MPs recently recommended improvements to the way scientific papers are checked before they are published, calling for the peer review process to be more transparent - see the BBC article.
The recommendations came out of a House of Commons Science and Technology Committee report which also urged that researchers make their scientific data publicly available, and that reviewers have formal training.
Executive secretary at JISC, Dr Malcolm Read, said, “At JISC we strongly support the recommendations of the House of Commons Committee report. Though most researchers agree with the principles of peer review, many feel there is room to improve how it is implemented. Recently there have been suggestions about alternatives, like open peer review and JISC has funded universities to look into open access academic journals which are compiled from other openly available material.”
JISC is already acting on a number of the recommendations - including funding the Dryad project mentioned in the report. Dryad-UK provides a repository for the data underpinning research articles, encouraging greater research openness. The BMJ Open journal and titles from BioMedCentral and PLoS have become partners, integrating their submission process with Dryad and strongly encouraging authors to deposit research data.
Neil Jacobs, programme director at JISC, said, “We are also engaged in productive collaboration with innovative publishers such as PLoS, as well as industry bodies, for example on standardising the way usage statistics for articles are reported.”
The government report describes access to data as ‘fundamental’ for researchers to reproduce, verify and build on each others’ results.
This spirit of openness is something JISC supports, through its work with the UK Research Councils.
However, there are challenges, as JISC’s programme manager for data management Simon Hodson explains, “These objectives will be difficult to realise unless research practice and supporting systems and infrastructures are developed to make good practice easier. Similarly, researchers will feel little motivation to make data available in a timely way unless conventions of recognition and reward evolve to encompass the effort required to ensure data quality and reusability. The JISC Managing Research Data Programme is helping universities support researchers in responding to these challenges.”
What does JISC think about open-ness in research?
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The UK’s changing fashions from tracksuits to knitted bikinis are to be collected in a huge online wardrobe f
Celebrated mail-order company Kay & Co Ltd was for more than 100 years a staple of shopping in the UK, providing contemporary fashions, household items and luxuries at affordable prices to the general public.
Now over 1500 images from the catalogues are to be digitised online by the University of Worcester with funding from JISC – and the public are invited to contribute images and stories of their own concerning their favourite outfits which will give future historians an insight into today’s attitudes to the fashions on display.
Paola Marchionni, programme manager at JISC said: ”The World of Kays is such an interesting project not only because it brings back images of what our taste in fashion used to be - like velour tracksuits with heels - but because it provides a visual history of society and culture in the last century. It proves that history isn’t always written down but is also alive in our stories and memories which people can contribute to academic research. At JISC we were interested in funding this project as it has a strong local focus but wider appeal to researchers, teachers and the public outside the Worcester area as well.”
The website will explore the impact of Kay & Co Ltd on shaping the nation’s lifestyle and clothing choices from 1920 to 2000, as well as the contribution the company made to city life.
Until the website is launched, members of the public can get involved with the World of Kays project on Facebook or by following @WorldofKays on Twitter.
Project manager Jenni Waugh said: “The website will be a fantastic resource for community historians and fashion enthusiasts alike. It’s a wonderful opportunity to make the history of Kays more available.”
The Kays Collection of catalogues and business records was deposited in the University of Worcester’s Research Collections by Bernard Mills, Chair of Kays Heritage Group. Mr Mills was responsible for rescuing the Kays business archive.
You can search all of JISC’s imaginative content using the tool below - including the Kay's catalogue once the collection goes live:
JISC EMBEDDED OBJECT
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Arabic medicine was once the most advanced in the world and now entire digital facsimiles of some of its most important texts have been made freely available online. The unique online resource, based on the Wellcome Library’s Arabic manuscript collection, includes well-known medical texts by famous practitioners such as Avicenna, Ibn al-Quff, and Ibn an-Nafis, lesser-known works by anonymous physicians and rare or unique copies such as Averroes’ commentaries on Avicenna’s medical poetry.
The Wellcome Arabic Manuscript Cataloguing Partnership (WAMCP) combines the efforts of the Wellcome Library, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, and King’s College London Digital Humanities Department and is funded by JISC and the Wellcome Trust. It offers a rich digital manuscript library available online for free which represents a significant resource for a wide range of researchers including Arabic studies scholars, medical historians, and manuscript conservators to aid and enhance their work.
Alastair Dunning, programme manager at JISC, said: “When it comes to digitising manuscripts, there are real challenges not just in faithfully representing the original image in digital form but also in ensuring that manuscript is described with precision and accuracy. This JISC-funded project has surmounted these challenges, allying the remarkable collections at the Wellcome Trust with the technical and academic expertise available at the Library of Alexandra, and creating a resource to open up new avenues in Islamic Studies scholarship.”
“We were keen here at the Library to create the Wellcome manuscript collection online resource with the functionalities it offers,” said Professor Magdy Nagi, head of the information and communication technology sector at the Library of Alexandria. “The smooth streaming of content without the need for high bandwidth, and being able to zoom endlessly into the pages helps users to explore the details and beauty of the manuscripts. One of the key challenges in developing the online catalogue was maintaining the authenticity of thousand year old manuscript texts, such as rendering the old Arabic characters as they appear in the manuscripts.”
All the manuscripts have been photographed in their entirety, and can be viewed in detail alongside the comprehensive manuscript descriptions. Sophisticated cataloguing tools were built based on definitive standards in order to achieve rich, thorough manuscripts descriptions. Users are able to link between specific descriptive fields and the related images with the possibility to compare two manuscripts side-by-side on the screen to illuminate the differences. Moreover, significant passages in the manuscripts, such as the incipits, basmala, explicits and section headings, are fully transcribed. Extensive physical descriptions have been recorded by conservation specialists.
Researchers may explore the content of the online catalogue more selectively, where manuscripts may be browsed according to their categories or searched via the full text search facility. Significantly, the system allows users to search using the old Arabic alphabet through a virtual keyboard, matching the original content of the manuscripts. The results of the searched manuscripts may be further narrowed down through the faceted filters, which retrieve more precise results for the researcher’s convenience.
Simon Chaplin, Head of the Wellcome Library, expressed his enthusiasm for the project: “Providing global access to our collections is at the heart of our mission to foster collaborative research and we are delighted to see these particular treasures become freely accessible online. We are grateful to the Library of Alexandria and Kings College London, whose partnership in this project has enabled us to extend the availability of these rare materials to the countries of their origin.”
JISC EMBEDDED OBJECT
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Libraries, museums and archives have recently taken to experimenting with open data with a vengeance and now the JISC Discovery programme with the DevCSI project are running an international competition to see what people can unearth in this data.
The challenge is to develop an application which allows people to discover the treasures hidden in one of ten datasets - from the shipwrecks lurking off UK shores, to the metadata behind Jane Austen’s will online.
The rich data sets on offer are:
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Andy McGregor, JISC programme manager, said: "Libraries, museums and archives are opening up their data because they recognise the potential to harvest it in interesting new ways to make their collections more useful for education and research. Whether this is through striking visualisations, ways of exploring their content or valuable juxtapositions with other, similar collections, this competition is an opportunity to see what exciting possibilities clever developers can dream up for this rich pot of information."
The judges are interested in browser-based applications that genuinely make the collections from these libraries and museums even more useful for people.
There’s a tablet computer - an EEE Pad Transformer - for the overall winner but also twelve other prizes to be won.
The competition closes on 1 August 2011.
Read the rules of the competition on the Discovery site
Here's an example of what you could do with this data; Alex Parker from the University of Southampton, won a previous JISC competition by bringing to life library data with his Book Galaxy.
Move your mouse around the galaxy to see the book titles and courses. Blue dots are books, yellow dots are courses. If nothing is appearing, you might not have Java installed. Download Java
JISC EMBEDDED OBJECT
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Unlocking the descriptive information or metadata about digital content, articles, books and research is the key to making it more useful, according to the JISC-funded resource discovery taskforce as it embarks on a new programme of work.
If all UK metadata was made openly accessible, the taskforce says, then the resources themselves would be more visible and it would be easier to build innovative new ways for researchers, teachers and students to explore the resources.
Twelve national organisations have signed up to a new set of open metadata principles and now JISC is inviting all publicly funded organisations including universities, colleges, libraries, museums and archives to make the same commitment.
Signing up means that organisations are committed to supporting the principles and looking for opportunities to carry them out in whatever they do – whether this is building new ways to present unique collections or in contributing to national shared services for managing collections.
Rachel Bruce, innovation director of the digital infrastructure at JISC, said: “JISC advocates wide and easy access to resources for use in education and research. The new work programme called Discovery along with the open metadata principles underpin an approach that will help drive an innovative infrastructure and make sure that the UK’s future researchers and students can more effectively access and use content resources.”
She said: “We are already supporting the implementation of this open metadata approach within JISC services.”
The organisations that have already signed up are: British Library, BUFVC, Collections Trust, Digital Curation Centre, Edina, JISC, Mimas, National Library of Scotland, National Library of Wales, Owen Stephens Consultancy, RIN, RLUK, Royal Holloway University of London, SCONUL, The National Archives, UKOLN, University College London, and University of Southampton.
David Prosser, executive director of RLUK, said:“Signing-up to the open metadata principles was an easy decision for RLUK. Resource discovery is a key element of our members' activities and we are hugely excited by the possibilities of wider access and the new, innovative discovery tools that will be built on open metadata.”
For more information or to sign up to the principles, contact Andy McGregor
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The archive includes rare shots of the nationalist leader of China Chiang Kai-Shek among photographs taken by the Chinese ambassador to the USSR during World War Two, Fu Bingchang.
Funded by JISC, the project is a collaboration between the Web Futures team at the University of Bristol’s Institute for Learning and Research Technology (ILRT) and the Historical Photographs of China (HPC) team within the Department of Historical Studies.
Paola Marchionni, programme manager at JISC, said: “Chinese studies is a growing area of research as the UK and others seek to establish stronger links with Asia. Visualising China is particularly innovative in allowing users to explore content drawn from different sources in a serendipitous way and leveraging crowdsourcing to enrich that content. Sophisticated resources like Visualising China will create opportunities for people across the world to carry out new research and contribute to our understanding of China’s past.”
The site offers researchers free open access to major online collections such as Historical Photographs of China (University of Bristol), the Sir Robert Hart Collection (Queen’s University, Belfast) and Joseph Needham’s Photographs of Wartime China (Needham Research Institute, Cambridge), as well as to previously unseen and private collections and a selected Google Books library of China-related publications.
Researchers may submit comments or annotations to the image entries, organise images on to their own workbenches, download low-resolution images, and explore the collections by word searches, date ranges, photographer, people depicted, maps and classification terms.
Robert Bickers, professor of history and director of HPC, said: "The resource brings Chinese history since the 1850s to life and informs our understanding of modern China. Likely users of the site include family history researchers and historians around the world, not least in China, where photographic documentation is not always easily available."
The Visualising China project grew out of five years of digitisation work undertaken by HPC in the Department of Historical Studies, culminating in one of the largest online collections of historical photographs of China, which is still growing.
Images come from a variety of sources – archival (e.g. School of Oriental and African Studies archive; the National Archives; British Steel Collection), commercial (e.g. John Swire and Sons Ltd), as well as privately-held collections, including family albums, prints and negatives, often somewhat neglected in attics and cupboards. The web site was built by ILRT, with additional support from the British Academy, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Worldwide University Network and the University of Bristol.
Image copyright Peter Hibbard
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The latest edition of JISC Inform is now live with a focus on how JISC is working to support colleges and universities enhance the learner experience.
In this issue we look at how students are taking an active part in their course design and delivery which is in turn increasing their satisfaction levels in our ‘students as agents for change’ article and ‘has mobile reached the tipping point?’
We catch up with Joi Ito about his involvement with Creative Commons (CC) and how opening up resources through CC licences is unleashing resources onto the internet, offering learners a greater understanding of the courses they will be studying.
Tag #jiscinform31
Improving the visibility of course information is also a focus with JISC’s forthcoming funding call, highlighted in our ‘market your university and boost student retention’ article.
We look at how to manage the new responsibility that comes with technology with the support of JISC’s regional support centres in ‘why safeguarding is no longer a buzzword’.
Our debate carries on the theme of meeting the expectations of learners and looks at ‘can online learning replace a face to face course?’ Why not give us your opinions and upload your own video to add to the discussion?
As students demand seamless access, quick admin and fast services, JISC supports this by providing the invisible skin that binds all these systems together in our feature on ‘resources for administrators’ and we take a look at international projects such as the London 2012 Olympics and the e-InfraNet initiative to see lessons learnt.
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Making your educational resources openly available is not always straightforward when there are multiple licences involved - but two new JISC online wizards can help navigate the issues.
Amber Thomas, programme manager at JISC, said, “These are really useful tools for aiding the remix of creative commons licensed content. The wizards are very simple to use, and we hope they will be useful to many people”.
The wizards navigate through the licence compatibility issues which arise when blending Creative Commons (CC) licensed resources into open educational resources.
They have been created for use by JISC funded open educational resources projects, but it is anticipated that they will have to be applicable to other projects throughout the creative industries internationally.
Prodromos Tsiavos, England and Wales Project, Legal Project project lead, Creative Commons UK, said, "These tools allow users of the CC licences to make quick, easy and accurate decisions as to when and how to use multiple combinations of the CC licences. They reduce the complexity of copyright law and empower the end user by reducing the need for external advice when licensing copyrighted material. CCUK strongly supports this collaborative work and believes it will substantially contribute to the re-use, utilisation and proliferation of CC licensed content."
The toolkit will help people to understand the range of Creative Commons licences which are compatible with each other when they are blending Creative Commons licensed resources to create Open Educational Resources.
Jason Miles Campbell, service manager, JISC Legal said, “These tools make tricky calculations easy when it comes to working out how the various Creative Commons licences work with each other. Web2rights, Creative Commons UK and JISC Legal have pooled expertise to enable those passionate about releasing open educational resources to get on with creating imaginative, inspiring materials, rather than focussing on the legal intricacies of licensing.”
The wizards have been designed by the JISC-funded OER IPR intellectual property rights support project team, which is led by Web2Rights Ltd, in collaboration with JISC Legal and Creative Commons UK.
Naomi Korn, Director, Web2Rights Ltd, said, “I am delighted that we have produced a tool that so many people can use.”
Access the whole suite of IPR resources and tools designed for OER projects |
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Notes and comments scribbled by Charles Darwin on the pages and margins of his own personal library have been made available online for the first time.
Darwin’s personal scientific library, the majority of which is held at Cambridge University Library, has been digitised in a collaborative effort involving Cambridge, the Darwin Manuscripts Project at the American Museum of Natural History, the Natural History Museum, and the Biodiversity Heritage Library.
The digitisation project was jointly sponsored by JISC and National Endowment for the Humanities through a transatlantic digitization collaboration grant.
In total, Darwin’s library amounted to 1480 books, of which 730 contain abundant research notes in their margins. These annotated books are now in the process of being digitized. The first phase of this project has just been completed, with 330 of the most heavily annotated books launched online at the Biodiversity Heritage Library for all to read .
Alastair Dunning, programme manager at JISC, said: "Digitisation not only creates online version of books, but reveals the annotations and notes that are unique to each book and its owners. So with this website, jointly supported by the NEH in the US and JISC in the UK, we can see the flashing thoughts, hasty scribbles and cherished opinions that underpinned the development of Darwin's thought."
University Librarian librarian Anne Jarvis said: “The Darwin collections are among the most important and popular held within Cambridge University Library. While there has been much focus on his manuscripts and correspondence, his library hasn’t always received the attention it deserves – for it is as he engaged with the ideas and theories of others that his own thinking evolved.”
Because Darwin’s evolutionary theory covered so many aspects of nature, reading served him as a primary source of evidence and ideas. Darwin once complained that he had become a ‘machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts’.
The pages of Darwin’s Library, smothered as they are in his tantalizing scrawl, give us a direct view of the great Darwinian intellectual machine in action. With the Charles Darwin Library online, now everyone can retrace how Darwin systematically used reading to advance his science.
Most of Darwin’s personal library rests at Cambridge University Library and at Down House. Although the majority of the books are scientific, some are humanities texts on subjects that Darwin transformed into scientific topics.
The series of transcriptions accompanying each page allows everyone to see which passages Darwin found relevant to his work, stimulated his thinking, or just annoyed him as he read the work of others. 
For example, his friend Charles Lyell wrote in his famous Principles of Geology that there were definite limits to the variation of species. Darwin wrote alongside this: “If this were true adios theory”.
The online transcribed marginalia relies on the work of two scholars, Mario A. Di Gregorio and Nick Gill, published in the 1990s and now greatly enhanced by Gill. Finally, in addition to images of the books and transcribed jots, the information is fully indexed so that people can search for topics and ideas relevant to their interests or work.
Images courtesy of Cambridge University Library.
Find out how JISC is supporting other translatlantic projects through its digitization grants
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HEFCE and JISC are moving forward in delivering cloud-based services for UK education and research.
Since announcing a £12.5 million fund in February that aims to help universities and colleges deliver better value for money by working together more effectively (note 1), HEFCE and JISC are now able to confirm the projects and partners appointed to deliver the two parts of this work: a national cloud infrastructure and supporting services.
JANET (UK) will deliver the national brokerage to aid procurement of cloud services between higher education institutions and commercial suppliers and Eduserv will provide a pilot cloud infrastructure for higher education institutions. Other partners include De Montfort, Exeter, Edinburgh, Kent, Liverpool John Moores, Oxford, Leicester, Southampton and Sunderland universities (see note 2 for a full list of partners).
So that colleges and universities can gain the most benefit from this new cloud-based infrastructure, four new services will be developed to drive its adoption:
• A new specialist team set up by JISC Advance to provide support for procuring and implementing administrative systems and services.
• A shared service to help universities manage the administration of their research operations, from research proposal through to project completion.
• A service to support the secure distribution of graduation documents and transcripts for the benefit of students and prospective employers.
• A service to support libraries in the administration of their electronic resources, which will include the management of their licensing and subscription of electronic journals.
David Sweeney, HEFCE Director – Research, Innovation and Skills, explains the value this suite of work will have once complete, "In the current economic climate all education organisations are looking for further ways to work together, share resources and reduce costs. This programme of work will provide data management and storage services, plus a suite of tools to help universities and colleges, researchers and administrators work more effectively across the research management lifecycle. This will reduce duplication and increase the efficiency of administrative and research processes."
David Utting JISC Director of Service Relationships commented, "Cloud-based services have the potential to bring enormous efficiencies and benefits to higher education institutions and we look forward to working with them to realise these. But we acknowledge that it is vital to demonstrate to users the security and robustness of working in an education and research cloud.
"There have been a number of high-profile issues with data being stored in public clouds, which is why we are working with JANET (UK) to deliver a private higher education cloud to ensure universities can trust that their information and data will be secure."
For further information visit http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/umf.aspx
Notes
1. This £12.5 million is part of the University Modernisation Fund. For further information see ‘Shared services in cloud computing to be funded by HEFCE’
2. Who is involved?
The University of Exeter will lead the Research Management and Administration System (RMAS) work between the universities of Exeter, Kent, and Sunderland to procure, develop and implement a cloud-based research management and administration system based on a need identified by earlier feasibility studies funded by HEFCE.
De Montfort University is developing an enterprise service bus (ESB) solution to demonstrate interoperability between local and cloud systems for shared administrative applications, starting with RMAS.
JISC Collections will manage the electronic resource management support service which builds on work by JISC and the Society of College National and University Libraries (SCONUL).
The Digital Curation Centre (DCC) at University of Edinburgh will develop data management tools and training capability. This will support the production and implementation of data management plans for universities and their researchers to preserve data for sharing, re-use and citation.
A consortium led by Liverpool John Moores University will develop the secure document service.
Four projects will produce software applications which can be delivered as a service from the cloud. They will support researchers with their work and data management and comprise:
• Leicester University is providing support for joint NHS and university research teams working with tissue samples and anonymised patient data.
• The University of Oxford is providing a database to a wide range of researchers in the arts, humanities and other disciplines. Oxford will also provide an integrated set of tools to manage data within Life Sciences and other similar research projects. This will make it easier to submit data for longer-term storage in an appropriate standards compliant data repository.
• The University of Southampton is providing electronic lab data management and collaborations tools.
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Do you like a smoodge or a swallie, and do you stagger after a Mick Jagger? Wherever you are in Scotland your weather is bound to be oorie, chilpy or dreich. Scots Words and Place-names wants to hear about how people are using Scots words – this is all about your contribution to a totally new, interactive way of collecting the language you speak.
The JISC-funded Scots Words and Place-names (SWAP) project , launching on 21st June and based at the University of Glasgow, is trying to find out more about the language that people speak in their everyday lives in different parts of Scotland.
SWAP will use social media to encourage the public to talk about the Scots words they use, helping create the next Scots dictionaries. There is a Facebook page and Twitter feed (@Scotswap) alongside the SWAP website.
Alastair Dunning, programme manager at JISC, said, "Websites that ask for public contributions, like the BBC's NatureWatch, work best when their goal really resonates with their audiences. In the Scots Words and Place-names project, University of Glasgow researchers have found a fantastic way of using technology to open up and share the everyday words of the Scots population."Contribute the words you know on the Facebook page and Twitter feed (@Scotswap) or via the SWAP website.Scots is largely a spoken language, yet research into the way people speak it relies mainly on books and other written sources. The SWAP project is the public’s chance to get involved with academic research. They want contributions from anyone who uses Scots words and the resources available on the website will grow as the public add their own knowledge.
The results will add to the word collections of Scottish Language Dictionaries, helping form new Scots dictionaries, and contribute to knowledge of Scots place-names, enhancing the work of the Scottish Place-Name Society. Information gathered will be added into a Scots place-name glossary to supplement the dictionary-based research which was used to create it.
The project is also running a competition throughout June on Glow, the Scottish schools intranet, with judges including the novelist Louise Welsh. This aims to get children and teachers using Scots in schools. The entries have been enlightening so far, including discussions of Scots words from ‘dumfoonerin’ to ‘bahookie’.
Professor Carole Hough of the University of Glasgow, principal investigator of the project, said, “Research into the Scots language, and Scottish place-names, has really taken off in recent years. This project is a great opportunity to share it with the public, and to get more insights from local knowledge.”
[image designed by 20:7 Design ]
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JISC Techdis, a JISC Advance advisory service, has brought together its range of resources in one place to offer organisations the Accessible IT Practice Support Programme, which will help staff to think about how they can use technology in a more inclusive way and meet the needs of all learners.
The online programme takes staff through 12 different modules from generic themes like improving productivity to more specific tutorials on getting the most out of ebooks and PowerPoint. Staff can follow the course as an accredited City and Guilds qualification if they wish.
Alistair McNaught, JISC Techdis senior advisor and co-author said: “The programme is the only one of its kind, providing an ideal platform for raising awareness of inclusion issues at the same time as developing the skills to create more inclusive teaching and learning environments.”
For more information visit the website or contact JISC Techdis on itq@jisctechdis.ac.uk
Make a booking for a training event
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JISC Legal's Jason Miles-Campbell and Matthew Dovey, digital infrastructure programme director at JISC, will be two of ten panellists providing their expert voices on how JISC is helping with the answers to IPR questions from education and research organisations.
Matthew said, “The area of copyright and intellectual property rights is complex. Researchers, learners and academic staff face challenges each day about when and how they need to comply. Advice and guidance from JISC Legal and the JISC-led SCA provides expertise in the area and I’m looking forward to taking part in the discussions this afternoon.”
All comments are welcome on the Guardian higher education network blog today (Thursday 9 June) between 1-4pm.
Find out more about the debate and join in at 1pm
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Young researchers are increasingly using free web technology to help with their research – but they are not active in creating content, says a major British Library/ JISC generation Y, ‘Researchers of Tomorrow’ report.
The UK’s largest survey of the information seeking behaviours of doctoral students born between 1982-1994, commonly dubbed generation Y, shows a ‘modest increase’ in the students’ use of web technology in the last year.
Compared with a sample of older students, more of the generation Y sample had used at least one kind of open web or Web 2.0 technology with only 8% saying they had used none at all.
The report shows that passive use of these open web technologies is more common than active use. Researchers are reading wikis and blogs without adding to them; they make passive use of internet forums for research, and few blog themselves. For example, while 29% made passive use of internet discussion forums, only 13% were active on them.
The generation Y students also look to their peers for advice and inspiration on technology more than key influencers like their supervisors and library and information services staff.
JISC EMBEDDED OBJECT
Charles Hutchings, market research manager at JISC, said: “While the first year report challenged assumptions being made about these students, this second report delves deeper to give us a clearer picture of the typical generation Y doctoral student. In contrast to older students at the same point in their studies, they typically prefer tailor-made advice and guidance; are unwilling to share their research prematurely; prefer to work in their institutions rather than at home and are more relaxed about their research progress than older doctoral students.
“At JISC we’re interested in this picture because it gives us a clear reference point for our investments in technology for research in universities and colleges. These students are the academic professionals of the future that universities and other organisations will be supporting so we need to help them understand this group in as much detail as possible.”
Isabel Oswell, head of business & research audiences at the British Library, commented on the report: “Consultation is at the heart of how the Library and JISC engage with their researchers. This second year report shows that the breadth and depth of online research material is of increasing relevance to researchers. However, it also shows that libraries need to play a role in helping researchers navigate their way through this plethora of material so that researchers make the best use of the resources that are available to them.”
Oswell continued: “We look forward to understanding more about our generation Y researchers this year and to the final report next year.”
The report is the second publication in the three-year study which was commissioned by the British Library and JISC to establish a benchmark for research behaviour, against which future generations can be measured – and also to provide guidance for librarians and information specialists on how best to meet the research needs of generation Y scholars.
The study includes a survey of doctoral students of any age to provide background to the generation Y research. The first report took place at the end of June 2009 with the assistance of over 70 universities and covering all subject disciplines. It was repeated in 2010 and will be launched for the third and final time in mid 2011.
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JISC’s head of innovation Sarah Porter will today (Friday 3 June) lead an online Guardian debate about the future of the internet in academia.
Sarah is one of ten panellists leading the discussion about how higher education could better embrace the web and what that transformation would look like.
Sarah said: “JISC’s active research in universities shows that not only has the internet changed the way people conduct their research, use university libraries, teach and administer services – but that it’s also benefitting the impact that institutions have outside their own campuses.
“I’ll be really interested to see in this debate whether we can come to some conclusions about changes that need to happen in universities to make even better use of the internet.”
All comments are welcome on the Guardian higher education network blog between 1-4pm.
To stimulate the debate, Guardian journalist Eliza Anyangwe posed some questions: “Are universities only touching the tip of the iceberg of possibilities the web offers in teaching and research? And what about in HE management and administration; how is the web changing service provision here? Is it being used enough?”
Find out more about the debate and join in at 1pm
Follow @GdnHigherEd on Twitter for highlights from the discussion
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Cardiff University has developed the first generic system in the UK to help education institutions assess the popularity and use of their electronic resources viewed via access management software.
The JISC-funded RAPTOR project, led by Cardiff’s information services directorate, enables institutions to view usage statistics from different access management systems, with a particular focus on federated access systems.
The RAPTOR system automatically analyses the log files created by an institution’s access management systems, and shows information about the resources that users have accessed in easily understandable graphics.
The system has been designed to be easy to install and configure, to appeal to institutions with limited technical expertise or resource. It should also be easy to use for the non-technical staff who may require this information.
Martyn Harrow, director of information services at Cardiff, said: “The strength of the RAPTOR tool at a time when education budgets are being squeezed is in providing the evidence needed for academic schools to assess the e-resources subscriptions that are in place. Universities using this system will be able to prove the impact of the e-resources they provide, and ensure that they continue to deliver the best possible value for money for individual academic schools and entire institutions.”
Chris Brown, JISC e-research programme manager, said: “The JISC funded RAPTOR project has produced a tool that has the potential to become extremely important both for institutions and the UK federation. In these times of not just cost savings but looking at improving efficiencies, the RAPTOR tool provides valuable statistics on resource usage. It can analyse a variety of log files and present important information, not only promptly, but most importantly, in an easy to use way. The team at Cardiff have used their wealth of experience in this area and incorporated user feedback to build a tool that is easy to install and use but also extremely powerful.”
Dr Rhys Smith, engineering consultant for identity and access in the information services, said: “RAPTOR’s ease of use has been one of the central considerations in developing the system. This development will give non-technical staff the flexibility to independently produce these statistics whenever they are needed. Users can access the statistics in as much detail as they require (for example, you can view usage by individual department) and the system then presents the figures in an easily understandable way, which can in turn be exported into presentations or reports.”
A further feature of RAPTOR includes providing UK-wide statistics for the JISC Monitoring Unit on the take-up of federated access management across the UK. RAPTOR could also be applied in the US, Europe, and beyond, with potential partnership opportunities between Cardiff and other institutions already being identified to further develop the system.
RAPTOR is now available to the higher education community. The project has secured further JISC funding of £20k to develop the project in consultation with external partners and its users to evaluate and improve the software.
JISC is now funding RAPTOR further to help standardise the code and establish a community of early adopters. This work will help to show the benefits of the tool, build a community and give feedback to the team on potential improvements.
Visit the RAPTOR website for more information
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Publishers, researchers and librarians met this week to debate the global and UK position for scholarly communications including the transition from traditional journal publishing models to open access for academic research.
Discussion Tag:
#scholarlycomms
JISC hosted the roundtable discussion which saw experts gather to share their views on the benefits and international challenges facing higher education in making academic research more widely available, for example through open access routes.
Mark Patterson - Director of Publishing, Public Library of Science explained that he saw that there have been, "significant changes in the publishing world with several open access titles launching over the past 18 months." He also added, "We are seeing a publishing system evolving and adapting to online and digital media. However, it is not just access to research articles and papers that is important it is also being able to reuse and share the content of those articles so new knowledge can be created."
What is clear from the debate is approaching online publishing models for research with a one size fits all approach would be dangerous and care needs to be taken to ensure the models suit the research disciplines. Neil Jacobs JISC’s programme director for digital infrastructure leads JISC’s work on open access and says: “In some areas of physics, where a pre-print culture is normal, open access has been built around that. In other disciplines, such as in some areas of the life sciences, there are major open access journals and repositories. Open access is not yet common in chemistry, and the importance of monographs presents different challenges in the humanities.”
The debate looked at the possible paths to transition from the traditional journal model through to gold oa as well as talking through whether a hybrid model was also the way to go. There was agreement that peer review must remain a cornerstone of scientific publication, to ensure author’s reputations and the credibility of the research. It also contributes to the prestige of some journal titles, which are likely to remain as important brands within scientific publication.
Lorraine Estelle CEO of JISC Collections raised the point that, "there is likely to be a mixed economy for quite some time yet because of course it is a global issue and unless the whole world moves to open access in a particular discipline, there is going to be some subscription for those articles that are coming from other countries."
The debate concluded that there was a strong agreement across the delegates to work together to address these challenges to benefit research and UK plc.
View and listen to JISC’s roundtable debate heading towards the open road for UK research:
JISC EMBEDDED OBJECT
Sections:
During his speech to the Association of British Science Writers recently David Willetts, Minister for Universities and Science, outlined the joint commitment RCUK and HEFCE are making to ensure that open access becomes a reality.
Willets said: “Transparency is at the heart of the Government's agenda, and this also applies to published research. In a recent discussion with members of the research community and publishers I stressed the importance of open access to this information for everyone, and I'm delighted that the Research Councils and HEFCE have committed to taking this forward."
Roundtable delegates:
James Milne - Editorial Director and Acting Managing Director, RSC Publishing, Royal Society of Chemistry
Neil Jacobs - Programme Director Digital Infrastructure, JISC
Debby Shorley - Director of Library Services, Imperial College London
Lorraine Estelle - CEO, JISC Collections
Richard Gedye - STM Director of Outreach Programme
Lorraine Estelle - CEO, JISC Collections
Mark Patterson - Director of Publishing, Public Library of Science
Philip Schofield - Professor of the History of Legal and Political Thought, UCL
Find out more about JISC's work in scholarly communications and how it is part of the Open Access Implementation Group (OAIG).
via Jisc news
Leading developers from across the UK have been awarded funding to explore technologies to make learning more productive for students, including those with visual, auditory and other impairments.
The first competition is focusing on enhancing communication which is often a challenge for people with sensory impairment. The three successful bids will create software to help translate sign language into text, and sensors which will make it easier for learners to communicate using gestures.
The second competition will develop technology to help learners produce and navigate digital information independently, anytime, anywhere and in a user-friendly way. The projects will design solutions to make it easier for learners to access specially designed textbooks from any device, transfer documents in an accessible format and pull out the key facts from a document.
The funding has come from two competitions sponsored by the Department for Business Innovation and Skills (BIS) and the Technology Strategy Board (TSB) and managed by JISC TechDis, a leading UK advisory service on technology and inclusion. Both competitions represent phase one of a Small Business Research Initiative (SBRI) programme, which encourages technology solutions for specific public sector needs.
Business and Enterprise Minister Mark Prisk said: “It is fantastic to see funding given to innovative small businesses that can now develop life-changing technologies. These organisations are absolutely vital to driving growth in our economy, and I warmly congratulate all the successful bids.”
The competition attracted the attention of European and international organisations and a rigorous assessment process took place, involving a panel of over 45 experts who work in the field of assistive technology.
David Whyley, Head teacher Consultant – Learning Technologies and one of the competition judges said: “The standard of the entries showed an amazing depth of appreciation of the importance that accessing new technologies can play in the lives everyone. The applicants really impressed me with their wide range of innovative, high quality solutions. The response to this competition has shown that there is a tremendous number of talented people out there who desire to have an impact on the living, learning and work of the targeted groups.”
Both competitions represent phase one of a Small Business Research Initiative (SBRI) programme, which encourages technology solutions to help with specific public sector needs.
The companies involved range from small private sector start-ups, to more established technology developers through to much larger consortia, as well as a university.
Sal Cooke, JISC Techdis Director said: “We are delighted that we have been able to attract interest from such a broad range of organisations, with substantial expertise, who are clearly committed to providing innovative assistive technology solutions. The potential impact is huge, as all the proposals have one thing in common; they are designed to be of benefit to the end user by improving communication and access to information. All the projects will be working with end users to ensure the results of phase one clearly identify and address their needs.”
A total of £250,000 for each competition was made available and successful companies will be expected to complete their contracts by the end of October 2011. A decision will then be made with regard to a second phase of the project. This will clearly depend on the availability of funds and the successful outcomes from the phase one projects.
Mark Glover, Head of SBRI at the Technology Strategy Board, said: “SBRI has enabled organisations that would not normally engage with the public sector to propose exciting new ideas and get the support necessary to move them towards commercial reality. These two competitions have created an excellent opportunity for businesses and academia, to develop technology which promises to make a significant difference to the learning, working and social environment for people with disabilities.”
Find out more about the competitions
Read the original press release on the JISC Techdis website
via Jisc news
Measuring the impact of a resource you’ve put online can be difficult – but a newly updated JISC toolkit will help content creators, publishers and other information professionals understand the reach of their digital assets.
They can use the kit to help guide them through different aspects of measuring impact, both qualitative, such as focus groups, and quantitative, such as web metrics.
Users of the toolkit are also encouraged to contribute to updating the hands-on advice by adding their own advice on topics like how to conduct an interview, using Google Analytics, writing a suitable survey and setting up log file analysis, all designed by the Oxford Internet Institute.
JISC’s programme manager for digitisation, Paola Marchionni, said: “Understanding the impact of your scholarly resources is an important part of the evaluation process. If you can see how people such as researchers are using the resource, you can then go back and make it even more useful for them and improve their experience.
“Good impact evaluation also helps projects generate statistics to support future work and grant bids, make a stronger case for the sustainability of a resource and tell good stories in the media.”
Project manager Eric Meyer, research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, said: ““The question of impact is on everyone’s minds. In the toolkit and in the synthesis report we argue that “impact” is more than crude measures of number of visitors, or numbers of links.
“We recommend using a variety of qualitative and quantitative measures to understand the types of impacts resources have on research, teaching, learning, and for the wider public. The case studies on the site and in the synthesis report illustrate how both high-traffic sites and more specialized collections can demonstrate and enhance their impacts. We encourage others to contribute their own case studies and methods to the toolkit so it continues to grow.”
A number of JISC projects have already used the toolkit to evaluate their digitised resources, ranging from lectures podcasts on iTunes to multimedia dance resources and historical material.
Find out about the impact of digitised resources by downloading the report
via Jisc news
JISC’s executive secretary this week called for more join-up across Europe to ensure researchers and other network users get the most from cloud computing.
Speaking at the largest and most prestigious research networking conference in Europe, Dr Malcolm Read said that a federation of clouds for education and research could be extended across the whole of Europe if conditions were right.
Dr Read highlighted JISC as the funder of the UK’s national research and education network, JANET. He said: “National networks like JANET are already providing increasingly broad support as they offer data storage, cloud brokering and high performance computing to researchers and other people in education.
“In my opinion there is merit in providing national private clouds for the research and education community. These existing national networks are obvious candidates for brokering and delivering such services because they have specialist expertise in procurement and service delivery.”
In his talk Dr Read drew a parallel with the success of the GEANT network, the European infrastructure that reaches 40 countries through interconnectivity with its national research and education network project partners. Around 40 million research and education users benefit from the connection across Europe.
Dr Read concluded: “If national private clouds make sense, then linking such clouds across Europe, and potentially more widely, should also be explored.”
Dr Read was speaking to over 500 decision makers, networking specialists and managers from across the continent at the Terena networking conference in Prague
JISC’s programme director for the digital infrastructure Rachel Bruce also spoke on cloud this week at a separate event in the UK. Read more about what she said.
via Jisc news
JISC welcomes Professor Ian Hargreaves’ independent review of the UK’s intellectual property (IP) framework as a positive step towards easy, widespread access to information and resources.
Dr Malcolm Read, JISC executive secretary, says: “We support the key findings in the report which we anticipate will help optimise the impact of UK research and enable our world class universities to fully contribute towards innovation and growth.
“JISC has consistently advocated a more liberal, ‘open’ IP framework that can support innovative uses of digital assets. For universities and colleges the following exceptions (below) are crucial as they will allow for and encourage digitization, preservation, access and re-use of digital content as well as supporting research and learning,” he said.
For universities and colleges to effectively have long-term access to electronic materials, the format-shifting and non-commercial use exceptions are vital. This supports a general transition to e-only services giving users anytime anywhere access and freeing up space and resources.
Text mining allows researchers to extract and manipulate information and data from a range of sources. The change would have an enormous effect on the range and capability of UK research.
Orphan works are those for which the rights holder is unknown or cannot be traced. Enabling people to access and re-use these works would support teaching, learning and research immeasurably. Potentially this would encourage mass digitisation of digital content on which services and innovation can be built.
Currently, contracts can be used to override exceptions to copyright. Enshrining the exceptions in law will future proof the implementation of new proposed copyright exceptions and protect the current exceptions, supporting further innovation and growth.
This new exception future-proofs developments in new technology to make sure that that harmonised exceptions across Europe remain relevant.
How can JISC help?
Other recommended exceptions which JISC welcomes include the exceptions for parody and format shifting as well as extending the exception for non commercial research to all media.
UK colleges and universities contribute towards innovation and economic growth as part of a wider, rapidly evolving and complex eco-system which includes a spectrum of new and emergent business relationships and models. In particular, recent studies have valued universities’ knowledge exchange income (mainly patents) at £3 billion (2008/09)and the Universities UK report, The impact of universities on the UK economy, states that they contributed £59 billion to the UK economy in 2009.
JISC welcomes the full implementation of the recommendations outlined within the Hargreaves Review of IP to provide a basis for UK innovation, education and research with unprecedented opportunities to compete internationally in a fast moving digital age.
Paul Ayris is president of the association of European research libraries, LIBER, and director of University College London library services as well as being UCL’s copyright officer. He says: “These exceptions provide a robust basis for UK education and research to support the UK’s economic growth and innovation, digital literacy, the preservation of vulnerable materials and unlocking digital access to a wealth of vital cultural heritage content currently warehoused as orphan works. Moreover, the applications of text mining, which are immense and varied can be better harnessed by UK education and research, speeding up science and innovation and allowing UK’s universities and colleges to work more efficiently.”
Download the Hargreaves report (PDF)
JISC was invited to contribute to the report. Read the document we sent Professor Hargreaves (PDF)
via Jisc news
There is a "compelling case for using the cloud for research", JISC's Innovation Director for digital infrastructure argued last week.
Speaking at an 'inside government' forum on cloud in the public sector, Rachel Bruce said: "It's clear that universities need the right infrastructure for the right job, and hybrid infrastructure with local and public provision is required. But investment in the cloud is often driven by cost - so cloud computing is a particularly attractive option for smaller institutions who can't afford to replace their physical hardware to do the same job."
Rachel highlighted some of the reasons that universities are increasingly looking to use the cloud for their research services.
Cloud is attractive because it can help universities and similar organisations:
1. Reduce environmental and financial costs - where functions are only needed for short periods, for example
2. Share the load - when a university is working with a partner organisation so that neither organisation need develop or maintain a physical infrastructure
3. Be flexible and pay as you go - researchers may need to use specialized web-based software that cannot be supported by in-house facilities or policies
4. Access data centres, web applications and services from any location
5. Make experiments more repeatable - write-ups of science experiments performed in the cloud can contain reference to cloud applications like a virtual machine, making the experiment easier to replicate
JISC committee member and Pro Vice Chancellor of Roehampton University, Chris Cobb, also addressed an Eduserv symposium last week on shared services.
He said: "With the universal drive for efficiencies, shared services has become even more topical. The key though is to examine opportunities at a process level and not as whole systems or organisational units. JISC is undertaking valuable work in supporting institutions in improved understanding of their processes and the relationship of processes to systems and physical infrastructure.
"Through this, institutions are better placed to take advantage of services orientated architecture, 'software as a service' and cloud based technologies to increase resilience and reduce costs. With cultural barriers to shared services now dissipating, the time is right to consider shared services more strategically and not just opportunistically as has been the case so far."
JISC is currently doing work to help organisations better understand the costs of a cloud infrastructure and help them make decisions about how the cloud might fit their business models.
JISC is currently working to deliver part of the Universities Modernisation Fund, a £12.5 million HEFCE fund that aims to help universities and colleges deliver better efficiency and value for money through shared services.
JISC is contributing funding to eleven pilot projects with the Engineering and Physical Sciences research council (EPSRC) to explore and develop new cloud computing technologies for research.
Find out how the pilots are going
JISC is also helping over 40 UK universities and colleges navigate through the steps needed to improve their IT service delivery for students and staff including evaluating the possibilities for cloud computing.
Read JISC's tagged articles on cloud computing using the Delicious social bookmarking service
via Jisc news
UK research and education is to benefit from a network running at an unprecedented 100Gbit/s, the equivalent of uploading 125 doctoral theses in just one second*.
Internationally other national research and education networks have conducted trials of 100Gbit/s technology but JANET is the first to run it for operational traffic.
The JANET network is designed to handle vast quantities of data from the world’s greatest scientific endeavours and this latest advance ensures that the UK can collaborate and compete with the best there is.
From a primary school student learning about the Victorians through to a postgrad researching their dissertation, they all benefit from this single unifying network.
As bandwidth demand doubles every 18 months this upgrade is the latest crucial stage in the evolution of JANET.
Jeremy Sharp, head of strategic technologies at JANET, commented: “This technical advance is the latest example of JANET(UK)’s commitment to ensuring that UK research and education is underpinned by a world class infrastructure. At a time when research and education is being asked to do more with less it is vital that we identify and implement appropriate technologies that deliver real benefits to our customers.”
As more organisations move towards cloud services and shared data centres and research projects produce vast quantities of data, the move to 100Gbit/s provides a cost effective means of meeting this demand.
The international reputation of the UK’s education and research is seen as fundamental to the future economic recovery and prosperity of the country and, in a global marketplace, it can only achieve this with a world class infrastructure.
JANET’s value to the schools sector in England was recently demonstrated by the Department for Education’s decision to continue to provide central funding for the network in the forthcoming financial year.
* based on an average thesis size of 100 Mb.
via Jisc news
Learning and research on the move has just become much easier as JANET(UK) is pleased to announce the launch of its new high capacity data service for education institutions and research organisations, JANET 3G.
From June 2011, the data service will allow academic and support staff to remotely access vital resources such as research data, virtual learning environments and library catalogues while on the move. With over 60 enquiries already received in the first week of its launch, from both universities and colleges, the appetite for this new service is evident.
Communications Minister Ed Vaizey said: “I am delighted that the education sector is putting in place plans to provide wireless broadband for the academic community. This is a really exciting development and will help us achieve our goal of having the best broadband in Europe by 2015."
JANET 3G has been developed to provide a range of 3G data packages that combine value-for-money with features specifically configured for the education sector. It is designed to be easy to deploy, helping organisations to make the most of their existing investment in wireless networking. Offering seamless integration with the international roaming service, eduroam*, their existing authentication mechanism can be used for mobile users, making security configuration much simpler. By enabling the use of an organisation’s existing IP addresses, JANET 3G also makes firewall configuration much easier.
“JANET 3G is a perfect example of our ability to respond to meet the needs of education and research,” says Tim Marshall, CEO at JANET(UK). “Increasingly academic and support staff are working on the move and we are delighted to respond to this by providing high quality connectivity both on and off campus.”
Educational organisations are offered a wide selection of price plans enabling them to precisely match their users’ needs whilst keeping control over costs. Data packages available range from low usage machine-to-machine plans to genuine 15Gb data allowances for demanding users, providing a real breadth of choice.
Customers are able to choose either to use a press-out SIM card useable with the iPad and tablet family; to add a dongle for individual users; or to create a Wi-Fi hub for up to five users with a Mi-Fi device. JANET 3G will be provided by aql, and powered by the Three 3G mobile data network.
Dr Adam Beaumont, Managing Director of aql, states: “This is a partnership where we have taken best of breed to create a unique product. aql is bringing together MDS, providing a scaleable billing solution and Three, offering high capacity network access, on one platform to provide a seamless service.” He continues, “In order to be able to provide a service to education and research, we need to be scaleable and cost effective. We believe we’ve achieved this and are keen to be rolling out JANET 3G to the JANET community.”
*eduroam (education roaming) is the secure, world-wide roaming access service developed for the international research and education community.
via Jisc news
The infokit has been developed by JISC and JISC infoNet in conjunction with a number of universities who have worked to identify the issues and challenges they current face within their research teams in managing the research lifecycle from bidding for a grant through to publication.
Josh Brown digital infrastructure programme manager at JISC explains: “The current situation for UK universities is a very mixed picture depending upon the type of higher education institution, but what they all have in common is the need to deliver information and data on research happening within their organisations to funders and increasingly to businesses who are looking to work with them to commercialise commissioned work.”
At the moment there is no common standard across the UK research community to manage their information. Many institutions have created their own bespoke systems to meet their needs and this infoKit highlights many of the emerging trends. For example the universities featured show there is particular value of adopting common standards such as CERIF or shared services such as the JISC and HEFCE-funded Research Management and Administrative System (RMAS), which is modular enabling universities to create a cradle-to-grave research information system.
Steve Bailey senior advisor at JISC infoNet who has developed the infoKit says: “What we have learnt through the case studies and our research is that by investing in general good practice which fits you and your institution it is likely to become easier to comply with REF as you will have the bedrock of systems and processes in place to meet the internal and external requirements for your institution. It is also clear that there is a strong business case for the cost savings and avoidance of duplication with universities to adopt a research information process.
“The infoKit provides a very real look at the challenges and lessons learnt that researchers and their intuitions are going through in terms of their information management. Previous research has have found that by adopting a research information management approach universities can save approximately 20/30 per cent on complying with returns for the research excellence framework and when each submission costs over £1000 per researcher that is a significant saving.”
The infoKit will be updated and evolve as JISC gains additional insight from its projects and the requirements of the REF become clearer.
*source Research Councils
Read a blog post written by Josh Brown about the new infoKit
Listen to a podcast with Josh Brown and Steve Bailey (Duration 9:44)
JISC EMBEDDED OBJECT
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Download the podcast