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I have been tracking national research initiatives in Australia, Canada, UK and USA in various blogs over previous months. Another potentially very important national initiative can now be added to the list from Germany.

An alliance of scientific organisations in Germany which includes all the majors players such as Deutsche Forschungsgemeinshaft (DFG, the German Research Foundation), Fraunhofer Society, Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres, and the Max Planck Society, have signed a joint national e-infrastructure policy initiative with six priority areas focusing on:

• National licencing of e-journals;
• Open Access;
• National hosting strategy for preservation of e-journals;
• Preservation and re-use of primary research data;
• Virtual research environments; and
• Legal frameworks (focusing on copyright law and equalising VAT treatment on print and electronic publications).

The Alliance agreed to coordinate the activities of the individual partner organisations and to expand on the ideal of the innovative information environment by means of a Joint Priority Initiative from 2008 to 2012 with the following goals:

• to guarantee the broadest possible access to digital publications, digital data and other source materials;
• to utilise digital media to create the ideal conditions for the distribution and reception of publications related to German research;
• to ensure the long-term availability of the digital media and contents that have been acquired from round the world and their integration in the digital research environment;
• to support collaborative research by means of innovative information technologies.

Further information on the initiative is now available to download as a PDF in English or you can brush up your language skills (as I did or at least tried to) and read it in the original German 🙂

I am pleased to announce we have added an Associates and Partners web page to the Charles Beagrie website. We work with a range of associates and partners to form project teams for specific assignments and fulfil the needs of individual clients.

The company is fortunate to work with leading figures in the field of digital preservation, Higher Education and Scholarly Communication and the web page profiles some of our main associates and business partners. It is intended to give potential clients examples of the breadth and depth of experience and skills that the company can draw on through its directors and network of associates and partners.

I have previously blogged on UKRDS, the major consultancy work the company has been undertaking with ther lead partner SERCO Consulting over the last six months on a UK Research Data Service feasibility study for the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE).

The interim report of the study has just been released. The report analyses the current situation in the UK with a detailed review of relevant literature and funders policies, and data drawn from four major case study universities (Bristol, Leeds, Leicester, and Oxford). It describes the emerging trends of local data repositories and national facilities in the UK and also looks internationally at Australia, the US and the EU. Finally it presents possible ways forward for UKRDS. Preliminary findings from a UKRDS survey of over 700 UK researchers are presented in an Appendix. The study has now moved into its second phase building on the interim report and developing the business case.

Luis Martinez-Uribe, Digital Repositories Research Co-ordinator at Oxford University has written on the interim report in his blog “I highly recommend everyone with an interest in research data management to have a look at this report as not only it captures the current state of affairs in the UK and elsewhere but also offers possible ways forward.”

Readers of the blog may be interested in work underway in Canada via Research Data Canada which is running in parallel to work on UKRDS here in the UK, Datanets in the USA, and ANDS in Australia.

Research Data Canada has established The Research Data Strategy Working Group – a collaborative effort by a multi-disciplinary group of universities, institutes, libraries, granting agencies, and individual researchers to address the challenges and issues surrounding the access and preservation of data arising from Canadian research.

The group is currently working on a draft report “Stewardship of Research Data in Canada: Gap Analysis” which provides a statement of the ideal state of research data stewardship in Canada and a description of the current state, as determined by examining a number of indicators. The purpose is to provide evidence of gaps between current and ideal state in order to begin filling in the gaps. The indicators of the state of the stewardship of research data in Canada are as follows: policies; funding; roles and responsibilities; [trusted digital] data repositories; standards; skills and training; reward and recognition systems; research and development; accessibility; and preservation. The final version will be available in September.

Information on the working group and other Research Data Canada activities is available from its website.

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The blog has been very quiet over August and the holidays. This is just a brief first entry (more to come next month) to flag up major consultancy work the company has been undertaking with SERCO Consulting over the last six months on a UK Research Data Service feasibility study for the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE).

The study has been initiated and led by the consortium of Research Libraries in the UK and Ireland (RLUK) and the Russell Group [of UK Universities] IT Directors (RUGIT) and aims to assess the feasibility and costs of developing and maintaining a national shared digital research data service for UK Higher Education sector. There is more background information on the UKRDS website.

A major part of the study has involved a feasibility and requirements stage working with the universities of Bristol, Leeds, Leicester and Oxford to survey over 700 academics in disciplines across the universities on their research data use and requirements. You will find further information on the Oxford results on the Oxford Scoping Digital Repository Services for Research Data Management Project website. Further information on the overall survey and findings will be available soon and a link and commentary will be posted on the blog.

There have been some good articles on digital preservation appearing recently in India’s English language newspapers, which reflect growing awareness amongst its IT industry and commentators on the challenges posed.

In this vein, it is interesting to note that India’s Ministry Of Communication and Information Technology has set up a committee on National Digital Preservation Programme (NDPP). The committee is expected to submit its report in the next three months and final recommendations would come out after six months following an international workshop on Digitization and Digital Preservation (NCDDP 2008) scheduled to be organised during December 2008.

The NDPP work is mentioned in the Economic Times and the article also refers to the US NDIPP programme, the UK’s Digital Preservation Coalition, and Digital Preservation Europe.

The latest issue of Wired is devoted entirely to massive data and data mining applications: everything from astronomy, environmental and medical applications, through to legal discovery, tracking airfare prices, and pollsters identifying voter intentions.

Its a fascinating range of 13 articles that should have something to interest most readers of this blog – all available from the online issue linked above.

Seamus Ross, professor of humanities informatics and digital curation at the University of Glasgow, has been appointed the new dean of the Faculty of Information Studies at Toronto University for a seven-year term effective 1st January 2009. There is further information on the appointment in the June issue of the University of Toronto Bulletin.

I am pleased to announce that the JISC-funded report A Comparative Study of e-Journal Archiving Solutions has just been published and is now available to download as a pdf from the JISC Collections website. It has been a great pleasure to work with Julia Chruszcz, Maggie Jones and Terry Morrow on this study over the last few months.

The report is the result of a call by the JISC, issued in January 2008, for a Comparative Study of e-Journal Archiving Solutions. The Invitation to Tender asked for a report that ‘will be published for wide use by institutions to inform policies and investment in e-journal archiving solutions.’ The ITT also stated that the report should ‘also inform negotiations undertaken by JISC Collections and NESLi2 when seeking publishers compliance to deposit content with at least one e-journal archiving solution.’

The report contains chapters covering: Approaches to e-journal preservation, Publisher licensing and legal deposit, Comparisons of Six Current e-Journal Archiving Programmes (LOCKSS, CLOCKSS, Portico, the KB e-depot, OCLC’s Electronic Collections Online, and the British Library’s e-journal Digital Archive), Practical experience of e-journal archiving solutions, Evaluation of four common scenarios/trigger events, and Criteria for judging relevance and value of new archiving initiatives. There are two appendices on Publisher Participation in different programmes.

The report has the following recommendations:

1. When negotiating NESLi2 agreements, JISCs negotiators should take the initiative by specifying archiving requirements, including a short-list of approved archiving solutions.
2. To help quantify the insurance risk and the necessary appropriate investment, bodies representing publishers and other trade organisations should gather and share statistical information on the likelihood of the trigger events outlined in this report.
3. Post cancellation access conditions should be defined in the licensing agreement between libraries and publishers. Publishers should be strongly encouraged to cooperate with one or more external e-journal archiving solutions as well as provide their own post-cancellation service (at minimal cost).
4. The publisher (or subscription agent) should state their policy on perpetual access under the four scenarios described in section 9.
5. When titles are sold on to other publishers, the Transfer Code of Practice (see section 9.3.) should be followed.
6. Archiving service providers and publishers should work together to develop standard cross-industry definitions of trigger events and protocols on the conditions for release of archived content. Project Transfer is a potential exemplar. The ground rules for any post-trigger event negotiation should be clear and transparent and established in advance.
7. Archive service providers must provide greater clarity on coverage details, including not only publishers and titles, but also the years and issues included in the archive.
8. Using the scenarios outlined in this report, libraries should carry out a risk assessment on the impact of loss of access to e-journals by their institution, and a cost/benefit analysis, in order to judge the value and relevance of the archiving solutions on offer.
9. Relevant UK bodies and institutions should use whatever influence they can bring to bear to ensure that archiving solutions cover publishers and titles of particular value to UK libraries.
10. The findings of this study should be reviewed and updated at regular intervals to reflect continuing developments in the field of e-journal archiving and preservation.

Its publication comes hot on the heels of two related studies the Portico/Ithaka e-journal archiving survey of US Library Directors and the JISC-funded UK LOCKSS Pilot Programme Evaluation Report. A further blog entry will follow!

An interesting development over the weekend with Microsoft announcing in a blog post that it is to shut down its book digitisation and live search book programme launched in 2005. The Live Search blog states:

“Today we informed our partners that we are ending the Live Search Books and Live Search Academic projects and that both sites will be taken down next week. Books and scholarly publications will continue to be integrated into our Search results, but not through separate indexes. This also means that we are winding down our digitization initiatives, including our library scanning and our in-copyright book programs. We recognize that this decision comes as disappointing news to our partners, the publishing and academic communities, and Live Search users. ”

It will be interesting to see the response and implications for Microsoft’s major library partners such as the British Library. The BL and Microsoft partnership was launched in November 2005 and aimed to digitise 100,000 books from the collection – the digitisation programme is still underway. Note Microsoft also “….intend to provide publishers with digital copies of their scanned books. We are also removing our contractual restrictions placed on the digitized library content and making the scanning equipment available to our digitization partners and libraries to continue digitization programs.”