Knowledge Discovery Resources - Marcus Zillman

Just came across this whilst catching up on Bloglines...
http://www.kdresources.info/

Networking for researchers

Research Information (Ded/Jan) also has a nice article on resources for biomedical researchers, including mention of a life sciences social networking site to be launched in January (www.biomedexperts.com) - it's a prepopulated network, sourced from NIH data, containing over 1.4 million profiles. It'll be an interesting one to watch...

Mandate for access to NIH research

In Research Information (Dec 07/Jan 08), the story "US Senate approves mandate for access to NIH Research". It will allow NIH to require, rather than request, researchers to make their NIH-funded research outputs publicly available via PubMed Central. Currently, less than 5% is deposited voluntarily.
http://www.researchinformation.info/news/news_story.php?news_id=154

LIFE - digital lifecycle cost study

LIFE, a collaboration of British Library and University College London funded by JISC, started its second phase this year. The first phase "examined the life cycles of key digital collections at UCL and the British Library and established the individual stages in the cycle. These stages were then costed to show the full financial commitment of collecting digital materials over the long term". The second phase, which will end next August, "aims to refine the LIFE methodology adding four new exemplar case studies to further build upon LIFE1"
http://www.life.ac.uk/

JISC Information Governance Gateway

JISC Information Governance Gateway now launched at http://www.jigg.ac.uk/ - useful resource for institutions

Email : outsource or inhouse?

Thanks to ResourceShelf for pointing out this story:
When E-Mail Is Outsourced
http://insidehighered.com/news/2007/11/27/email
This looks at some of the issues institutions are now facing (although US focused) in deciding how to move ahead with email and other services. Microsoft and Google have both marketed to the higher education sector and offer the benefits of integration. But the choice facing institutions is not simple and raises a number of questions relating to:

• cost/value
• role of IT services
• privacy and ownership of data
• advertising
• the value of an ".edu" or ".ac.uk" email address
• capacity to innovate
• support required
• ability to influence priorities for development.

Relates to a story on BBC News (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/6741797.stm) earlier this year and to the move towards "software as services" mentioned in my posting on 11th October (http://ali-stuff.blogspot.com/2007/10/software-on-demand.html).

Models of sustainability workshop

Yesterday, I went along to the workshop on Models of Sustainability, jointly organised by JISC and the Oxford eResearch Centre. It was an interesting workshop, with a keynote by Malcolm Read followed by presentations from eScience projects. Here are a few of the issues and ideas discussed:

• Have eScience Programme outputs reached the level of sustainability needed? How long is a reasonable length of time to expect a step change?
• Can we have generic tools given that research itself is not generic?
• How much tinkering of tools and software do researchers actually want to do?
• Although we have a culture of sharing software, there isn't the same culture of sharing data (file sharing does not equal data sharing!). The problem is not technological but cultural
• In time, will current students bring their social networking skills into research?
• What can be learned from Athens to Shibboleth move in terms of running a development programme to inform a production programme?
• Sustainability = continuing efforts, changing culture, reducing duplication, encouraging sharing and discussion, open collaboration. Must not forget the broader sustainability agenda (e.g. HEFCE shared services programme)
• The sofware engineering needs to be sound and built on a solid framework. Academia is perhaps not geared to developing robust software and middleware; funding agencies generally haven't funded software development; career progression reward for those developing software is difficult; staff recruitment and retention issues; sustainability not even on radar screen of many HEIs and most academics
• One option is the spinoff company - in this instance, it is important to establish trust between company and university. Takes time to get technology to market. The DTI/Technology Standards Board follow on is a great bridge. Keep the team together as far as possible
• The team needs a mix of scientific, domain, financial and business experience
• Sustainability depends on users but need to promote long term view (vision of integrating compute, data and collaboration is not easy for researchers in a hurry with a short term view); new ways of working takes researchers out of their comfort zones
• If you want to continue to innovate, maintaining what you have becomes more difficult – issues of scalability, competition for support. There is a tension between maintaining an infrastructure and innovating
• Sustainability lessons – work with user community; constantly innovate and deliver; develop modular easy to use software; strong promotion, personal ownership; vision - many new ideas
• Innovation has 2 strands – new technical capability, new science communities
• Is there a role for Full Economic Costing in sustainability?
• Need to get across that software and data are facilities and therefore need managing
• What is the role of institutions in helping to sustain a project?
  

Slides will be available from http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/programme_einfrastructure/modelsofsustainability