The DPC is dedicated to developing the skills, knowledge and solutions to preserve and ensure access to digital information. 2012 marks the 10th anniversary of the DPC and I had the pleasure of being a judge at this year’s awards.

I enjoyed working with colleagues from across the UK to assess the entries.  I saw some of the strides that have been made in digital preservation, and coming from one of the organisations that founded the DPC, I was certainly pleased to see such positive progress and the DPC’s ability to highlight this.

The DPC’s most prestigious prize – the Decennial Prize – was awarded to mark their 10th anniversary and recognizes the most outstanding work over the past decade.   There was intense international competition with finalists from New York, Washington and London.  Dame Lynne Brindley, chief executive of The British Library, July 2000-July 2012, presented the award to the winning entry - the Archaeology Data Service at the University of York.

It was heartening to see this award go to an initiative which we at Jisc supported at their inception and which continues to be successful.  The team at York are a creative group who have developed and thrived within an innovative business model that allows them to preserve an extraordinary range of data while providing free access to all researchers and other users.  This approach ensures the longevity of data that would otherwise rapidly be lost or become obsolete and provides advice to researchers.

The Award for Teaching and Communications, presented by Oliver Morley, chief executive of the National Archives team, was awarded to the University of London Computer Centre team who run the Digital Preservation Training Programme (DPTP); an entry-level, introductory course that develops critical thinking about digital preservation.  It is designed to help all those working in information management to understand effective approaches to the challenges of digital preservation.  It enables students on the course to assess the models and examples in the context of their own organisation.

The Award for Research and Innovation was presented by Martyn Harrow, chief executive of Jisc to the PLANETS project.  PLANETS brings together memory institutions, small businesses, major technology providers, and research institutions from across Europe to build practical services and tools to help ensure long-term access to digital, cultural and scientific assets.  It established the not-for-profit Open Planets Foundation to provide the digital preservation community with services, ongoing support, and a sustainable future for its Open Source results.  It has permanently changed the digital preservation landscape by shifting the focus to practical, sustainable solutions that are soundly supported by practice-driven research.

Digital preservation ensures future access to resources and I believe this is essential for research, learning and future knowledge creation.  Just think of all of the digital information that is created on the web and how that represents points in time that can be lost without action, or all of the data produced through scientific instruments that informs science and understanding – digital preservation helps to secure continued access to these resources.

I am looking forward to what the coming years will bring in terms of digital preservation and I am sure the DPC will be central to showcasing international best practice.  The awards were a great way of recognising important work and I have to say it was really enjoyable working with William Kilbride, executive director of the DPC on this, and being one of the judges.

Here are a number of tips which I feel can help researchers make use of social media and related online activities to maximise the visibility of their research papers.

These are based on my personal experiences and I’ve learnt a lot through trying to make my own papers more visible:

1. Be pro-active:

For example, for the delivery of a recent paper, the co-authors agreed a plan on how to inform the members of our professional networks.  We uploaded the paper to the institutional repository and included the URL on our presentation slides, which were then uploaded to Slideshare (an online resource for sharing slides) shortly before the presentation.  This meant that could write blog posts with appropriate short URLs available in advance, which we could use whilst we responded to questions on social media channels such as Twitter during the presentation.  The key is to find the opportunities you have to promote your work and then make sure you maximise these by being prepared.

2. Monitor what works:

Monitor where people are getting your report from to find out the best channels for promoting it. A good way to do this is through usage statistics.  Look at Slideshare and YouTube views and Google Analytics (which can tell you how many visits you have had to a page and track where they are coming from).  Websites like Topsy provide statistics on URL usage and Twitter hashtags (these mark your work on a subject area and mean you can monitor twitter responses and activity).  Topsy can also provide comparisons with previous work and approaches taken by your peers.

3. Make it easy for readers:

Make it easy for those who are interested in your research to access your research by providing links to the papers.  Remember that they’ll want to read the paper and not the metadata about the paper, so provide direct links to the paper or key parts of it.  You may find that readers view your papers in mobile devices – perhaps even in bed!  So consider making your paper available in a mobile-friendly format such as HTML (this is the ‘language’ that web pages are written in).

4. Don’t forget the links:

Between 50-80% of traffic to institutional repositories come from Google.  A good way to ensure you come up near the top of a search is to use Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) techniques, making sure key words in the content are placed effectively to increase web traffic.  For papers hosted in open access repositories you will probably not be able to address ‘on-the-page SEO’ – tailoring the content or headings.  Therefore it will be important to provide ‘off-the-page SEO’ – links to the repository item.

5. Encourage feedback and discussion:

Unlike repositories, social media stories are often decided by support feedback and discussion.  We can exploit this feature by being involved with these discussions, use it as an opportunity to answer questions or correct mistakes and ask for feedback.

6. Develop your network:

Seek to grow your network and create new contacts. For example, conferences that you attend may have their own Twitter hashtag (which people can search by to find out information on the event).  This provides you with an ideal opportunity to develop your Twitter network.  You could follow other researchers who have similar interests to yourself, or tweet about the conference.

7. Understand your social media network:

Understanding who is getting to your information and how is key to successful promotion, and is the same with social media.  Twitter analytics tools such as SocialBro can provide insights into your network, by showing you who your followers are.

8. Know your limits in the social media environment:

‘Blogs, Twitter, LinkedIn, Academia.edu, YouTube… I haven’t got the time!’  Remember that you can’t expect to make use of every social web service which is available.  Prioritise channels based on relevance and the potential to reach your key audiences.  Analysing these channels will help you to prioritise.

9. Seek improvements:

Reflect on your use of social media and online services and identify improvements you can make.  If things aren’t working, change it!

10. And finally my top piece of advice… participate!

If you’re not there you can’t reap the benefits!

I hope these tips are helpful.  More information can be found in the slides I used for my presentation in Open Access week or on my blog.

Brian Kelly works for the Innovation Support Centre at UKOLN, based at the University of Bath.

Data from OpenDOAR (an authoritative worldwide directory of academic open access repositories)

As Heather Morrison describes in her blog post, there is plenty to celebrate in the continuing growth of open access.

Here at JISC we have been supporting emerging open access practices for over a decade. We’re busy building services and communities to support universities to respond to the changing landscape of education and research on a global, networked scale.

This week we has been highlighting some of the recent work that supports developments in open access and helps to raise awareness of the tools available:

• Watch our JISC open trailer and find out what open can do for you for the future
• Explore CORE the JISC-funded place to visit for open access research papers from across the world
• Hear how Open Education Resources could help your part-time tutors in our podcast
• Take a look at JISCs animation to find out about open data licensing
• Senior managers: find out what we can do for you by exploring our open education resource info kits
• Caren Milloy, Head of Projects at JISC Collections is exploring open access to save monographs, the question is – how?
• Read a blog post on the UK’s contribution to the European progress of open access from Rachel Bruce, digital infrastructure innovation director at JISC.

Key themes in the global discussion around International Open Access Week this year for education and research seem to be:

• the potential of opening up communications for greater public engagement and impact
• the relationship with open educational resources and concepts of digital learning and research
• the various approaches emerging to academic publishing; such as green, gold, self-publishing and new forms of journals
• the issues around opening up research data
• the renewed focus on Creative Commons licensing options into open access research articles

There is so much happening that it can be difficult to keep track of! What do you think the challenges and opportunities are for #openfutures?

… You could be thinking about challenges – how do we ensure we can benefit from text mining?

… You could be thinking about new aspects of open – will designs for 3D printers become an important area for exploring the potential of open approaches; do universities need to focus more on open innovation?

… You could be thinking about how to scale up good practice in areas like open educational resources?

There has been great progress and there is a lot to celebrate but we recognise there is also a lot to do and we want to ensure that JISC can help the sector realise the benefits offered by an open future…

Comment on this post or tweet with the #openfutures by 3pm GMT today and we will report back this afternoon!

The aim of the workshop was to collaborate with our counterparts in Europe to achieve the vision and recommendations identified in the European Commission Communication on open access and the preservation of scientific information.  As summarised by my colleague Paul Stokes, what the Communication asks is that:

• Research and funding policies which reflect the new open and linked digital world.
• Policies that are defined at a national and sub-national level.
• A robust and interconnected e-infrastructure is required to improve preservation & access to scientific information.
• A suitable new solution which needs to be established to support the transition in publication methods and emerging scientific processes.

The key principles of the Communication are:

All publicly funded research should be made available through open access as early as possible.

• That this should be underpinned by robust preservation.
• Business will benefit from access to research.

It’s imperative for Europe to work together to realise these aims and this was something all delegates seemed dedicated to achieve.  Experts at the meeting tackled open access, open research data and preservation.  A range of issues were raised where further collaboration, and in some cases coordination, is required.  These were naturally from the policy, infrastructure provider and information professional perspective – after all we were discussing implementing the Communication recommendations at a national level and moving the underpinning infrastructure forward to support policy.

The Commission wants to help Europe make progress and recommend a coordinated follow-up to their recommendations through “national points of reference”.   It is early days, a survey of workshop participants asked if they had or intended to appoint a national point of reference.

• 29% indicated that a national point of reference had been appointed already
• Of the 71% who haven’t yet appointed a national point of reference, 54% expressed an intention to appoint one.

However, thinking about the change in the practice of research is also very important.  How can you marry the policy direction with research practice?  Of course many researchers are undertaking open research and are also involved in curation of their outputs.  However, in order to make a more wholesale change the need to address the issue of incentives was raised; how can researchers be incentivised to make their research open access, whether it is the data or the final paper, and how can they fulfil the curation needs required to fulfil the aspirations of the communication?

A critical area of importance that the research data group focused on was the issue of skills, and the fact that digital data management requires a set of skills that are not yet widely developed and practised.  There have been developments in this area (for one example see the  JISC research data programme) but it was believed by the experts that the skills of both information professionals and researchers needs more attention if the aim of open access data is to be realised.  Discussion focused on the need for recognised qualifications for information professionals, training for early career researchers; and librarians and scientists working together on data management.

One of the aims of the workshop was to start to identify areas where collaboration and co-ordination might help member states achieve the goals of the Communication.  Generally there were a lot areas raised where exchange of knowledge would be valuable, but rather than a new forum being required it was felt there are already mechanisms, although in some cases these might need further resource.

For example, in the area of open access for publications discussion indicated that working through existing fora on sharing what works in national transition models and financial arrangements for transition to Open Access should be possible.  However, a gap which no obvious existing body fulfilled was identified; this was the area of specific infrastructure for Open Access.  The discussion concluded there is a requirement for further work on identifying both the needs, and addressing sustainability and governance arrangements for Open Access infrastructure.

The workshop has started to raise the profile of the need to further address European collaboration and coordination, whether it is through mechanisms based on the national points of reference or ensuring existing forums seek to further address the recommendations.  I believe that Europe does need to work on these issues collaboratively to remain competitive and the Communication offers a framework for this.

Knowledge Exchange and the European e-Infranet project hosted the workshop with 60 participants from across a wide range of European member states.

You can’t wait to have the book in your hands and show your mum, flaunt it under the nose of the VC and place it on your bookshelf. Yes it’s going to look great in your new office and the citations will start flowing soon. Yep. This is the beginning of….

Oh no wait, what’s that? It only sold 30 copies, worldwide.

In the last ten years, library print book purchasing expenditure has declined from 11.9% of their overall budgets in 1999 to 8.4% in 2009 (RIN, 2010). The average number of sales of monographs to libraries has declined from around 2,000 in 1980 to around 200 in the early years of this century (Willinsky, 2009)

This creates two problems for researchers. First, it decreases the number of readers with access to individual monographs, meaning that the flow of knowledge that underpins research is compromised. Second, it means that many scholarly monographs become economically unviable, leading to concerns that publishers may select titles based primarily upon the potential for sales rather than scholarly worth.

So how do we…

a) Keep the monograph alive to allow humanities and social science researchers to present considered arguments

b) Help increase readership to foster new connections and research, and

c) Find an economic model to sustain the publishing and dissemination of monographs – in both electronic and print.

These are some of the questions we are trying to answer in our open access monograph project –  OAPEN-UK being managed by JISC Collections. What if your monograph was available online for free for everyone to read as a PDF or in HTML and in addition libraries and academics could still purchase print (60% of academics still prefer print) or e-book editions if they wanted them? There would be no limits on who can read your book – discoverable to all through online search engines and the sales of the print could support the sustainability of the Open Access version. And of course each book is put through the same peer review processes that normal print books are – you could even experiment with open peer review – or get input from fellow colleagues as you write.

This is the model we are exploring in OAPEN-UK with 58 monographs matched into pairs – half available in OA and half available through standard methods. We are gathering sales, usage and citation data to assess performance – do the OA titles get more usages and sales than the control group titles?

In addition we are gathering data on perceptions, attitudes and priorities and processes to help us work out how a move to OA publishing may work. We recently did a survey of HSS academics – and had around 700 responses. Here are some of the highlights:

• Only 50% of researchers are aware of OA and only 30% familiar with it.
• Around 50% of researchers think it is ok to make a profit from OA publishing as long as that profit goes back into supporting the discipline or making more OA content available – 20% think you can make a profit and use it however you like and 20% think that you can make a profit but only to cover costs.
• Almost 80% would prefer the most restrictive Creative Comms licence, but what is interesting is that the responses show that researchers are more concerned about protecting their work than it being used commercially.
• 60% had read a monograph in the last couple of days – 39% had bought it and 33% had got it via the library
• Early career academics are more willing to consider self-publishing than later career researchers.
• 397 that had published a mono, book chapter or co-authored a mono since 2000 where interviewed. The authors picked their publishers because 1st they are good at disseminating to the right audience, 2nd cause they have good QA process, 3rd cause they are the best in their filed and 4th because they were the only ones interested!
• Phd students were more likely to rely on the library that late career academics
• Print still dominates reading preferences but less so for early career academics
• Perception of the group was that open access will have negative impacts on quality, reputation and reward but will be brilliant for availability and efficiency – so clearly any open access model really has to address quality and think about impacts in terms of the REF and reputations. Oh and no one really cares about royalties!

You can view all the results of the survey at: http://oapen-uk.jiscebooks.org/research-findings/researchersurvey/

You can also read about focus groups with publishers, research funders, librarians, learned societies and ebook aggregators at: http://oapen-uk.jiscebooks.org/research-findings/y1-initial-focus-groups/

We are doing lots and lots of research so stay involved by following us on @oapenuk or visiting the OAPEN-UK website at: http://oapen-uk.jiscebooks.org/, or by joining us at events: http://oapen-uk.jiscebooks.org/events/

“Digitisation breathes new life into material from the past, and turns it into a formidable asset for the individual user and an important building block of the digital economy.”[1]

Still, the way we create content online is still in its infancy, and the path from initial funding to long-term sustainability can be challenging. Despite financial investment, some undesirable outcomes have emerged:

• Project leaders return again and again to funders, because alternative revenue streams have not been developed;
• Completed projects cannot always be updated/ungraded once funded has ended;
• Content created may live in silos, be difficult to find and hosted on a variety of platforms;
• Preservation strategies are often uncertain, both for digitised and born digital content;
• Project leaders often rely heavily on the largesse of a host institution
• Some programmes or projects that cease to secure ongoing funding are obliged to stop work altogether

Add to this the challenging economic environment of the past few years and all of these issues are brought into glaringly sharp relief.

Since 2007, Ithaka S+R and the JISC-led Strategic Content Alliance have led the way in examining ways  that the academic and cultural heritage sectors are defining sustainability and helping to make sure that the digital resources will endure and provide value well beyond the term of the grant. In 2012, two years and one economic crisis later, this essential research is more important than ever to answer questions such as:

• What were the key sustainability issues to consider?
• How have project leaders made their resources valuable to users?
• How have project leaders made growth and innovation possible?
• Which sustainability models have been most successful?
• How had budget cuts and other factors affected the projects?

Answers to these questions however are never simple and the process by which projects, both current and previous, consider them are multifaceted and complex. As a first step to traversing the difficult road to sustainability, the following video lecture series has been developed with Nancy Maron (sustainability expert at Ithaka S+R) to consider how universities, museums and libraries can deal with these issues in a challenging economic environment. You may not find all the answers here, but you will certainly find out more about the questions you need to be asking and guidance on how to answer them.

Split into parts or available as full versions, the videos (under a CC-BY-NC-SA licence) allow for individuals or organisations to embed or repurpose the relevant sections for their own specific audiences. As they are in easily digestible ‘bite-size’ chunks with links to the relevant resources referenced, these should help you to think in more depth about the issues raised and to read and research at your own pace. All we ask is that you let us know how you are planning to use them and if/ how these have been useful to you.

Please follow the links below to view the videos most relevant to your sector:

Sustaining Digital Resources for Universities

Click here to view the embedded video.

Sustaining Digital Resource for Museums

Sustaining Digital Resources for Libraries

The second thing I notice is how open education goes across the boundaries of formal and informal, children and adults, across academic disciplines, into professional development and into making and crafting. Universities don’t own the “open education” space any more than any organisation could be said to own “learning”.

This question is explored by Lou McGill and also by Laura Czerniewicz.

The third thing that strikes me is that we really have reached a tipping point in the availability of learning opportunities online. David Kernohan asked on Monday “is open education becoming mainstream?” . The reality of the networked world is webcasts, podcasts, courseware, etextbooks, a huge range of content created by anyone and shared with the world. This is the reality now, but for those of us working in education, we need to make the most of this opportunity. We need to be digitally literate, but more than that, we need to find ways of doing our work online, to become open practitioners and digital scholars.

For a compelling description of this opportunity, see David Wiley talking about “Why Be Open?”

Click here to view the embedded video.

For educational institutions to thrive, we need to explore models for how we can work in this space, with all its opportunities and risks, all its noise and vibrancy. It is here that we see possibilities for new models of collaboration, peer learning and accreditation. To see how some UK Universities are responding to this opportunity, see four case studies on institutional approaches to open education, released this week.

And check out the huge range of activities that are taking place across the UK.

These are not always easy or obvious decisions for institutions to make: the ideas of open education can be a threat to the status quo. Good decisions navigate this space carefully. As Martin Weller wrote in The Digital Scholar, “in education, technology is often talked of in utopian or dystopian terms”, but the reality is often more complex. My colleagues and I have been trying to move beyond this polarisation by sharing our pictures of the open education space. At the core of the discussion are some crucial questions about the economics of openness, which were eloquently described, entirely independently, by Paul Stacey. This storify shows the discussion develop: click the links to see each blog post. Hopefully this is the start of an ongoing conversation.

“Open education” matters because it’s already happening all around us. The fact that the US Dept of Education is teaming up with Creative Commons and the Open Society to launch a video competition on Why Open Education Matters suggests that although it may not be mainstream yet, it is very real. The models continue to grow and combine with the ethos of open access and the methods of open source.The choice for us, as individuals and educational organisations, is in how we respond.

Amber Thomas and David Kernohan

What strikes me about the post is that is latches on to some recent synthesis work on digital humanities, extracting some of its findings and treating them as an ideology to be critiqued.

This implies there is a coherent philosophy to the digital humanities. A set of founding ideas, an essential ideology, that will either determine its success or failure.

The trouble is that the Digital Humanities is not reducible to a manifesto. Rather it is the evolving set of humanistic traditions and practices about investigation, analysis, critique, communication and publication that are coming under pressure in the Internet age. The whole practice of scholarship is evolving / being revolutionised (delete to taste) because of the digital realm.

All scholars are affected by this. Are there really any scholars who don’t use emails, mailing lists, JSTOR, digitised resources, Google Search, electronic journals, Wikipedia? Are there really any scholars who’ve not worried about peer review, or taken advantage of open access?

No, of course not. Although they might pretend that this is all mere convenience and doesn’t help come them closer to the ‘explanation of aesthetic works’?

But the ‘convenience’ of the digital can drive their work in different directions; a radical reduction in the hours spent travelling to libraries and browsing through print archives changes the research process.

And as the tools created by digital humanities projects grow in their scope and functionality – projects in 3D scanning, data mining, textual analysis, crowdsourcing – these too will change research practices.

I don’t disagree with Fish that we need to measure the contribution of digital tools to scholarship, but this should be with the aim of refining these tools, not just throwing them all away.

Arguing against the Digital Humanities is a little like arguing the Internet itself. It’s there, and it surrounds you. It won’t go away.

This post originally appeared on the JISC digitisation blog here.

This was the question that JISC set out to answer by funding 9 experimental projects to analyse and exploit activity data to provide new services to researchers and students or to improve existing services. These projects covered recommendation services for library and repository content, access grid usage patterns, analysing data for student retention, virtual learning environment usage data, the link between student attainment and library usage and the possibility of taking a user centered approach to activity data.

The simple answer is yes, there are lots of ways that working with activity data could be useful. But there are many technical, legal, skills and policy issues that need to be addressed in order to do so. To enable others to learn from the experience of these projects and to copy the technical and legal solutions they developed we have produced a site that summarises all that was learned in the programme. The site is live now. It provides a high level overview of what activity data is, why it is useful and how it can be exploited and also contains detailed recipes for anyone who wants to start the process of exploiting activity data at their institution. You can also read more about the projects that made up the programme.

The site was produced by Sero Consulting working with Tom Franklin and Mark van Harmelen.

One interesting question about activity data is should it be made openly available? There are plenty of challenging issues here to do with anonymisation, compliance with data protection and ensuring that the users are appropriately informed and it is what they want. But there are also benefits to open data. A good illustration of what can happen with open activity data is the Book Galaxy app below that uses the library circulation data released as part of the JISC Mosaic project to provide an innovative interface for exploring the relationship between books. The activity data guide includes resources that address the question of open data and links to open data released by some of the projects.

Here’s the Book Galaxy – move your mouse around the galaxy to see the titles. Blue dots are books, yellow dots are courses. If nothing is appearing, you might not have Java installed. Download Java

It seems to me that there is likely to be appetite for further innovation with activity data as it offers the potential for more efficient institutional services and new functionality that can enrich the research and learning experience. Both of which are important drivers in the current climate. We will be funding further work on 4 of the 9 projects to explore whether they can develop further answers or produce useful services. There is also a programme of projects on Business Intelligence managed by my colleague Myles Danson, these projects are building solutions for storing and analysing data about the business critical operations within universities. You can read an overview of the projects on the JISC website and there is a useful JISC Infonet Infokit on the topic of business intelligence. Within JISC we are also starting to think about the bigger picture of business intelligence for universities and what we can do to help universities exploit emerging opportunities so look out for future work in this area.

Find out more about this work and that of the digital infrastructure team on their blog.

Image from The First World War Poetry Digital Archive, University of Oxford www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit © The Imperial War Museum

The legacy of World War One in terms of social, economic and political global change cannot be overstated; it changed the individual’s view of society and their place within it with far-reaching effects into their future and our past. In the words of H.G. Wells: ‘This is the end and the beginning of an age’.

To mark this event in international history is therefore a key priority for custodians of heritage and educators alike.

We’ve already made considerable efforts to preserve online the memories and writings of those active during the First World War.  The popular Great War Poetry Archive was funded by JISC to digitise precious documents relating to the poetry of the Great War – including Wilfred Owen’s original notes for the well known poem Dulce et Decorum Est.

It also includes podcasts with eminent historians and veterans including the writer and broadcaster Ian Hislop talking about his grandfather’s experience in action and why he is so ‘obsessed’ with the First World War.  The Serving Soldier collection might also interest you as a way of finding out about the lives of soldiers from 1899 to 1918, a period which spans the Second Boer War, Younghusband Expedition and World War One.

But now it’s time to commemorate the 2014 anniversary.  Higher and further education has a  unique part to play in the WW1 commemoration because it can offer an academic appraisal and reappraisal of themes, events and perceptions.  To help people in education who are studying the period, we are promoting a joined-up approach across many different organisations that currently hold audiovisual, images, text based works and film relating to the First World War. JISC wants to explore how providing this in a more seamless way could help those working in education and research to access the resources. So as a result we’re planning two activities:

• JISC WW1 Discovery programme- to aggregate digital content such as films from a range of digital collections and find new and innovative ways of presenting this content for the benefit of education and research on WW1.

• JISC WW1 OER project- to create innovative Open Educational Resources around WW1 relevant across disciplines for embedding in teaching and learning using a range of content pertaining to WW1 in the UK and internationally, ready for release in March 2012

JISC’s overriding goal for both activities is to work for researchers, teachers and students to produce digital content and resources that are comprehensive, open and sustainable, but that answer differing, specific needs within higher and further education.  The plans are underpinned by a common strategic ‘direction of travel’ which is outlined most clearly in the JISC Statement of Intent.

I look forward to updating you further as these projects progress.

To find out more about what’s planned visit the blog.

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

The committee’s report, now available online, describes access to data as ‘fundamental’ for researchers to reproduce, verify and build on each other’s results.  It highlights that reproducibility should be the gold standard that all peer reviewers and editors aim for when assessing a manuscript. This spirit of openness is something JISC supports, through its work with the UK Research Councils.But researchers will also be aware of the challenges of making their data sets available to reviewers.  In the longer term, there are technical and economic challenges associated with making data available, especially as different types of data require different treatment. A lot of social data that is created through longitudinal studies makes sense only if the entire length of the study is available. Other data, such as environmental data, must be kept permanently available – you can’t repeat an earthquake.

Keeping data like this available in perpetuity is expensive and could end up as a cost that universities across the world simply cannot afford.  JISC is funding Dryad-UK which mirrors a US initiative to help researchers control who sees their data and when.  Researchers can deposit their data in a secure environment and then give privileged access to reviewers, for example, and then make the data available more widely once the article is published.

However, in some areas of science the data is produced by computers and programs and is correspondingly huge. Storing indefinitely the mass of outputs of Large Hadron Collider experiments is unfeasible. So we have to make it possible for people to re-run the programme, something that requires you know quite a lot about the machine and the environment it is running on in order to understand the data.  As long as the researcher defines the input conditions, and what the program is designed to do, you should be able to trust the outputs. And if we ensure that authors make clear the nature of the program they are running and the algorithms then people in the future should be able to re-run the program to retrieve the data.  I’m hinting of course that beyond the software or statistical test is something much more fundamental – the accuracy of the data itself.

As part of the report’s consultation process I was asked to comment on whether, in some cases, peer review might encourage a tendency towards conservative judgements among reviewers. But peer review in one form or another has been an underpinning aspect of research arguably since before journals as we know existed. As the report highlights, journal editors are well-placed to find the right experts to review unusual research, so the process itself cuts against the conservatism. Online publication affords us a great deal more flexibility in how the peer review process works.  In the past, two different forms of assessment have happened as part of a single process.  Both the technical assessment and the impact assessment have happened after publication of a research paper.  But separating the two processes is important because of the longer time scale over which you get your answer – so it’s encouraging that the committee’s report recommends a pre-publication technical assessment.

Another criticism sometimes levelled at peer review is that it is a burden on academics who have to do this in their own time.  But few researchers feel they have a nine-to-five existence anyway. In my experience reviewing manuscripts outside of a regular working day is part of the mentality in the research community. The situation would only become worrying if researchers had to spend more time on peer review proportionate to their own research. Greater transparency in the process might also help garner more recognition for peer reviewers, by ensuring that an individual reviewer’s work is known to their peers.  The committee report rightly highlights that we need to encourage researchers to deposit their data, rather than enforce it. Researchers deserve credit and recognition for working in an open way. It’s a complex situation, so a blanket mandate on open data might not be feasible but we need to create the right conditions so it is easier for researchers to make their data openly available.

This blog post first appeared in Research Information.

It is becoming evident that the conflicts and indeed the events of the 20th century can be fully investigated only when today’s historians have the equivalent relationship to the moving image as they have to the recorded text.

This short video by the JISC Film & Sound Think Tank highlights the issues involved in opening up access to film archives.

Film and television archives, delivered over the web, are as essential for learning today as libraries of books. Students already expect to use the full gamut of rich media in their education, and by 2014 video will account for 91% of global consumer traffic on the internet.

However, a recent report from the JISC Film & Sound Think Tank identifies what it refers to as the “AV gap” (the Audio Visual gap) between the expectations of learners and the reality of education today.

The report says, “The engines of our screen culture – film, television, and radio – were the dominant media of the 20th century, and many of the most important and most memorable messages of the 20th and 21st centuries have been expressed in moving images and sound. Yet education has far to go still to incorporate them systematically in teaching and learning.”

The Film & Sound Think Tank was convened with the aim of advising  JISC on all issues relating to the creation, discovery, use, delivery and preservation of film and sound resources in education and to input into relevant strategic and policy areas.

Contributors came from a broad set of organisations within broadcast, production, archives, research and education.  Those who contributed to the work clearly recognised that there was an opportunity to work in partnership to enhance film and sound archive provision – and all were interested in the challenges and opportunities around enhancing usage for education, research and beyond.

The report marks the culmination of the group’s work and proposes a series of strategic recommendations aimed at promoting current audiovisual collections and making them easily findable and usable for educational purposes.

The recommendations include, among others, strategies for improving resource discovery, clarifying licensing information, allowing more sophisticated manipulation and citation of moving images, and partnership work between Higher Education institutions and producers and broadcasters.

These high level approaches echo the more practical, every day, barriers to embed sound and moving images in education also identified in this blog post.

We are currently exploring how the recommendations made by the group can be taken forward in collaboration with JISC Services and other organizations working in this area. For example through enhancements to relevant JISC Services such as BUFVC, JISC Digital Media and MediaHub as well as through forthcoming projects to commemorate the anniversary of the First World War and activities around the BBC-led Digital Public Space.

The report was written by Paul Gerhardt and Peter B. Kaufman and can be found here together with a range of video resources and podcasts.

A summary downloadable pdf version of the report is available here.

When we started creating a search environment to look at multiple databases in one we were given the oddest, but most precious piece of advice: ‘lose the search box’. The stunned looks around the project team’s faces said it all… isn’t searching about, well, searching?

At the BUFVC we offer access to many different types of datasets, from listings of practically everything that was broadcast on British TV and radio since 2001, to newsreels produced throughout the 20th century. In the United Kingdom there is no audiovisual equivalent for the British Library legal deposit. We therefore work hard to fill that information gap and find ways for education institutions to gain access to audiovisual content.

When we thought of ‘federating’ most of our data (searching it all at once) we thought it would be easy. And it was. We know our data well and could map it quickly.  But that wasn’t the real challenge. It was by looking at how users interacted with the developing system that we learnt the key lessons. If you are searching our 13 million records there are two difficult steps: what to type in that search box and how to then get rid of all the stuff you don’t want.

The answer to the first dilemma – how to stop users worrying about the empty search box – was to make it less important. We needed to make sure that whatever the exact search term, users should be able to make interesting discoveries even if the results were not the best. To do this we created relationships between our records based on semantics. This means that users will see suggestions for searches and records that may take them in different (but related) journeys.

The second dilemma is all about filtering. The search results page became our control centre, allowing users to filter results, tweak searches, see the suggestions for related searches and use a variety of additional tools. All this makes for a busy page but after many rounds of user testing we think our designer hit the right balance between complexity and elegance. Some of these features include:
•    Human-friendly filters such as identifying results by availability (‘can I see it online, do I need to order it from someone?), media type (moving image, audio, documents), genre or collection
•    A comprehensive history function that keeps track of viewed records, searches and tweaks to searches and the ability to mark and cite or export records in a variety of standards

When reflecting back on the project, I remember mostly the sense of fun, the permission we gave ourselves to think creatively, and our exciting user testing rounds. Developers and users don’t often mix but with good moderation these sessions proved magical. These are three elements I would urge anyone to replicate in future projects.

We are not alone in this development; sites that enable discovery and aggregate results from multiple collections are increasing in number – Edina’s JISC Media Hub is well worth a visit. We hope to have created something which rewards users with new connections through discovery. Work will only be completed in September and there are many plans beyond that. In the meantime if you are looking for moving image and sound, be it television or radio, newsreels or commercially available programmes for education pay a visit to our beta site and give us your feedback. If you are reading this from a UK higher or further education institution, please remember to login to access all areas.

The open-source based software and interface will be released as a package under an Open Source licence later this year. This project was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and led by Royal Holloway, University of London.

Luis Carrasqueiro is Chief Executive, British Universities Film & Video Council
luis@bufvc.ac.uk

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

This statement is revealing of wider issues institutions face in today’s times of financial constraints: how do we know if a digital resource is having an impact on its target audience? How do we reach and speak to scholars, teachers and students to measure their satisfaction? What metrics should be adopted in the context of digitised scholarly material? How much does a digital resource tell about the institution that created it? And above all, has the investment paid back? These are not easy things to assess and often impact just takes time to materialise.

In order to support content creators, resources managers and information professionals within institutions in the task of assessing the usage and impact of their digital resources, JISC has supported the development of the Toolkit for the Impact of Digitised Scholarly Resources (TIDSR), by the Oxford Internet Institute (OII).

The toolkit, first developed in 2009 and recently updated, provides a framework for conducting this kind of analysis and offers guidance on a range of qualitative and quantitative methodologies that can be used such as webometrics, content analysis, surveys and focus groups. The TIDSR was used by projects in the JISC Impact and embedding of digitised resources programme, of which the Old Bailey was one, to conduct an analysis of their collections, identify where resources were working well and what could be done to improve them and better embed their content within teaching and research.

The case studies drawn from the experience of the projects are available in the toolkit and are a useful starting point for beginners in the field. They also provided fertile ground for the programme’s final report, “Splashes and Ripples: Synthesising the Evidence on the Impacts of Digital Resources” (PDF), by Eric Meyer. The report begins to sketch a picture, based on evidence rather than anecdotes, of how digitised resources in the humanities are currently being used and provides a set of recommendations to content creators on how to go about maximising the impact of their resource such as:

[quote from report]

1.     Remember in advance that you will want to contact your users. A number of projects had a difficult time finding users to survey or interview, but users are a key resource that you will want to approach from time to time.

2.     Use the media to your advantage. One of the undeniable advantages that arts and humanities resources have in the United Kingdom is that there is considerable public interest in these topics. […] The Old Bailey Proceedings Online project has benefitted from inclusion in popular BBC programmes (see page 11).

3.     The media and the public are influenced by numbers and metrics. Being able to demonstrate your impact numerically can be a means of convincing others to visit your resource, and thus increase the resource’s future impact. For instance, the amount of traffic and size of iTunesU featured prominently in early press reports (see page 21).

4.     Make your resource easy to find. This can involve a number of strategies, including search engine optimization (SEO), partnerships with more prominent related sources (see page 31), links in related sites, and inclusion in Wikipedia and other sources. A Vision of Britain through Time has been the most proactive resource in this regard, (see page 28),

5.     Give your resource an unambiguous name and acronym/initialism, both to increase the likelihood that your resource turns up at the top of relevant searches, and to make measuring mentions of your resource result in as few false positives as possible.

6.     Create quick wins for new visitors to your collection. By finding things that they can quickly learn, do, see, or contribute, you can increase the stickiness of your site, and increase the likelihood that your resources will be used. Oxford University’s podcasts, for instance, are easy to immediately access and hear (see page 23).

7.     Leverage your wins. Using the most popular aspects of your resource to attract people to other parts of the collection via features such as suggested links and recommendations for further information can increase the time spent with your collection.

8.     Adopt Cool URLs as persistent, consistent, human-readable, and citable links to digital resources. The British History Online collection has used this method to increase the readability of its links (see page 39).

9.     Provide the ability to export citations directly to reference management software such as Zotero and EndNote.

10.     APIs are the future. Linked data, apps, and other ways that enable researchers to access and combine the data in your resource will increase its utility.

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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In my role at JISC I look after our content programme which brings scholarly collections into the digital age – taking journals, newspapers, manuscripts, photographs and other material and putting them on the web. I have the pleasure of working with many outstanding collections in the UK and have helped unearth some real treasures that can be shared and used for education and research.

The British Cartoon Archive is one such example. Hosted by the University of Kent, it represents a visual history of British history whether through the social comedies of Carl Giles or the political satire of Steve Bell. It provides the student with an alternative viewpoint on the century – not official documents, but a more slanted approach that provides a more accurate portrayal of public opinion. The video explains more.

The First World War Poetry archive, curated by the University of Oxford, is another astonishing collection. Incorporating the Great War Archive, where members of the general public where asked to submit images of objects relating to the war (letters, diaries, photos etc.), the resource is a seminal example of a crowd sourced website. The accompanying video tells some amazing stories that have been collected by the archive. In one story, we hear of a Scottish soldier, enlisted for war without the chance to say goodbye his family. He placed his goodbye message inside a matchbox and threw it onto the platform in the hope it would get to his loved ones. This video recounts the full story.

Most of the time I am looking at ways to promote these resources and create awareness amongst academics, researchers and learners that they exist. The JISC content site lists all the resources JISC has either funded or licensed for educational use. But one also needs to remember digitisation from the perspective of the creator, and the many things to take into account when putting collections online.

There are five pieces of advice that recent JISC funded projects have discovered have been crucial to successful digitisation projects.

Five top tips

1. Embedding digitisation within a university needs engagement, you need people on your side from across the whole of the organisation from researchers, academics and IT staff as well as senior management

2. Partnership is vital for those developing digitised content. Not just with other universities but with innovative publishers and producers

3. Digitised resources will achieve maximum impact when part of universities’ teaching and research strategies

4. Users love speed and convenience – one quick search over a federated website works better than multiple searches over disparate websites

5. Engaging external communities in digital content needs to be a two way process. It’s not just about universities broadcasting their expertise and exposing their digital content

So it is no surprise that there is by now a significant amount of good ‘stuff’ sitting on academic blogs in and around UK colleges and universities created by students, researchers, lecturers and others. But much of this material sits outside of institutional records, archives and information management systems.

If this information is not to be lost, copies of blogs need to be captured as records of business, institutional history and the deliberations of individuals. The UK Web Archive follows a practice of preserving blogs along with other websites, by harvesting their web versions in the form of HTML pages.

JISC is currently working on a low cost way to collect blog posts from across a college or university.  A JISC funded project at the University of London is looking at how to archive blogs by creating plug-ins for WordPress that will enable it to work as a blog archiving tool, allowing people to search and reuse the content from this central system. The project has also built a useful blog archiving bibliography

Despite the plethora of JISC blogs elsewhere we have now introduced a blog into our web presence for the first time. We hope that this will be the start of a new conversation, somewhere you will return to and hear from the people behind our work, that it will be a way to hear more informal voices and opinions talking about what we think, what we are working on, why we are doing what we are doing.

Come back and talk to us, comment on what we say, challenge us and use the comment facility here on the blog.