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I missed a significant announcement back in the summer holidays so I will blog a (belated) update this month. In July JISC Collections and Portico concluded a UK consortium membership rate for the Portico archive. This builds on a previous consortium agreement with Portico for Scottish university libraries in SHEDL.

The JISC agreement offers a substantial discount to consortium members on the individual library rate that would apply. As of 12 October 2011, 57 UK university libraries have joined the Portico e-journal archive (20 of these are since July 2011 and as part of the new JISC Collections agreement). Take-up of the e-books archive has been much lower so far: only the SHEDL libraries (where e-journal and e-book archive membership was bundled) and 5 out of the 20 new UK library members have taken this option.

Membership of Portico acts as an “insurance policy” should post-cancellation access arrangements with a participating publisher fail and provides a fully out-sourced service. The Portico archive service is discussed in more detail in a JISC Collections Guide to e-Archiving Solutions.

I’m pleased to announce the release today of the Report ‘Benefits from the Infrastructure Projects in the JISC Managing Research Data Programme‘ prepared by Charles Beagrie Ltd for the JISC.

JISC’s Managing Research Data programme has invested nearly £2M, in a strand of eight Research Data Management Infrastructure (RDMI) projects to provide the UK Higher Education sector with examples of good research data management.

The eight projects studied in the report have described a wide range of key benefits from investments in research data infrastructure including:

Ability to cite shared data (Admiral Project, University of Oxford):

Integrated thinking around research data management (IDMB Project, University of Southampton):

Enhanced data sharing and discovery (FISHnet Project, Freshwater Biological Association and King’s College London);

Research efficiency, rapid access to data (I2S2 Project, Universities of Bath/Cambridge/Southampton, Charles Beagrie and the Science and Technology Facilities Council);

Clear and accessible guidance (Incremental Project, Universities of Cambridge and Glasgow);

Improving data management plans, policies and institutional settings (MaDAM Project University of Manchester;

Cost Savings through Centralisation and Virtualisation (Sudamih Project, University of Oxford).

Our report provides an analysis and synthesis of all the benefits and metrics identified by the eight RDMI projects in their benefits case studies, the benefits and enhancements that accrued to existing tools and methodologies from them, and the emerging business cases (as of June 2011) for sustainability being built by the RDMI projects. A brief overview is available on the JISC webpage with the report itself.

There was a 6 minute interview on digital preservation and personal digital archives on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme at 8.21 am UK time this morning with Richard Ovenden (chair of the Digital Preservation Coalition), John Sutherland of UCL, and John Humphries of the BBC. The discussion did feel a bit weak in places and the researcher input to the discussion perhaps could have been balanced with input from someone active in the digital humanities but it was still interesting to hear and the digital library/archive case is well put by Richard Ovenden. You can now listen to a recording of the discussion online.

The official description of the broadcast is as follows: The poet Wendy Cope has sold her archive to the British Library for £32,000, a bounty that includes everything from letters, diaries and drafts to more than 40,000 emails.John Sutherland, professor of literature at University College London, and Richard Ovenden, of the Bodleian Library, consider whether emails really denote a digital form of art, and what impact the email will have for future literary research.

Dear all

A quick reminder to anyone wishing to respond to the JISC consultation on the draft e-Journal Archiving White paper that the deadline for comments is the end of next week (Friday 12 November).

Details of the consultation and the draft white paper are available here.

Charles Beagrie Limited are pleased to be partners in the DryadUK project which launched earlier this month. DryadUK is a JISC-funded project being run from the British Library and Oxford University, with assistance from NESCent, the Digital Curation Centre (DCC), ourselves, and the Research Information Network (RIN).

The project is assisting the further development of Dryad in the following ways:

Expanding Dryad

• By establishing a UK mirror site
• By expanding the service to include new publishers, journals and disciplines

Increasing Dryad sustainability

• By developing a sustainable business plan
• By establishing a framework for evaluating Dryad data usage

Adding value

• Exploring ways to improve metadata standards for deposition, citation and annotation
• Adding usage of DataCite dois.

For further information see the DryadUK webpages.

Libraries are facing increasing space pressures and funding constraints. There is a growing interest in wherever possible moving more rapidly to e-only provision of academic journals to help alleviate these pressures as well as to provide new electronic services to users.

One of the most cited barriers and concerns both from library and faculty staff to moving to e-only has been sustaining and assuring long-term access to electronic content.

Today JISC has released a consultation draft of a White Paper on e-Journal Archiving for UK Higher Education Libraries (prepared for JISC by Charles Beagrie Ltd). The consultation on the draft white paper is open until 12 November.

Although focussing on the UK sector, many of the economic and emerging best practice issues it addresses will also be of interest to university libraries and research institutions in other countries.

The white paper complements and references other advice and guidance available from JISC on e-journal archiving, in particular A Practical Guide to e-journal Archiving Solutions published in February 2010, which gives a detailed and impartial evaluation of the UK LOCKSS Alliance, CLOCKSS and Portico.

The white paper therefore is primarily focussing on areas not previously covered in JISC guidance, in particular outlining emerging good practice in terms of policy and procedures for institutions and drawing together the economic case for e-journal archiving.

The economic case explores the benefits arising from transitioning from print or print+electronic to electronic-only for current journal licensing; and benefits arising from the purchase or licensing of past electronic issues and/or retro-digitised versions of historic print journals.

The white paper also includes four emerging good practice case studies from the libraries of:

• University of Glasgow
• University of Huddersfield
• London School of Economics
• and the Scottish Higher Education Digital Library (SHEDL)

These were selected to provide a range of emerging UK good practice in large research universities, small-medium scale universities, specialist research universities, and innovative collegiate shared licensing and resource development.

Related Blog Posts

For those interested in the topic of e-journal archiving and licensing electronic content, there are a number of related posts on this blog covering some of our previous work in this field including:

A practical guide to e-journal archiving solutions

Ensuring Perpetual Access – German National Hosting Strategy for electronic resources

and Just published: A Comparative Study of e-Journal Archiving Solutions

The new UK coalition government has been making some interesting policy decisions around government data extending some of the work already underway under the previous Labour administration. For example see the prime minister’s Letter to Government departments on opening up data issued on Monday 31 May 2010.

The conservative party (majority partner in the coalition) technology manifesto is well worth looking over for anyone interested in data and IT policy in the UK and an indicator of what might still be coming out of the new government.

In addition, to plans to open up government data and spending information it refers to research by Rufus Pollock et al at Cambridge University on the economic value of open data, which estimated it will create an estimated £6 billion in additional value for the UK. This boost to British jobs will come from the synergies and positive spillover benefits that result from businesses and social entrepreneurs building new applications and services using previously locked-up government data.

It is fascinating to see how big an effect on UK government policy advocacy by the likes of the Open Knowledge Foundation and the Free Our Data campaign has had. Of course it helps if similar initiatives are underway in the USA – see the Wired interview with the US government’s first-ever chief information officer, Vivek Kundra.

I am pleased to announce that our study Ensuring Perpetual Access: establishing a federated strategy on perpetual access and hosting of electronic resources for Germany is now available.

Concepts and Properties of Archives and Hosting in the Strategy and their Relationships ©Charles Beagrie Ltd 2009. CreativeCommons Attribution-Share Alike3.0 Key: solid colour represents core properties and fading colour represents weaker properties of archives and hosting services.

The study was commissioned by the Alliance of German Science Organisations to help develop a strategy to address the challenges of perpetual access and hosting of electronic resources. In undertaking the study we were requested to focus on commercial e-journals and retro-digitised material.

Although developed for Germany, there is substantial discussion and recommendations around the issues of perpetual access, archiving, and sustainability of hosting and access services for these materials which will be of interest to an international audience.

Contents include:

• Discussion, definition, and glossary of terms;
• Review of relevant  international activity;
• Review of current and future desired position in Germany;
• Gap analysis;
• A series of use cases;
• Scenarios, potential solutions, and recommendations

Model used for discussion of the Federated Strategy on Perpetual Access and Hosting of Electronic Resources for Germany  ©Charles Beagrie Ltd 2009. CreativeCommons Attribution-Share Alike3.0

The members of the Alliance of German Science Organisations are the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation), the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the German Rectors’ Conference (Hochschulrektorenkonferenz – HRK), the Helmholtz Association, the Leibniz Association, the Max Planck Society, and the Wissenschaftsrat (German Council of Science and Humanities). For further information on the Alliance Hosting Working Group that steered the study see:

English webpage:

http://www.allianzinitiative.de/en/core_activities/national_hosting_strategy/working_group/

Deutsch:

http://www.allianzinitiative.de/de/handlungsfelder/nationale_hosting_strategie/arbeitsgruppe/

The Final Report of the Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access is now available.  The report Sustainable Economics for a Digital Planet: Ensuring Long-Term Access to Digital Information describes its work as follows:

“…questions remain about what digital information we should preserve, who is responsible for preserving, and who will pay.

The Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access investigated these questions from an economic perspective. In this report, we identify problems intrinsic to all preserved digital materials, and propose actions that stakeholders can take to meet these challenges to sustainability. We developed action agendas that are targeted to major stakeholder groups and to domain-specific preservation strategies.

The Task Force focused its inquiry on materials that are of long-term public interest, looking at four content domains with diverse preservation profiles:

• Scholarly discourse: the published output of scholarly inquiry
• Research data: the primary inputs into research, as well as the first-order results of that research
• Commercially owned cultural content: culturally significant digital content that is owned by a private entity and is under copyright protection; and
• Collectively produced Web content: Web content that is created interactively, the result of collaboration and contributions by consumers.”

I have not had chance to look at the report in detail but hope to add a short commentary to the blog in due course.