Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are nothing new. In fact, Google web trends show searches for the term API have been on an increase since their records began in 2004.  However, I would argue that there are still potential benefits to universities to be wrung from this venerable technology.

The simplest definition of an API is ‘an interface to a website or software that is designed to be used by developers not by end users’. It allows developers to access the data inside the website or software and use that data in other websites or other pieces of software.

Allows an easy transfer of data around your institution and with partners
The modern university has a mind-boggling array of software, hardware and websites. They also work in an increasingly collaborative environment.  To ensure the smooth running of the university and for ease of collaboration, it is essential that data can flow between the systems that make a university tick. APIs offer a route to addressing the problem. Read some examples of how institutions have used APIs to move data between systems.

Provides automation for laborious tasks
Data sharing between systems can often be difficult and can sometimes require the manual processing of information to take it from one system and to another. APIs offer potential cost savings in the process of moving data. There will be an initial set up cost for the API, but in the long run they should offer a more efficient and more scalable option than manual data processing. This should not only provide cost savings but should also allow the exploration of new opportunities which arise when working at a greater scale.

Improves attraction and retention of students
Universities operate in an increasingly competitive environment; they need to attract students. A university’s brand is an important element in attracting students. APIs could offer opportunities to ensure a university’s brand is well represented in social media and other websites where potential students are likely to be looking. An way of using APIs to help with retention would be developing smartphone applications. These could make it easier for students to settle in to life at the university, for example the recently developed NewcastleUniversity App.

These are all big issues for universities and APIs offer the promise of big rewards. But big rewards rarely come easily. However, when thinking about APIs we are fortunate that there is a wealth of good practice in successful implementation on the web and in enterprises. The report which I have been involved in writing offers some useful case studies and examples that people can follow when implementing APIs. It also includes some practical pointers on management and planning issues that need to be taken into account if APIs are to be implemented.

So, while APIs are sometimes viewed as some kind of young web 2.0 upstart, I would argue that they are a mature technology with a long history of solving exactly the kind of challenges every university is facing. I’d love to hear how you are using APIs – please do tweet @andymcg or comment below I’d also like to hear if you think I’ve got it wrong and that APIs are in fact old hat with newer technologies emerging that can offer better ways of
addressing these problems.

Read Andy’s team blog

I work at Somerset College as research & library services manager and many of my colleagues may ask – ‘Is it worth creating various interactive tutorials or embedding other media with the use of digital tools for the sake of a one hour session?’

Let’s be honest here, learners rarely master research or referencing skills in a one hour library instruction session. The sheer amount of information all around them in different types and formats may even leave them more overwhelmed. Alongside this, the numerous methods of referencing information sources can turn learners to the web, (sites like Neil’s Toolbox, for example), and without the proper understanding of how citation works in real terms or what it consists of this is not always a good thing.

This has been helped at some colleges by the induction of an integrated study skills module into the curriculum; this means that librarians are delivering library instruction sessions throughout the academic year. Although, this is not the case everywhere and library staff are often heard saying that getting numerous library instruction sessions booked in for learners would ‘eat away’ at precious tutorial time with their lecturers.

I believe that there are two areas where we can teach learners how to use library materials and reference usage correctly:

• Create effective communication to enhance participation
• Support a learner-centred/interactive approach to activities enhanced by the use of technologies.

Here are some thoughts on how we can help make this happen:

• Communication is fundamental and it does create transformation, awareness about libraries and their services gets cascaded to learners via academic staff almost instantaneously.  In my experience most colleges have staff development departments or units, as they are sometimes called, that can help with organising training sessions for academics. How about thinking of a cunning title that will encourage curiosity and ultimately better attendance (we called one of ours ‘Library at Your Fingertips’)
• Another idea…… librarians ‘roving’ around with tablets (iPad, Samsung Galaxy or their equivalents) and mingling amongst learners and staff demonstrating library resources in less traditional learning environments (see University of Huddersfield’s Project 2012: The Roving Librarian)
• As for teaching materials, rather than venturing into the vastness of cyberspace in search of ready-made tutorials, it can be rather satisfying to create your own that can turn a traditional library instruction into an interactive learning experience. Such tutorials, if uploaded onto a virtual learning environment (VLE), can be particularly helpful in reaching a large number of learners 24/7. What’s more – they are also tailored to individual learning needs and their study levels. Creating an envisioned tutorial through the use of freely available Web 2.0 digital technologies can be a huge accomplishment for librarians and learners alike.  Read our full case study for more information
• At Somerset College our latest development with harnessing technologies involves the use of e-clickers. A vital feature of the TV games’ shows such as Who Wants to be a Millionaire and Jeopardy! are now mimicked during the referencing and research teaching sessions. The use of e-clickers helps to engage learners during their library instruction and results in an increased participation and competitiveness with their peers. Instant feedback provided on screen helps librarians assess learners’ understanding of the subject matter during the session.
• Involving learners in creating tutorials could improve their digital literacy development and employability skills. In doing this you could also be enhancing your own technical skills.

College libraries are always on the lookout for new emerging technologies to see how they can be utilised in improving library instruction and the learning experience. JISC RSC South West has been pivotal in helping us with researching and implementing new technologies as well as showcasing best practice in their use across the academic region. The JISC RSC South West has been key in providing that all-round continuity!

Mark Walport speaks. Photo courtesy of Torsten Reimer

“It’s a complete no-brainer,” said Sir Mark Walport. The director of the Wellcome Trust was responding to JISC’s Digital Infrastructure Directions report into the value and benefits of text and data mining, which recommends that the UK should create a copyright exception for text and data mining for non-commercial research. “It is critical that we enable researchers to maximise the value of publicly funded published outputs. We need to just get on and do it,” he urged.

It was a view endorsed by his fellow experts on the panel, and the majority of audience, who had heard one of the report’s authors explain the rationale behind the study and the key findings within it at an event last night at the Wellcome Trust.

Dr Diane McDonald explained that JISC had commissioned the report because of the need for empirical evidence on the subject – the UK government has stated that policy changes should be based on solid evidence – and that she and co-author Ursula Kelly had used the UK Treasury’s own best practice guidelines to evaluate the research.

The context is that the academic world faces a data deluge. There are 1.5m academic publications every year and two new articles are uploaded to UK PubMed Central every minute of the day.  No human researcher could hope to be able to examine the torrent of data in their field, make sense of it and turn it into new knowledge – but computers can. However, while there are some pockets of data mining within UK higher education, concentrated within the biomedical sciences, the entry and transaction costs to this new form of research are, in the main, so high as to be off-putting.

Panel session. Photo courtesy of Torsten Reimer

The availability of material for mining is limited – most text mining in the UK is based on open access publications – and researchers face legal uncertainty as they negotiate a maze of licensing agreements. In addition, there are inaccessible information silos where different corpora of articles come in different formats with different standards and different metadata, making it extremely difficult to search across them. There is also low awareness among both researchers and publishers of the potential for text mining.

Yet, the benefits of lowering the barriers to such forms of research could be significant, not only for UK higher education but also for its economy and for society as a whole.

Professor Martin Hall, vice-chancellor of the University of Salford, offered an example of how data-mined information could have a real impact on public health. For example, these tools could be used to create a cholesterol map of greater Manchester which would allow public health officials to focus efforts where it counts and make a significant intervention.

Professor Douglas Kell, chief executive of the BBSRC, meanwhile, pointed to research in his own field and the move towards a more inductive, data-driven model where the research begins with the data and finds a hypothesis that fits rather than vice versa. “Integrative biology requires the use and thus access to data and literature that one did not create itself. Without this, biological research will be stalled,” he said.

It was a point picked up by audience member Philip Ditchfield of GlaxoSmithKline. “There are about 7,000 diseases out there and we can cure about 1% as an industry at the moment.  We’re all patients at the end of the day and we need to discover medicines. That’s the priority,” he commented. “We’re a very compliant industry and we want to work with publishers, not undermine their intellectual property. Publishers often say you can mine our content – you just have to ask us. That’s very easy to say and very hard to achieve. It is like in the early days of motor cars when you were allowed to  drive down the road but you had to have a man with a red flag running in front of you.”

Removing this red flag, at least for non-commercial research, in the form of a copyright exception to support text mining and analytics, as proposed by Hargreaves is the key recommendation of the report.

Find out more about the report

Just weeks into the New Year and already there is a new ebooks revelation that colleges and universities need to digest. January saw the launch of Apple’s new iBooks2 software which grabbed headlines (see the BBC article here) and sparked heated debate across the academic community.

Quietly underpinning the technology of the iBooks software is ePub.  ePub is the ‘defacto’ ebook standard, with the latest version of ePub3 supporting complex layouts and rich media and interactivity for eTextbooks and professional and scientific publications.

Supporting institutions and academics in taking advantage of these new technologies saw JISC fund the creation of a thinktank to explore the potential of ePub for the academic community.  JISC, the members of the thinktank and Edina at the University of Edinburgh, undertook a study on ePub and the current ebook landscape.

Digital Monographs: Technical landscape exemplars and Recommendations peers beneath the eye-catching headlines and provides an important message for institutions and how they increasingly adapt their teaching and support services to an online, interactive and digital future.

Importantly, the report identifies areas where ePub3 can help institutions, students and researchers confront some of the problems they currently face. For example, students face a continued rise in the costs associated with buying print text books.  Researchers too find that they have to adjust to an increasingly open mandate from funders and institutions.

Listen to a podcast about this with JISC programme manager Ben Showers:

Podcast

EPub provides opportunities for institutions to answer critical problems such as those above and others:

• Academics and researchers can publish their work cheaply and easily, benefitting students as well as researchers who may be outside an academic institution;
• It is easily readable on multiple devices (from phones to tablets and desktop) and can be accessed from popular platforms;
• It provides a clean copy of text or data for quoting – essential for the scholarly process;
• ePub3 realises the potential for highly interactive and rich academic content,
• It has no legal restrictions or patents preventing its open use,

The report also provides a picture of the current ebook landscape and the impact that ebooks and mobile access are having on the support institutions provide to their students and academics. In particular there is a lot of talk about student expectations; but scholars’ expectations are changing rapidly.

As the report makes clear: The next generation of scholars will be educated in a context of increasingly-digital learning materials. Their expectations for ease of discovery, format-shifting, mobile access and multimedia exemplars will extend beyond e-textbooks used at the undergraduate level (P. 15).

Increasingly these expectations are focussing around mobile access and consumption: “…mobile devices are ubiquitous, personal and always at hand; even if they are not the locus of sustained content consumption, they are a critical adjunct” (p. 38).

JISC has been interested in the transformations taking place in scholarly publishing and communications for a number of years, most recently with its work on scholarly communications and the idea of campus-based publishing. Indeed, the availability of cheap and easy e-book publishing platforms combined with open licensing is the basis for a growth in open textbooks , often with significant public investment (for example in California).

While processes such as peer-review ensure the quality and value of scholarly outputs, ePub3 could see academia exploit a trend that’s already witnessing blockbuster authors such as JK Rowling withholding digital rights and publishing ebooks directly.

The once high barriers to such a future are being rapidly lowered with ePub and similar standards. Criticlaly, ePub reuses existing technologies wherever possible, for example, XML, XHTML, and has led to ePub being described as “a website in a box”:

Its technology stack is heavily borrowed from web technologies. This allowed a number of ebook readers to be developed quickly using web browsers as base platforms

It also means that the technologies and tools are ones familiar to many in the academic community; this is based on existing technologies, ensuring it is quickly adopted within the academy.

With open standards like ePub3 and the JISC Digital Monographs: Technical landscape exemplars and Recommendations report institutions are in a great position to start taking advantage of these technologies and providing students and their researchers with the tools enhance their learning and research and give UK institutions a cutting-edge in the competitive world of education.

Find out more about the report and its 10 recommendations for the future of ebooks in education.

How universities and researchers manage the issues around research data varies massively – and of course will depend on the type of data they hold – whether sound recordings of bird songs, text mining results from Shakespeare’s plays, thousands of measurements provided by space probes, hours of rare film recordings, DNA sequences or qualitative data from psychological research interviews.

JISC is live streaming its conference next Tuesday 13 September around research integrity – specifically on the importance of good research data management.  Our aim is to bring together the current thinking on effective practice and give senior staff and researchers an opportunity to debate the thornier issues, like whose responsibility this is and how to manage freedom of information requests.

We welcome your input: submit your questions via twitter by using #jiscres11 and we’ll put them to our panel.  You can also watch the keynote speakers live on Tuesday, who alongside me include:

• Professor David Baker, deputy chair of JISC
• Professor Dave De Roure, professor of e-research, Oxford University e-Research Centre and national strategic director of Digital Social Research
• Professor Sir Tim O’Shea, principal and vice chancellor of University of Edinburgh and chair of JISC
• Professor Kevin Schürer, pro vice chancellor (Research and Enterprise), University of Leicester

During the conference you will:

• Learn why research data management matters and who should be responsible for research data management in your organisation
• Read recommended reports and resources as they are referred to by the speakers
• Understand from case studies what success might look like
• Watch key experts describe the routes to successful data management
• Participate on Twitter and ask questions of the speakers using #jiscres11

It’s the kind of discussion we think could be helpful to professionals in the UK and internationally so if you know people who you think would be interested I’d really value you sending this information on.

There’s no need to register – simply add a date in your diary for 10am on 13 September 2011 and join us online here.

Watch a video about how JISC can support your research reputation:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Visit JISC’s Youtube channel to watch similar videos on research efficiency and collaboration

Why all this interest now? One reason might be the overwhelming evidence that open access is a desirable destination for all kinds of reasons.  A joint report was released last month from JISC, RIN, Publishing Research Consortium, RLUK and the Wellcome Trust, which showed clearly that moves toward open access were supported by an analysis of the costs, benefits and risks in scholarly communication.  A recent Danish study of SMEs showed that most of them struggle to access findings from publicly funded research, which surely inhibits innovation.  JISC, on behalf of the UK Open Access Implementation Group, is commissioning three further studies to discover how open access can support the work of the private, public and third sectors, and these studies will report over the next six months or so.

But there are other reasons why open access is gaining a lot of attention from governments.  We have known for some time that the knowledge economy depends on the application of codified, technical knowledge.  As David Cameron and Barack Obama pointed out this week  “science and higher education are the foundation stones of their two nations’ 21st century economies”.

Most readers will know that JISC has been an advocate of open access for some time but that does not mean we have taken an uncritical stance.  Now that the direction of travel is established and widely accepted, there are some tricky practical challenges to overcome.  For example:

• Open access is likely to look different, and emerge at different speeds in different disciplines.  In some disciplines such as the life sciences, there are major, innovative publishers such as the Public Library of Science, and repositories such as UK PubMedCentral supported by research funders.  In other disciplines, such as chemistry, open access is not yet growing fast.
• The transition to open access will need to be co-ordinated to ensure the continuity and rigour of the peer review system.  Again, the Public Library of Science is leading the way here, exploiting the opportunities of digital technologies while preserving academic rigour.  JISC’s new programme in campus-based publishing is exploring an alternative approach that has had success in other countries already.
• The institutional repository infrastructure, while mature and reasonably comprehensive, is not yet as joined-up as it needs to be.  JISC will be commissioning work in this area during 2011-12, and will be working with international initiatives such as the European OpenAIRE project.

Open access publishing faces a number of specific challenges, which could be summarised under the following six headings:

a)      Funding outputs from research that is not grant-supported.  This is a real challenge, and one that is likely to fall mainly to universities, who might want to act collectively to address it, as in the COPE scheme in the US.  Some publishers offer waivers, which is helpful.

b)      Funding outputs produced after the end of the grant.  This can be addressed by changing the ways in which grants are administered, for example by making it clearer and more straightforward for indirect costs to be used in this way.

c)      Complexity of funding arrangements from an author’s perspective.  Here, I think funders, universities and publishers do simply need a way to sit down together and develop a better set of arrangements.  There may be lessons from the approach taken by the Wellcome Trust, especially if research grant funding becomes more concentrated.

d)      Need for transparency in costing, especially for hybrid journals.  There seems to be no consensus that these are a way to transition to open access.

e)      Absolute cost.  Recent research shows that the average article processing charge needs to be under £2000 for the cost-benefits to work for the UK.  It seems likely that the PLoS-One publishing model, now widely emulated, must be a large part of the answer.  In the medium term, this needs to be combined with agreements on the wider sharing of usage statistics and citation data , and review services such as the Faculty of 1000, to open up a market in services to help readers navigate the literature.

f)       Distribution of costs / benefits among the sector.  Will research intensive universities have to pay more?  This is not necessarily the case, if arrangements are in place to ensure that research papers from grant-funded research are supported via those grants.  However, this will require close monitoring and perhaps collective action, and JISC Collections may well have a role in seeing a way through this.

We are working towards making open access in the UK both good for the research community and good for UK plc.

JISC Podcast:
How you can build a business case for open access policy

I believe rewards for better research information management are significant. By taking the friction out of reporting, universities can make genuine efficiency savings both of cash and time. Businesses and other potential partners can find out more about current research and can seek and find the researcher with the expertise they need. Researchers spend less time duplicating information in different systems, freeing them to get on with their real business: research.

In order to make the exchange and management of research information easier and more efficient, JISC has joined with the research councils, HEFCE, HESA, ARMA, UCISA and a number of universities, projects and companies to form the Research Information Management Group (RIMG).

The group has played a successful role in helping the sector to respond to a rapidly evolving environment. It has made the technical and business case for the adoption of a common research information standard, pointed the way to greater harmonisation of systems across the sector and created an opportunity for all the members of the group to come together behind a strategic vision.

JISC has taken forward a suite of projects which build on this vision. They have addressed many of the practical issues of improving research information management, from supporting researchers in their daily work to sharing large volumes of information between research partners and REF reporting. JISC infoNet has added its own research and case studies to the experience of these projects, built on the work of the RIMG and created a Research Information Management infoKit.

The infoKit is designed to provide senior managers with the key information they need to build better policies. It provides those tasked with procuring and evaluating systems with solid advice and gives staff who wish to implement better management and technical systems the benefit of a lot of hands-on experience.

But for me what is enjoyable about this work is that is it constantly evolving. The infoKit will be updated and adapted as the RIMG develops its vision and JISC projects create new tools and resources. It is already a valuable resource, but it will repay a fresh look now and again, as it grows and more value is added. Improved research information management strengthens all the partners in the world of research and JISC, by partnering with the RIMG and developing the infoKit is helping the UK to realise those benefits.

If you’re interested in our work in research information management find out more.

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