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The Higher Education Funding Council (HEFCE) is one of the major public funders of teaching and research in UK Universities. It is also the major funder of the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) providing around 75% of the recurrent core budget and the majority of its capital funding. So its announcements on funding are hugely important for the UK university sector.

HEFCE have recently released Circular letter number 02/2010 Funding for universities and colleges in 2010-11 setting out the implications of government cuts to its budget from August 2010.

The majority of press coverage following the release of the circular, has focussed on the implications for teaching and the reduction to the number of funded student places for the next academic year.

However the circular also sets out a number of key decisions and cuts in other areas of HEFCE support namely:

“£294 million in special funding for national programmes and initiatives, such as the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and the development fund for employer engagement. This compares with £316 million in 2009-10.” [approximately 7.5% reduction]

And under Capital funding it notes:

“reprioritising and rephasing of the funding for JISC, including the open and educational resource programme, will release a further £27 million”

Note “The decisions taken by the Board do not take account of the £600 million reduction in the higher education and science and research budgets by 2012-13 announced in the pre-Budget report on 9 December 2009”.

The JISC annual budget is around £82 million recurrent core and £33 million capital.

JISC is hugely influential in many areas of UK HE and FE including open access, digital preservation, e-learning and digital libraries amongst others. Any reduction to its core funding and capital programmes will be significant for many in the sector and beyond.  In January, JISC postponed all current capital funded calls and invitations to tender (ITTs), pending the HEFCE board decision.

An important editorial has just appeared online in the February issue of The American Naturalist.
To promote the preservation and fuller use of data, The American Naturalist, Evolution, the Journal of Evolutionary Biology, Molecular Ecology, Heredity, and other key journals in evolution and ecology will soon introduce a new data archiving policy. The policy has been enacted by the Executive Councils of the societies owning or sponsoring the journals. For example, the policy of The American Naturalist will state:

This journal requires, as a condition for publication, that data supporting the results in the paper should be archived in an appropriate public archive, such as GenBank, TreeBASE, Dryad, or the Knowledge Network for Biocomplexity. Data are important products of the scientific enterprise, and they should be preserved and usable for decades in the future. Authors may elect to have the data publicly available at time of publication, or, if the technology of the archive allows, may opt to embargo access to the data for a period up to a year after publication. Exceptions may be granted at the discretion of the editor, especially for sensitive information such as human subject data or the location of endangered species.

This policy will be introduced approximately a year from now, after a period when authors are encouraged to voluntarily place their data in a public archive. Data that have an established standard repository, such as DNA sequences, should continue to be archived in the appropriate repository, such as GenBank. For more idiosyncratic data, the data can be placed in a more flexible digital data library such as the National Science Foundation–sponsored Dryad Archive.

Authors of the editorial, Michael C. Whitlock, Mark A. McPeek, Mark D. Rausher, Loren Rieseberg, and Allen J. Moore present the case for the importance of data archiving in science.   This is the first of several coordinated editorials soon to appear in major journals.

The Association of American Universities and the American Institute of Physics have issued the following press release:

WASHINGTON, D.C., January 12, 2010 — An expert panel of librarians, library scientists, publishers, and university academic leaders today called on federal agencies that fund research to develop and implement policies that ensure free public access to the results of the research they fund “as soon as possible after those results have been published in a peer-reviewed journal.”

The Scholarly Publishing Roundtable was convened last summer by the U.S. House Committee on Science and Technology, in collaboration with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). Policymakers asked the group to examine the current state of scholarly publishing and seek consensus recommendations for expanding public access to scholarly journal articles.

The various communities represented in the Roundtable have been working to develop recommendations that would improve public access without curtailing the ability of the scientific publishing industry to publish peer-reviewed scientific articles.

The Roundtable’s recommendations, endorsed in full by the overwhelming majority of the panel (12 out of 14 members), “seek to balance the need for and potential of increased access to scholarly articles with the need to preserve the essential functions of the scholarly publishing enterprise,” according to the report.

“I want to commend the members of the Roundtable for reaching broad agreement on some very difficult issues,” said John Vaughn, executive vice president of the Association of American Universities, who chaired the group. “Our system of scientific publishing is an indispensible part of the scientific enterprise here and internationally. These recommendations ensure that we can maintain that system as it evolves and also ensure full and free public access to the results of research paid for by the American taxpayer.”

The Roundtable identified a set of principles viewed as essential to a robust scholarly publishing system, including the need to preserve peer review, the necessity of adaptable publishing business models, the benefits of broader public access, the importance of archiving, and the interoperability of online content.

In addition, the group affirmed the high value of the “version of record” for published articles and of all stakeholders’ contributions to sustaining the best possible system of scholarly publishing during a time of tremendous change and innovation.

To implement its core recommendation for public access, the Roundtable recommended the following:

• Agencies should work in full and open consultation with all stakeholders, as well as with OSTP, to develop their public access policies.
• Agencies should establish specific embargo periods between publication and public access.
• Policies should be guided by the need to foster interoperability.
• Every effort should be made to have the Version of Record as the version to which free access is provided.
• Government agencies should extend the reach of their public access policies through voluntary collaborations with non-governmental stakeholders.
• Policies should foster innovation in the research and educational use of scholarly publications.
• Government public access policies should address the need to resolve the challenges of long-term digital preservation.
• OSTP should establish a public access advisory committee to facilitate communication among government and nongovernment stakeholders.
• In issuing its report, the Roundtable urged all interested parties to move forward, beyond “the too-often acrimonious” past debate over access issues towards a collaborative framework wherein federal funding agencies can build “an interdependent system of scholarly publishing that expands public access and enhances the broad, intelligent use of the results of federally-funded research.”

The report, as well as a list of Roundtable members, member biographies, and the House Science and Technology Committee’s charge to the group, can be found here.

We are starting up and partnering in a number of new and interesting consultancy projects which run into 2010 as follows:

Dryad is an emerging digital repository for supplementary data underlying published works in ecology, evolution, and related fields being developed by a consortium of the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent) in the US and relevant scientific societies and academic journals. Its goals are to:

• – preserve all the underlying data reported in a paper at the time of publication, when there is the greatest incentive and ability for authors to share their data. This is particularly important in the case of data for which a specialized repository does not exist.

• – lower the burden of data sharing by providing one-stop data-deposition via handshaking with specialized repositories.

• – assign globally unique identifiers to datasets, thus enabling data citations.

• – allow end-users to perform sophisticated searches over data (not only by publication, but also by taxon, geography, geological age, biological concept, etc).

• – allow journals and societies to pool their resources for one shared repository.

• – enable bidirectional search and retrieval with data repositories from related disciplines.

The strategic priorities for Dryad emerged from a May 2007 workshop on “Data Preservation, Sharing, and Discovery: Challenges for Small Science in the Digital Era“, at which a variety of stakeholder journals and societies were represented.

I am pleased to announce that Charles Beagrie Limited will be working with the Dryad project team to develop a business plan and sustainability for the Dryad repository. Neil Beagrie and Julia Chruszcz will lead the consultancy with research support from Peter Williams. Further information on Dryad, the partners and the latest developments can be found on the Dryad website.

I2S2 – The  Infrastructure for Integration in Structural Sciences (I2S2) Project  is funded under the Research Data Management Infrastructure strand of the JISC’s Managing Research Data Programme, with a duration of 18 months (Oct 2009 to March 2011). It will identify requirements for a data-driven research infrastructure in “Structural Science”, focussing on the domain of Chemistry, but with a view towards inter-disciplinary application.

Two research data management pilots  will examine the business processes of research, and highlight the benefits of an integrated approach. Both pilots will address traversing administrative boundaries between institutions to national facilities in addition to issues of scale (local laboratory to national facilities, DIAMOND synchrotron and ISIS respectively).

A key component of the infrastructure will be a harmonised Integrated Information Model to include all stages of the Data Life Cycle. A “before and after” cost-benefit analysis will be performed using the Keeping Research Data Safe (KRDS2) model, which will be extended to address specific requirements in I2S2. We are looking forward to working with UKOLN (University of Bath and DCC), The Universities of Southampton and Cambridge, and the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) in the project.

The completed response from the eCrystals repository at the University of Southampton to the KRDS2 Survey has been added to the project webpage.

So far around 12 organisations from the UK and internationally have responded to the Survey. The eCystals response has been added to the project webpage as an exemplar for those still considering a response and for anyone interested in the information the Survey will contain.

Further information on the KRDS2 Survey are contained in an earlier blog posting on the Survey and on the project webpage.  KRDS2 invite you to contribute to the Survey if you have research datasets and associated cost information that you feel may be of interest to the study.

We anticipate that no organisation will have complete information on costs but most will have cost information in some areas. The aim of the survey is to compile an overview of what preservation cost information is collected.

The Survey proforma is available to download as an Acrobat form (requires Adobe Reader 8+ installed) or a Word form (requires Microsoft Word installed). The Survey proforma is available as a single main questionnaire or alternatively if you have multiple cost datasets you can complete a separate organisational cover sheet and multiple collection details as required. It should take less than 30 minutes to complete and KRDS2 is seeking responses (to info@beagrie.com) by the end of October 2009.

The implications of the emerging information society, what it means for digital preservation, and its impact on individuals have always been personal interests. These interests featured in the article “Plenty of Room at the Bottom? Personal Digital Libraries and Collections” a few years ago. One aspect that article touched on was the issues of “digital estates” and how they would be dealt with in future. At the time I speculated:

“It does not seem too far-fetched to suggest that in time we may see the emergence of “digital executors” with access to secure digital safe-deposit boxes storing passwords and access rights.”

So yesterday’s article in the Guardian newspaper  on Preparing for the digital after life struck a chord. The article addresses how should we deal with web users’ Facebook, PayPal and other accounts when they log off for good? Amongst other things it mentions a number of emerging services:

“After setting up an account with Legacy Locker, users can upload login details for digital assets and specify who will receive them posthumously. AssetLock offers a similar “electronic safe deposit box”, while Slightly Morbid allows members to send an email from beyond, giving them the ultimate final word. Deathswitch is an automated system that prompts users for their password on a regular basis. If it has not been received after several prompts, the system deduces the user is “dead or critically disabled” and messages are sent to pre-selected recipients.”

Fascinating stuff but I can think of several  people with overfull mailboxes who had better not apply for the Deathswitch service…

The Keeping Research Data Safe2 project (KRDS2) commenced on 31 March 2009 and will complete in December 2009. The project is identifying long-lived datasets for the purpose of cost analysis (including social sciences and humanities research) and is building on the work of the first “Keeping Research Data Safe” study completed in 2008.

We are currently undertaking detailed analysis of available cost information from 3 of our project partners and aim to develop guidance for how cost metrics can be captured and applied in future from this.

In addition we have now added a survey proforma to the project website to help us identify other research data collections with information on preservation costs and issues. We invite you to contribute to the data survey if you have research datasets and associated cost information that you feel may be of interest to the study.

We anticipate that no organisation will have complete information on costs but most will have cost information in some areas. The aim of the survey is to compile an overview of what preservation cost information is collected.

The Survey proforma is available to download as an Acrobat form (requires Adobe Reader 8+ installed) or a Word form (requires Microsoft Word installed). It should take less than 30 minutes to complete and we are seeking responses (to info@beagrie.com) by the end of October 2009.  The Survey proforma is available as a single main questionnaire or alternatively if you have multiple cost datasets you can complete a separate organisational cover sheet and multiple collection details as required. Please do not hesitate to contact us at info@beagrie.com if you have any difficulty or questions.

The latest Volume of Ariadne (issue 60 July 2009) publishes an article based on recent work by Charles Beagrie Limited and Serco Consulting for the UK Research Data Service (UKRDS) Feasibility Study. It should be of interest to an international as well as UK audience as may of the issues addressed apply to research and research data  issues in any national context.

Research Data Preservation and Access: The Views of Researchers present findings from a UKRDS survey of researchers’ views on and practices for preservation and dissemination of research data in four UK universities (Bristol, Leeds, Leicester, and Oxford) and place them in the wider UK and international context.

A preliminary report from the Survey was included in the UKRDS Interim Report . Elements of the Survey and its findings were also incorporated in the Final Report of the UKRDS Feasibility Study submitted to HEFCE . However space constraints precluded presentation of all the data and findings in full in these reports and they were mainly included in a separate unpublished appendix. This article therefore aims to publish more of this material and set it in its context  with updates from more recent published studies.

The “Keeping Research Data Safe 2” project aims to extend previous work on digital preservation costs for research data. It is identifying long-lived datasets for the purpose of cost analysis and building on the work of the first “Keeping Research Data Safe” study completed in 2008.

We are  making an open invitation via email lists and the project blog and  webpage for others to contact us and contribute to the data survey if they had research datasets and associated cost information that they believe may be of interest to the study. Please get in touch if you are interested in participating or would like further information. Expressions of Interest can be sent to info@beagrie.com.

We are preparing a survey proforma to identify key research data collections with information on preservation costs and issues which will be available shortly. Further information on the Keeping Research Data Safe2 Project can be found on the project website.

An update and review of the activity model published in the original Keeping Research Data Safe report has just been published on the KRDS2 project website.

All of our project partners undertook a detailed review of the activity model. The overall finding from this review was that the KRDS1 Activity Model was robust and broadly a good fit to their activities. Some changes were suggested for use in KRDS2, mainly to the wordings of definitions and edits to the existing text. In addition, three substantive changes or additions to activities were also identified by two or more reviewers and agreed as changes to the  model :

• The need to divide the “outreach and depositor support” sub-activity under Acquisition in the Archive phase.
• The need to divide the development of the archive’s Selection Policy and its application within the selection sub-activity of Acquisition.
• The need to cover staff training and development as a specific activity.

All proposed edits and revisions of the Activity Model can be downloaded here. The project team would welcome comment and feedback which can be sent to info@beagrie.com .