Nearly 200 delegates gathered in London last week to debate how to capture and manage the UK's rich data resources for future use. Their focus was the findings of the eagerly anticipated feasibility study into a UK Research Data Service (UKRDS), a study funded under the [Higher Education Funding Council for England] shared services programme with additional funding from JISC, Research Libraries UK and the Russell Universities Group IT directors.
The study recommends that there is a need for a UKRDS, based on a ‘cooperative service model’, that would build on existing good practice in data management and fill gaps in provision. More than 700 researchers at four case study universities had been interviewed as part of the investigations.
'The UK is already well provided with an infrastructure on which to build', Jean Sykes, Librarian and Director of IT Services at the London School of Economics and chair of the UKRDS project board, told the conference. This includes several subject-specific national data centres and many JISC initiatives, such as the JANET network, the Information Environment, the Digital Curation Centre and tools developed under the Data Audit Framework projects.
Institutional repositories could fill gaps left by the lack of suitable subject repositories, Dr Malcolm Read, JISC executive secretary, told the conference. 'If we can’t create subject repositories in all disciplines, we need a horizontal vision across institutional and disciplinary repositories.' This should include subject practitioner advice on what to save and how. ...
An executive summary of the (undated) final report is also available. See also notes by:
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
