Moving OA to the scientific enterprise

Moving OA to the scientific enterprise Michael Day, Digital Curation Centre UKOLN, University of Bath [email_address] Policy and Technology for e-Science, Institut d’Estudis Catalans, Barcelona, Spain, 16-17 July 2008

Presentation outline:
The Digital Curation Centre (DCC)
Some ongoing problems
Some new challenges raised by Open Science

The UK research context (1)
Dual-support funding system
Splits funding of research from infrastructure
Research Councils (around EUR 4 billion pa)
Higher education funding bodies
Direct institutional support
Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC)
Data curation on the agenda of several of these
Research Councils UK
Higher Education Funding Council for England
National research data service study
JISC

The UK research context (2)
JISC has been very active in funding work on long-term digital preservation and curation:
Research projects
Over ten years
A major recent focus has been on institutional repositories)
Supporting studies
Dealing with Data (2007)
Keeping Research Data Safe (2008)
Studies of 'significant properties' of certain classes of content (ongoing)

Launched in 2004
Initial grant funding from:
Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC)
UK e-Science Core Programme (Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council)
Main activities:
Development, services and outreach in digital curation
Research programme (2004-2008)
Consortium of four institutions
Now in second phase

Curation, not just preservation
Active management of data over life-cycle of scholarly and scientific interest
Reproducibility and reuse
Appreciation of differences between disciplines
Explored in separate DCC SCARP project
Big-science / small-science distinctions are becoming blurred
Importance of lifecycles
Conception, creation, use, re-use
Curation potentially involves a lifetime of endeavour

DCC Curation Lifecycle Model

DCC vision
Centre of excellence in digital curation and preservation in the UK
Authoritative source of advocacy and expert advice and guidance to the community
Key facilitator of an informed research community with established collaborative networks of digital curators
Service provider of a wide range of resources, software, tools and support services

Selected DCC activities and outputs
User services
Curation Lifecycle Model
Curation manual and briefing papers
Tools for repository self-assessment (DRAMBORA)
Community Development
Website, journal (IJDC)
Events (regular workshops/training, annual international conference)
Liaison with JISC's repositories activities
Tools and infrastructure
Representation Information registries

Problem 1: who 'owns' curation?
Many potential stakeholders
Dealing with Data report (2007) identified: scientists, institutions, data centres, the users of data, funding bodies and publishers
Also ... data scientists, curation specialists
Different repository types (project-specific, community-driven, reference collections)
The potential for duplication of effort and confusion is high
All of these probably have some kind of role ... so how do we co-ordinate?

Problem 2: institutions v disciplines
A major focus in UK is on the institutional role in curation:
Building on the Institutional Repository paradigm
It is not clear, however, that the curation of data is best performed at this level
Keeping Research Data Safe (2008) report notes that data is more often dealt with by discipline-based consortia
Bottom-up approaches to curation work well in some domains – but not in all
Need to understand domain differences
Initial SCARP studies reveal much complexity

Problem 3: how much will it cost?
Keeping Research Data Safe (2008):
Report (with case studies) focused on identifying costs at the institutional level
Some findings:
The complex service requirements for curating research data means that institutions are setting-up federated approaches to repository development
Currently ingest costs are much higher than long-term storage and preservation costs
Start-up (and R&D) costs are high for first adopters

What is needed for open science?
Some challenges:
1. Being open is not enough
Data need to be made available in ways that facilitate high-throughput reuse
e.g., Peter Murray-Rust's comments on the amount of chemistry data captured in formats like PDF
2. How do we capture the context(s) of research?
Not just papers and data, but Web-sites, annotation services, blogs, wikis, etc.
Importance of recording provenance

3. Current scientific reward structures do not support either data curation or open science
Funding bodies can 'mandate' (and in some cases fund) Principal Investigators to maintain data and make it available
Without a sustainable infrastructure, however, this will be only a short term solution
We need to decide what infrastructure we need and how we pay for it

4. What will be the role of institutions?
They have traditionally had an important role (e.g., research libraries)
Currently are major supporters (and hosts) of Institutional Repositories
Potential skills gap WRT data:
We need to think about the status and skills of data curators (capacity building)
DCC Curation 101, DigCCurr project
What does the 'institution' mean in Open Science anyway?
Open Notebook Science, open grant proposals, loyalty to collaborators or to institution

Summing up
There are still many more questions than answers
There is a (widely acknowledged) need for better co-ordination:
The curation landscape is currently very fragmented, with no real clarity with regard to identifying (and owning) roles and responsibilities
Much is specific to particular domains
There is a need for infrastructure
But what should this include?
Are we really able to identify generic needs?

Acknowledgements The Digital Curation Centre is funded by the JISC and the UK Research Councils' e-Science Core Programme. http://www.dcc.ac.uk/ UKOLN is funded by the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council, the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) of the UK higher and further education funding councils, as well as by project funding from the JISC, the European Union, and other sources. UKOLN also receives support from the University of Bath, where it is based. http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/

Moving OA to the scientific enterprise

by Michael Day on Jul 28, 2008

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Moving OA to the scientific enterprise — Presentation Transcript