched upon in library school courses, such as Cutter's Rules for a dictionary catalog.

Chapter 3 furthers this introduction by describing FRBR and FRAD (Functional Requirements for Authority Data) and how they relate to RDA. In all the more recent discussions surrounding practical aspects of the uptake of RDA, the theoretical principles underlying it are often forgotten and revisiting them can be an interesting exercise. After an overview of how FRBR and FRAD are constructed, it moves on to why they are important. One figure lays out a MARC record and labels the fields with the appropriate FRBR entities which is helpful in understanding them in context. The remainder of the chapter shows how the RDA terms have been incorporated into the layout of the sections of RDA and the wording of the rules themselves. The chapter shows why RDA is laid out in a very different way to AACR2, grouping rules by the attribute described rather than by item format. This chapter is perhaps the most difficult to work through, but I feel this is due to the nature of the content, rather than any failing on the part of the author.

Chapter 4 is entitled 'Continuity with AACR2' and while this may indicate it will describe how catalogues may appear different, the start of the chapter focuses more on continuity in terms of governance and principles rather than on the nuts and bolts of the records themselves. It does move to describing how AACR2 has been reworked into RDA, rather than RDA being written from scratch and illustrates this with a couple of rules and wordings from both products to compare the differences and similarities. It then moves back to what is essentially an historical account of the 'deconstruction' of AACR2, which is interesting in itself; but it would have been better placed near the start of the chapter to distinguish better between the historical description and the examples from RDA which follow.

Editorial Introduction to Issue 65: Ariadne in Search of Your Views

editor — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 23:00:00 +0000

Richard Waller introduces Ariadne issue 65.

You may have already noted in the editorial section of this issue a link to the Reader Survey which I ask you seriously to consider completing, whether you are a frequent Ariadne reader or are reading the Magazine for the first time. Moves are afoot to give Ariadne some effort towards improvements in your experience of the publication and I cannot emphasise enough the value I place on suggestions and comments from you. I am very keen to know what readers value and dislike in Ariadne.

Academic Liaison Librarianship: Curatorial Pedagogy Or Pedagogical Curation?

editor — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 23:00:00 +0000

Allan Parsons presents a strategic view of the need to develop the academic liaison librarianship role.

Developing Infrastructure for Research Data Management at the University of Oxford

editor — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 23:00:00 +0000

James A. J. Wilson, Michael A. Fraser, Luis Martinez-Uribe, Paul Jeffreys, Meriel Patrick, Asif Akram and Tahir Mansoori describe the approaches taken, findings, and issues encountered while developing research data management services and infrastructure at the University of Oxford.

The University of Oxford began to consider research data management infrastructure in earnest in 2008, with the 'Scoping Digital Repository Services for Research Data' Project [1]. Two further JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee)-funded pilot projects followed this initial study, and the approaches taken by these projects, and their findings, form the bulk of this article.

Moving Researchers across the EResearch Chasm

editor — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 23:00:00 +0000

Malcolm Wolski and Joanna Richardson outline an Australian initiative to address technology challenges within current research paradigms.

In 1999 Sir John Taylor [1], then Director General of the UK Research Councils, talked about e-Science, i.e. global collaboration in key areas of science and the next generation of infrastructure that will support it. It encompasses computationally intensive science that is carried out in highly distributed network environments or that uses immense datasets that require grid computing. In the US the term cyberinfrastructure has been used to describe the new research environments that support advanced data acquisition, data storage, data management, data integration, data mining, data visualisation and other computing and information processing services over the Internet. In Australia—and other countries—the term eResearch extends e-Science and cyberinfrastructure to other disciplines, including the humanities and social sciences, and denotes the use of information technology to support existing and new forms of research.

It is within this rapidly evolving context that the researcher of the 21st century now operates. However not all researchers are responding to changes in this new environment. In this article we will examine the current research paradigm, the main drivers for researchers to engage with this paradigm, reasons for lack of engagement, and a project undertaken at an Australian university—as part of a national initiative—to start to address the problem of making data from research activity, past and current, more discoverable and accessible.

Trends in the Evolution of Research Paradigms

Gray [2] discusses the evolution of research paradigms which has led to the increasingly important role that information technology now plays in supporting research. For thousands of years there was experimental / empirical science followed in the last few hundred years by theoretical science. The third research paradigm, which evolved in the last few decades, was characterised by increasingly complex research challenges based principally on large-scale computational simulation. This led to the concept of holistic systems of systems; the evolution from wet labs (hands-on scientific research and experimentation) to virtual labs; and an emphasis on modelling, simulation, projection and prediction.

E-Science / cyberinfrastructure / eResearch are short-hand terms for a new fourth paradigm which is characterised by data-intensive science. The focus is on data analysis and mining; patterns discovery; and the evolution of large databases and data archives. One by-product is the so-called 'data deluge', which has led to enormous challenges in research data management. The fourth paradigm is changing the longstanding model of scholarly communication as, in the words of Clifford Lynch [2], 'the paper becomes a window for a scientist to not only actively understand a scientific result, but also reproduce it or extend it'. This latest paradigm is also characterised by the collaborative and multidisciplinary nature of the research being undertaken at both national and international levels.