Overview of content related to 'open access'

Editorial Introduction to Issue 70

lisrw — Fri, 14 Dec 2012 14:20:23 +0000

The editor introduces readers to the content of Ariadne Issue 70.

Welcome to Issue 70 of Ariadne which is full to the brim with feature articles and a wide range of event reports and book reviews.

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.

21st-century Scholarship and Wikipedia

lisrw — Fri, 30 Nov 2012 13:18:23 +0000

Amber Thomas explores the ways in which emerging research practices and Wikipedia illustrate the changing boundaries of academic work.

Wikipedia, the world’s fifth most-used Web site [1], is a good illustration of the growing credibility of online resources. In his article in Ariadne earlier this year, “Wikipedia: Reflections on Use and Academic Acceptance” [2], Brian Whalley described the debates around accuracy and review, in the context of geology.

Mining the Archive: The Development of Electronic Journals

lisrw — Thu, 06 Dec 2012 15:50:18 +0000

Martin White looks through the Ariadne archive to trace the development of e-journals as a particular aspect of electronic service delivery and highlights material he considers as significant.

My career has spanned 42 years in the information business. It has encompassed 10,000-hole optical coincidence cards, online database services, videotext, laser discs, and CD-ROMs, the World Wide Web, mobile services and big data solutions. I find the historical development of information resource management absolutely fascinating, yet feel that in general it is poorly documented from an analytical perspective even though there are some excellent archives.

These archives include the back issues of Ariadne from January 1996. Ariadne has always been one of my must-reads as a way of keeping in touch with issues and developments in e-delivery of information. The recently launched new Ariadne platform [1] has provided easier access to these archives. Looking through its content has reminded me of the skills and vision of the UK information profession as it sought to meet emerging user requirements with very limited resources. The archives have always been available on the Ariadne site but the recent update to the site and the availability of good tags on the archive content has made it much easier to mine through the archive issues.

The Ariadne team, in particular Richard Waller, has given me the opportunity to mine those archives [2] and trace some of the developments in electronic service delivery in the UK.

Indeed working through the archives is now probably too easy as in the preparation of this column I have found myself moving sideways from many of the feature articles to revel in the other columns that have been a feature of Ariadne. This article is a personal view of some of these developments and is in no way intended to be a definitive account. Its main purpose is to encourage others to look into the archive and learn from the experiences of the many innovators that have patiently coped with the challenges of emerging technology, resource limitations and often a distinct lack of strategy and policy at both an institutional and government level.

Figure 1: Optical coincidence card, circa 1970

e-Journal Development

Arriving at the University of Southampton in 1967 my main surprise was not the standard of the laboratories but the quality and scale of the Chemistry Department library. School does not prepare you for reading primary journals and how best to make use of Chemical Abstracts, but I quickly found that working in the library was much more fun than in a laboratory. I obtained an excellent result in one vacation project on physical chemistry problems by reverse engineering the problems through Chemical Abstracts! Therefore, as it turned out, I had started my career as an information scientist before I even graduated. By 1977 I was working with The Chemical Society on the micropublishing of journals and taking part in a British Library project on the future of chemical information. Re-reading the outcomes of that project makes me realise how difficult it is to forecast the future. Now my past has re-asserted itself to good effect as I have both the honour and excitement of being Chair of the eContent Committee of the Royal Society of Chemistry.

Figure 2: Laser disc, circa 1980

So from my standpoint, in seeking to identify distinct themes in the development of information resource management in Ariadne, a good place to start is with the e-markup of chemical journals. In Issue 1 Dr Henry Rzepa wrote about the potential benefits of the semantic markup of primary journals to provide chemists with access to the content of the journal article and not just to a contents page and title [4]. The immediate problem you face reading this admirable summary of the potential benefits of markup is that many of the hyperlinks have disappeared. History has been technologically terminated. Almost 15 years passed by before the Royal Society of Chemistry set up Project Prospect and turned semantic markup into a production process [4]. Dr Rzepa is now Professor of Computational Chemistry at Imperial College, London.

By the mid-1990s good progress had been made in e-journal production technologies and the first e-only journals were beginning to appear. Among them was Glacial Geology and Geomorphology (GGG) which existed in a printed version only in as far as readers could print out a selection from it. One aim of GGG is therefore to provide the benefits of electronic transfer as well as other value added products in an accepted academic, peer-reviewed system. The author of the article describing the project [5] was Dr. Brian Whalley, who went on to become a Professor in the Geomaterials Research Group, Queens University of Belfast. As you will discover from his author profile (another Ariadne innovation), Brian is still active though retired from formal education. What struck me about this article was the author’s vision in January 1996 of how e-journals could be of benefit in university teaching.

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.

EMTACL12 (Emerging Technologies in Academic Libraries)

lisrw — Thu, 13 Dec 2012 14:42:26 +0000

Sarah Rayner and Olivia Walsby report on a three-day conference on Emerging Technologies in Academic Libraries, hosted by NTNU (Norwegian University of Science and Technology) in Trondheim, Norway over 1 - 3 October 2012.

Table of Contents

Paint-Yourself-in-the-Corner Infrastructure
Think Different

The three-day conference consisted of eight keynote presentations by invited speakers and a number of parallel sessions. The main themes set out for this year’s conference were supporting research, organisational change within the library, linked open data and other semantic web applications in the library, new literacies, and new services/old services in new clothes, along with other relevant perspectives on emerging technologies.

We attended the conference to gain an overview of organisational changes happening across the sector in relation to technological developments and to gather opinion on the relevance of the academic library within a digital society. We also wanted to explore how the future exploitation of new technologies within libraries might have a positive impact on the quality of teaching and learning together with the student experience.

This article will summarise a selection of keynote and parallel sessions from across the three days that addressed these issues.

1 October 2012: Keynotes

Paint-Yourself-in-the-Corner Infrastructure

Herbert Van de Sompel, Los Alamos National Laboratory, USA

The opening keynote presented by Herbert Van de Sompel from Los Alamos National Laboratory in the USA raised the issues brought about by changes to scholarly communication. Herbert spoke about an increase in dynamic scholarly records that are continually in flux, interdependent, and Web-based, and with which our current infrastructures are unable to cope. With the publication of interdependent and executable papers, research is now a native Web activity; supporting the re-execution of algorithms and the ability to add data at any time (i.e. PLoS Topic Pages [1] PeerJ [2]). Herbert pointed out that, as a consequence, we now need to be able to view the state of a scholarly record at certain moments in time; to track back in time to see where findings have come from, and to trace the workflow, and therein lies a challenge for academic libraries.

Herbert explained that at present the archive infrastructure is only able to deal with static, non-fluxing research output, that, when using URIs, you will always come to the current version, not prior versions, and that Web archives are not integrated into the Web. As Herbert went on to point out, the key problem is that the Web was created without motion of time; existing in the ‘perpetual now’.

Herbert believes that the challenges we face in this new environment are two-fold: archival approaches need to be changed to use a different infrastructure; and we need to reassess how we reference scholarly assets. We have CMS records, Web archives, and caches, but it would be better to trace the history or timeline of a URI. Therefore, Herbert offered some potential tools and solutions; Memento [3] (started in 2009) allows you to track back to a past version of an item in the Internet archive, bridging current URIs to old URIs from the Internet archive, using a time gate. SiteStory [4] is a tool which allows your Web server to take an active part in its own archiving; every request from a user is pushed back to an archive and stored. Therefore, every time material is accessed, it is archived, thereby providing a true history of an object in the archive.

Herbert Van de Sompel (Photo courtesy of Lukas Koster, University of Amsterdam.)

In conclusion, Herbert suggested that archiving needs to be an ongoing activity, tracing every interaction, including archiving links at the time of publication to ensure that the context and history of an evolving piece of research will never be lost.

Think Different

Karen Coyle, Berkeley, CA, USA

Karen Coyle (Photo courtesy of Lukas Koster, University of Amsterdam.)

Karen opened by raising a challenge to the way in which libraries are still holding on to outdated practices, such as the librarian’s obsession with alphabetical order, describing it as essentially only ‘an accident of language’ and questioning its continuing relevance given the now pervasive ability to cross-search. Karen continued on this theme citing bibliographic hierarchies such as Dewey as ‘knowledge prevention systems’ which only serve to lock our users into a set view of what's out there.

Karen’s introduction led nicely on to the main themes of her presentation: the current role of the library, the need to move away from the view that getting the book into the user’s hand is the end game, and the need to change our attitudes to bibliographic control and linear order. In effect, ‘the library should no longer be about volume and ownership!’. Karen talked about how we should instead focus on how resources are used and what resources should be used together, to inform how we approach provision in the future. Karen believes that the library must become connected to information on the Web, providing more context for our users and thus allowing greater information discovery. Karen argued that the library’s role is no longer simply to gather items into an inventory but to seek to organise information that until now has been inconveniently packaged. She suggested that we need to change our view, to focus on the information and its context, not the objects or books themselves. Karen noted in particular that currently we present nothing within the context of time, reiterating the theme of time travel covered in Herbert’s presentation. So, how can we do this? Karen proposed that we should be able to interrogate catalogues to provide items with context. She gave examples such as WorldCat [5], where you can view timelines on people, what they have published and what has been published about them, giving a relative image of their importance.

Karen argued that although linked data could prove to be an answer, or could certainly help, we must nonetheless seek to find a range of solutions and technologies. She warned that the pitfall of having an answer is that it stops you asking questions! Karen talked about how libraries must now recognise that bibliographic data are available everywhere, and that what libraries have that is essential and unique are the details on holdings. She proposed that on searching the Web, part of the rich snippet should include information about what the library holds and whether it's available. The Web should be used to direct readers to their library holdings, as well as making use of data such as location information, already being sourced by search engines. Karen’s concluding remarks were that libraries need to look to this new approach (using tools such as Schema.org [6]) or they will lose visitors, and that if we want to remain visible and relevant, we need to be where our users are - on the Web.

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.

Book Review: User Studies for Digital Library Development

lisrw — Thu, 13 Dec 2012 22:10:17 +0000

Selenay Aytac reviews a collection of essays on user studies and digital library development that provides a concise overview of a variety of digital library projects and examines major research trends relating to digital libraries.

User Studies for Digital Library Development provides a concise overview of a variety of digital library projects and examines major research trends relating to digital libraries. While there are many books on user studies and digital library development, this work operates at the junction of these two domains and stands out for its insights, balance, and quality of its case-based investigations. The book brings together points of view from different professional communities, including practitioners as well as researchers.

Book Review: The E-copyright Handbook

lisrw — Thu, 13 Dec 2012 23:30:54 +0000

Charles Oppenheim takes a look at the latest of Paul Pedley’s copyright guidance books, and, in some respects, finds it wanting.

Paul Pedley is a name that needs no introduction to aficionados of copyright textbooks, being the author of several such books published by Facet Publishing in the past (and reviewed by Ariadne [1][2][3][4][5]). His latest effort, The E-copyright Handbook, attempts to cover the fast-moving and complex world of electronic copyright, using an interesting approach. Rather than the traditional way of such books, describing the media and describing the rights granted to copyright owners, the way the law applies to each media type, exceptions to copyright and so on, his approach is a mixture but with some emphasis on activities, as a glance at the chapter titles shows: Introduction, Content Types, Activities, Copyright Exceptions, Licences, the Digital Economy Act, Enforcement and The Hargreaves Review.

It is a complex approach, which requires careful cross-referencing and also checking that material is neither duplicated, nor that is anything is overlooked. It is not clear to me whether the book is meant for reading through, or whether it should be just dipped into when a particular issue causes someone to check the law; but I found the approach confusing.

The book also suffers from being in a fast-moving area, where the law, and technology, change fast and although it is clear that Facet got the book published in record time, as there are numerous references to 2012 developments in the text, the work is already out of date in several places, and will no doubt get more out of date as the months go on. Another problem is that the book cannot make up its mind whether it is written for UK readers, or readers in the EU, or in the USA. All too often, different countries’ court cases are mentioned together; one is (say) a UK case and another is a US case. Without the understanding that US law and UK law in this field are very different, people will come to incorrect conclusions about the significance of the cases to them in their day to day work. Moreover, all too often the cases are described without any court decisions relating to them being provided; so one is left with the worry ‘why did the author mention this case at all?’

Enhancing Collaboration and Interaction in a Post-graduate Research Programme

lisrw — Sat, 28 Jul 2012 08:39:58 +0000

Tertia Coetsee describes a community of practice for post-graduate students where RefShare is deployed for digital storage and retrieval, alongside Blackboard for the purposes of communication. She also describes the role of the information specialist in the programme.

The Phytomedicine Programme is a multidisciplinary and collaborative research programme investigating therapeutically useful compounds present in plants growing in South Africa. The programme was started in 1995 and was transferred to the Department of Paraclinical Sciences, Faculty of Veterinary Science, University of Pretoria in 2002. In 2007 it was designated as a National Research Foundation Developed Research Niche Area [1].

Launching a New Community-owned Content Service

lisrw — Sat, 28 Jul 2012 16:36:05 +0000

Caren Milloy describes some of the challenges overcome and lessons learned by JISC Collections during the development of JISC eCollections.

JISC eCollections is a set of e-resource platforms launched in November 2011 by JISC Collections, in partnership with the JISC data centres EDINA and Mimas. The platforms (Figure 1) are JISC MediaHub, JISC Historic Books and JISC Journal Archives; together, they are intended to provide a sustainable, value-for-money alternative to accessing licensed content on publisher platforms, by consolidating and hosting the broad range of historical book, journal archive and multimedia content purchased by JISC Collections on behalf of the UK education community. The vision is to provide a world-class collection that ensures users’ broadest information needs are well met, and to work in partnership with the community to improve and develop the platforms around evolving student and researcher expectations.

Background

The primary role of JISC Collections is the licensing of content on behalf of its UK Higher Education (HE) and Further Education (FE) member organisations. Over the last 10 years, JISC Collections has invested over £40 million in centralised licensing of digital content, in perpetuity, on behalf of all its members. The first agreement was signed in 2002 for ProQuest’s Early English Books Online (EEBO). Since then, national licences have been negotiated for historic books, journal archives and multimedia content (Figure 1), such as documentaries and educational films. In 2010, JISC Collections invested a further £2.5 million in film and image content, representing UK and world history since 1987, specially selected for teaching and learning. The majority of JISC Collections’ member organisations would be unable to afford per-institution subscriptions to these book, journal and multimedia collections, so centralised licensing is critical to broadening access.

Figure 1: The three platforms that make up the JISC eCollections service

Why Develop JISC eCollections?

The platforms contain more than 4.5 million resources from over 20 providers. JISC Collections members were previously required to access this content via a range of separate services, each with different user interfaces and administrative requirements, and with a complex funding set-up including both JISC subsidies and publisher access fees payable by each institution. JISC Collections felt that its existing – and future – investments in content would best be protected and preserved by developing an independent service, as an affordable alternative to relying on content providers for access to perpetually licensed content. Such a service would allow the education community to take ownership of its acquisitions and assure it of future control. In 2011 each group of resources was consolidated into one platform to increase discoverability, simplify the user experience (making it more inclusive to users at all academic levels), reduce the administrative burden, and thereby enable maximum value to be derived from the initial content investments.

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.

Wikipedia: Reflections on Use and Acceptance in Academic Environments

lisrw — Sat, 28 Jul 2012 20:26:22 +0000

In the light of a workshop run by the Geological Society of London and Wikimedia UK, Brian Whalley reflects on the attitudes and practice of academia in respect of present-day Wikipedia content.

Wikipedia has become internationally known as an online encyclopaedia ('The Free Encyclopedia'). Developed by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger and launched in 2001 it has, to date, editions in 285 languages. Wikipedia is but one subset of the Web-based applications known as 'wikis'. The original wiki (as wikiwikiweb) was developed by Ward Cunningham in the 1990s as the least complex way of rapidly sharing and communicating 'information'. Wiki is Hawaiian for 'quick'; repeating the word is equivalent to adding 'very'.

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!

Collaborations Workshop 2012: Software, Sharing and Collaboration in Oxford

lisrw — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 13:57:05 +0000

Simon Choppin reports on a two-day software workshop held at The Queen’s College, Oxford over 21 - 22 March 2012.

On the 21 and 22 March 2012 I attended a workshop which was unlike the stolid conferences I was used to. In the space of two sunny days I found I had spoken to more people and learnt more about them than I usually managed in an entire week. Presentations were short and focused, discussions were varied and fascinating, and the relaxed, open format was very effective in bringing people from differing disciplines together to consider a common theme. In this case the theme was software, and whether you used or developed it, there was plenty of food for thought.

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.

Kultivating Kultur: Increasing Arts Research Deposit

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

Marie-Therese Gramstadt discusses how the JISC-funded Kultivate Project is encouraging arts research deposit in UK institutional repositories.

Funded by the Deposit strand [1] JISC Information Environment programme and led by the Visual Arts Data Service (VADS), a Research Centre of the University for the Creative Arts, Kultivate will increase arts research deposit in UK institutional repositories.

Peculiarities of Digitising Materials from the Collections of the National Academy of Sciences, Armenia

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

Alan Hopkinson and Tigran Zargaryan give an overview of their experience of digitising paper-based materials in the Fundamental Scientific Library of the National Academy of Sciences, Armenia including some of the obstacles encountered during image processing and optical character recognition.

Early writing which first appeared as cuneiform protocols and then emerged in manuscript form and as printed materials is currently entering a new stage in its development – in the form of electronic publications.

Developing Research Excellence and Methods (DREaM) Project Launch Conference

lisrw — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 16:59:05 +0000

Ray Harper reports on a one-day conference which launched the DREaM Project, held by the Library and Information Science Research Coalition in London on 19 July 2011.

The DREaM (Developing Research Excellence and Methods) Conference [1] was held at the British Library Conference Centre in London in July 2011. The conference was attended by 86 delegates, and consisted of an overview of the DREaM Project, two keynote papers, a one-minute madness session, and four parallel breakout sessions. I had the opportunity to attend as a sponsored delegate, thanks to Glen Recruitment, Sue Hill Recruitment and TFPL.

Piloting Web Conferencing Software: Experiences and Challenges

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

Julian Prior and Marie Salter report on their experiences piloting Elluminate Live! at the University of Bath.

In the current fiscal climate faced by educational institutions in the UK, elearning tools and technologies that promise efficiency savings as well as enhancing the quality and quantity of course offerings are gaining popularity. One such technology is Web conferencing where lectures, seminars, meetings or presentations take place online and allow for remote participation and collaboration via audio, video, instant chat and a virtual 'whiteboard.'[1].

Retooling Special Collections Digitisation in the Age of Mass Scanning

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

Constance Rinaldo, Judith Warnement, Tom Baione, Martin R. Kalfatovic and Susan Fraser describe results from a study to identify and develop a cost-effective and efficient large-scale digitisation workflow for special collections library materials.

The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) [1] is a consortium of 12 natural history and botanical libraries that co-operate to digitise and make accessible the legacy literature of biodiversity held in their collections and to make that literature available for open access and responsible use as a part of a global 'biodiversity commons.' [2] The participating libraries hold more than two million volumes of biodiversity literature collected over 200 years to support the work of scientists, researchers and students in their home insti

From Link Rot to Web Sanctuary: Creating the Digital Educational Resource Archive (DERA)

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

Bernard M Scaife describes how an innovative use of the EPrints repository software is helping to preserve official documents from the Web.

When I started as Technical Services Librarian at the Institute of Education (IOE) in September 2009, one of the first tasks I was given was to do something about all the broken links in the catalogue. Link rot [1] is the bane of the Systems Librarian's life and I was well aware that you had to run fast to stand still.

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).

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.

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.

Editorial Introduction to Issue 66: Sanity Check

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

Richard Waller introduces Ariadne issue 66.

With institutions searching to increase the impact of the work they do, and conscious of the immediate impact of any event they organise, many will be interested to read of 10 Cheap and Easy Ways to Amplify Your Event in which Marieke Guy provides a raft of suggestions to enhance the participants' experience of and involvement in, the event they are attending.

Characterising and Preserving Digital Repositories: File Format Profiles

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

Steve Hitchcock and David Tarrant show how file format profiles, the starting point for preservation plans and actions, can also be used to reveal the fingerprints of emerging types of institutional repositories.

10 Years of Zetoc

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

Jane Ronson looks at how Zetoc has developed and what the future holds for the service.

Now celebrating its 10th anniversary, Zetoc [1] provides quality-assured, comprehensive journal table of contents data for resource discovery that users can search and have delivered straight to their in-box or desktop. In a nutshell, Zetoc is all about convenience, current awareness and comprehensive coverage. In a recent survey, one academic commented: 'This is a "one-stop shop" for relevant literature'. What is Zetoc, what has it achieved and where is it going? In this article I will look at the history of the service and how it has developed over the past decade.

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.

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.

Repository Fringe 2010

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

Martin Donnelly (and friends) report on the Repository Fringe "unconference" held at the National e-Science Centre in Edinburgh, Scotland, over 2-3 September 2010.

2010 was the third year of Repository Fringe, and slightly more formally organised than its antecedents, with an increased number of discursive presentations and less in the way of organised chaos! The proceedings began on Wednesday 1 September with a one-day, pre-event SHERPA/RoMEO API Workshop [1] run by the Repositories Support Project team.

Europeana Open Culture 2010

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

David Fuegi and Monika Segbert-Elbert report on the annual Europeana Conference, held at the Westergasfabriek in Amsterdam in October 2010.

The Europeana Conference is a free annual event which highlights current challenges for libraries, museums, archives and audio-visual archives and which looks for practical solutions for the future. It connects the main actors in cultural and scientific heritage in order to build networks and establish future collaborations. The Europeana Open Culture 2010 Conference [1] was the third annual conference and the biggest so far. It focused on how the cultural institutions can create public value by making digital, cultural and scientific information openly available.

Internet Librarian International Conference 2010

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

Claire Tylee, Katrin Flemming and Elly Cope report on the two-day Internet Librarian International Conference focusing on innovation and technology in the information profession, held in London on 14-15 October 2010.

Table of Contents

Thursday 14 October
Track A: Looking Ahead to Value

Thursday 14 October

Track A: Looking Ahead to Value

A102: Future of Academic Libraries

Mal Booth, University of Technology Sydney (Australia)

Michael Jubb, Research Information Network (UK)

Mal Booth from the University of Technology Sydney started the session by giving an insight into current plans and projects underway to inform a new library building due to open in 2015 as part of a major redeveloped city campus.

Book Review: Acquisitions in the New Information Universe

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

Eilidh Mackay reviews a work which takes a concept-based approach to contemporary acquisitions practices.

In Acquisitions in the new information universe, Jesse Holden provides a comprehensive introduction to fundamental acquisitions concepts, and strategies for translating these into practice in the twenty-first century.

Book Review: Introductory Concepts in Information Science

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

Charles Oppenheim takes a look at an introduction to Information Science but fails to be impressed.

With a title like that, one would expect a primer, introducing all the key concepts of information science to someone studying the topic for the first time at undergraduate or Masters' level, and possibly for the interested layman. Such a book would be a worthy successor to Chris Hanson's Introduction to Science Information Work, and Roger Meetham's Information Retrieval, both of which were first published about 40 years ago. Sadly, however, this book does not fulfil the promise of its title.

Repository Software Comparison: Building Digital Library Infrastructure at LSE

editor — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 23:00:00 +0000

Ed Fay presents a comparison of repository software that was carried out at LSE in support of digital library infrastructure development.