This study created a number of case studies covering a very wide area to look at common themes and issues around developing innovation communities generally, as well as gathering requirements for a university innovation community and looking how this could link with wider communities. Conclusions were drawn from the evidence examined, as well as from theoretical work covering this area, and recommendations made for future work. Comments on this to j.hensman@coventry.ac.uk would be very welcome.

The slides are available at the end of the post, it’s a link called ‘JISC_sustainability_presentation’. Hope that helps!

OSS Watch are here to help projects who want to consider there options.

Those writing new bids should contact us during bid writing.

it would have been a good idea to start with a three-minute introduction of what issues it was hoped to explore

it would also be handy to have a recap every 10 minutes or so of what we were talking about

it was very tiring concentrating so hard: a break after an hour would have been more productive I think

I gave the extreme example of medical researchers in universities fronting research papers for pharmaceuticals, and how sometimes even the named authors are not allowed to access the data pertaining to the article. See Aubrey Blumsohn’s “Ghost-statistics, raw data and the meaning of authorship. Are we learning any lessons from scandals in pharmaceutical research?” He lost his job as a medical research at the University of Sheffield because he refused to put his name as lead author on a Proctor and Gamble study of Actonel until he saw the raw data. He later found that the article was indeed mis-representing the results shown by the data. He now monitors other similar situations in his very frank Scientific Misconduct blog.

I tried to post comments to this blog last night but with no success, not sure if there is some problem between the blogging software and the Linux software on the EeePC I was using, or it was just me!

I have a blog post here:
http://hoos-foos.blogspot.com/2008/07/open-ports-for-open-minds.html

This made me realise that some of the things I was thinking of as ’sustainability’ issues were actually ‘impact’ issues. For example, uptake of standards, or embedding specific approaches or skills into the community.

Although we can see these as sustainability issues, where the ideas have impact, ’sustaining’ them takes care of itself. It ceases to be about keeping a website running, or keeping a team together etc.

* Need to build communities around projects - so not just project team in a ‘bubble’
* Do we need to build sustainability element into project bids?
* How do we get funding for sustainability - esp. for digitisation - when we are giving away outputs for free? Here a point about the fact you can make ‘data’ available for free, but still charge for service on top of ‘data’
* Need for more effective engagement with commercial partners?
* Is ’sustainability’ a way to bridge the divide between ‘research’ and ’services’?
* Sustainability increasingly important as economic situation gets more difficult
* Build JISC/community expertise of building business models - and fund feasibility studies alongside projects?

There may have been others which I missed… I’ve also posted my summary on the session (less comprehensive than the one above!) at http://www.meanboyfriend.com/overdue_ideas/2008/07/sustainability-and-jisc.html

For the large project, there may be a belief that strategically JISC needs something like it into the future, but it would be unwise to assume anything! Two big issues; one is the need for (and apparent current lack of) good advice and guidance. The other, and main point here, is timing. Here’s how it goes:

- Project to end 2/2010
- redundancy notices 11/2009
- need continuaton decision 9/2009
- requires bid 7/2009
- bid framework needed 5/2009
- evaluation must be completed 3/2009
- evaluation must be commissioned by 11/2008
- evaluation spec should be agreed 9/2008
- ergo, evaluation spec must be drafted… yesterday!

But we didn’t get much beyond that as we were called back in!

I focus on user case studies and encouraging NGS users to tell other people in their research field about the NGS. The best advertising we can have is happy users. I’ve left some publicity material down in the exhibition hall if you want to pick some up!

Digitisation projects sometimes divide their potential users into very large groups, e.g. HE researchers and the general public

But breaking down these groups into much smaller groups, e.g. researchers in history, A-Level students or genealogists allow projects to create much more tailored outputs that respond more precisely to their needs.

These are aspects that seem to be tagged onto the end of many projects and to which a very small amount of resources are allocated to. Not much support exists at JISC in terms of helping a project advertise their deliverables outside of the usual academic conferences or JISC web pages. In the case of some projects it may be wise to advise that they take on dedicated marketing and dissemination officers to ensure that the project is marketed effectively using a variety of strategies that are targeted at the relevant sectors.

Why “vs.”?

Open Source provides many viable business models. There are a large number of highly successful businesses who build, support and maintain open source software. similarly there are a very large number of businesses who are open source and contribute to its sustainability.

Two quick examples which are relevant to our sector:

XenSource (developed at the University of Cambridge) was sold for $500 million to Citrix - see http://www.xensource.com/PressReleases/Pages/pr081507.aspx

The Apache web server serves the vast majority of web pages from UK institutions (and the world in general). The Apache Software Foundation, which maintains this software, along with a large number of less widely used outputs, for an annual spend of less than $168,000 in the last fiscal year. See http://involve.jisc.ac.uk/wpmu/oss-watch/2008/06/03/just-how-big-is-the-apache-software-foundation/

Having said that, I agree we need to work at creating and sharing resources whilst at the same time building sustainable models.

** Data Conditioning **

At present, the ‘activation energy’ required to bridge between the data environment of the average bench researcher and the metadata requirements of the average institutional repository is so great that submission of research datasets by researchers to institutional repositories will never happen to any significant extent.

To overcome this barrier, I advocate JISC-funded research to investigate ‘data conditioning’, which I envision as having three stages:

(a) An expert in knowledge management with research domain knowledge establishes a secure local (e.g. Departmental) repository to which a researcher can save datasets in the formats she currently uses (e.g. raw Excel spreadsheets with minimal metadata). The version of Fedora packaged as a virtual machine by Ben o’Steen of the Oxford Research Archive is a suitable platform for such a local repository.

(b) The researcher is then encouraged to submit data regularly to this local repository, over which she feels a sense of ownership and control. This achieves the goal of ‘sheer curation’ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheer_curation), ensuring routine capture of research data without imposing a large cognitive overhead on the researcher. This is done in ways that enable easy and as far as possible automated enrichment of the data by essential metadata in conformity with agreed vocabularies, using processes previously worked out in collaboration with the researcher. For example, personal details could be automatically extracted from institutional personnel records and/or the Research Council’s Je-S database of academics (the data within which was provided by institutions in the first place).

(c) When the researcher is ready, the conditioned datasets, in formats and with metadata suitable for the institutional repository, can then be automatically uploaded without further effort to the institutional repository for long-term preservation and (optionally, at the researcher’s say so) for publication. Such ingest could be done in bulk, and could use OAI-ORE packaging.

A diagram showing the increasing ease of repository submission in response to increasing amounts of data pre-conditioning is available at http://tinyurl.com/6o5f9n

Have a good meeting!

David

Not sure if it’s of any interest here, but I’ve been working on another model that is specifically concerned with supporting technological innovation by making inventions as cheap, predictable and ubiquitous as possible, quickly. As such, it builds on, but extends what it is that JISC sets out to achieve with its support for open standards.

There’s more details on the blog post linked from this comment.

The key areas where they think they need to be influecing the curriculum are:

Library science = what generic data management skills are needed? are these “data scientists”?

IT, computer science = can the addition of certain data focussed aspects on these courses create the skills of the “data scientist”?

Researchers = what is it we need to ensure is part of a research post-grad ( or before ? )that will make sure researchers are data literate?

The first issue is now available online at http://www.elp.ac.uk/newsletter.html

Issue 2 will be available from 15 July.

A small number of paper copies will be available at the JISC Innovate conference.

Regards
Carol

- What are the main infrastructure challenges in your area?
The need for infrastructure to help sharing the effort and costs of ensuring digitally encoded information is available and usable for future generations, and which deals also with DRM, Authenticity etc, and which is itself auditable and persistable in some sense.
It should be noted that preservation in OAIS terms requires understandability and usability and this can be tied in with the interoperability needed right now. My work in DCC, CASPAR and PARSE.Insight address various aspects of these needs.

- Who is addressing them? (subject-oriented bodies, research funders, universities, academic departments, JISC, etc?)
Piecemeal efforts in many areas but overall there seems to be (1) a lack of focus and (2) a tendency to ignore data and the necessary semantics associated with it.
In addition to UK efforts there are of course EU efforts which should be integrated, in particular the e-Infrastructure work of which PARSE.Insight is part. The Alliance for Permanent Access (http://www.alliancepermanentaccess.eu) is another contributor to all this by bringing together major players across Europe.

- Why are these bodies addressing the main challenges? Might others do better?
This is an area in which clearly many need to contribute but there needs to be a Roadmap which can show how all these efforts can be accomodated. I guess that’s what I like to think I’ve been working on.

- What should be prioritised over the next five years?
The Warwick workshop (http://www.dcc.ac.uk/events/warwick_2005/Warwick_Workshop_report.pdf) had a list of priorities which are pretty good and which were picked up by the OSI Preservation and Curation WG (http://www.nesc.ac.uk/documents/OSI/preservation.pdf)

With this is in mind there seems some sense in the suggestion (as also highlighted by Chris above) of the Science Commons Protocol that data be dedicated to the public domain. The potential for downstream innovation in this case is greatly increased.

Clearly there are exceptions to this. Access and data protection are a very important, but arguably separate, issue.

The attribution needs that IPRs provide can be met nowadays (perhaps more successfully even) by technology.

It might be that the language is wrong here. We’re talking about Intellectual Property _Rights_, when perhaps we should be talking about Intellectual Property _Responsibilities_. What we’re actually interested in in this conversation is who has the responsibility for looking after the data, and it’s only for a (small?) part of the academy that that follows as a commercial imperative from who has the rights for the data. For everyone else, they’re two separate questions, incomprehensibly yoked: one involves form-filling, the other involves being helped to look after the results of your work.

The “Master of Science–Concentration in Data Curation” from GSLIS at
the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign is interesting in this
context.

http://www.lis.uiuc.edu/programs/ms/data_curation.html

From the blurb:

“The Data Curation Education Program (DCEP) concentration within our
ALA-accredited master of science offers a focus on data collection and
management, knowledge representation, digital preservation and
archiving, data standards, and policy. Data curation is the active and
on-going management of data through its lifecycle of interest and
usefulness to scholarship, science, and education. Data curation
activities enable data discovery and retrieval, maintain its quality,
add value, and provide for re-use over time, and this new field includes
authentication, archiving, management, preservation, retrieval, and
representation. Our program will provide a strong focus on the theory
and skills necessary to work directly with academic and industry
researchers who need data curation expertise.”

At the moment there’s an interesting parallel situation with regard to career paths for institutional repository managers.

To what extent is the IR a side-show from the ‘main business’ of the library? How many IR managers are on short-term contracts and face job insecurity when the JISC project funding runs out? Do they get support from their Library senior managers in terms of technical support and political advocacy within the institution?

A hard-hitting and colourful analysis of this situation (in the US, at least) has been written by Dorothea Salo, Innkeeper at the Roach Motel. She also covers other issues currently vexing IR managers such as open source software communities.

The Repository Fringe event in Edinburgh at the end of this month welcomes Dorothea as our keynote speaker. Dave DeRoure will be giving the closing plenary address.

It does seem a daunting enough task to simply define what data curation involves and who should be involved so it may well prove extremely difficult to pin down a set of core or minimum requirements for formal education and accredited training. However, it does seem that there is value in professionalising the role of data curator (but perhaps a better job title is required!). I am particularly keen to see some indications of career progression so that the role of data curator is seen as a dead-end job.