JISC: Supporting The Future of Research

Editor's Notes

• #4: Janet – UK based –internationally connected for research worldwide(Notes – Not just about UK provision but be connected worldwide – for example Internationally, JANET is playing a part in the research taking place in Cern, Switzerland with the Large Hadron Collider. When work resumes on the ‘big bang’ project, JANET will help to transmit worldwide the five gigabytes per second of data that will be pumped out of the site. During a test, the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory near Oxford used the network to send 60 million megabytes of data to CERN over a ten-day period – using the best domestic broadband available, this would have taken 30 years.)(Notes –JANET Lightpath - launched in November 2007 to meet the growing needs of the UK research communities. The service enables the UK’s research communities to transmit large volumes of often delay-sensitive data across the network without it being disrupted by everyday network traffic.)Federated Access Management(By 2009, over 90% of higher education institutions and more than half of further education providers had signed up to federated access management, providing access to approximately 8 million users across the UK, which makes the UK the first country in the world to establish such a comprehensive and sophisticated system).
• #5: SARAH – YOU MIGHT WANT FIND A WAY TO SAY SOMETHING ABOUT THESE KEY PRINCIPLES, BUT CURRENT CLIMATE MAY MAKE THAT HARD? _ EG JISC CAN HELP US COLLABORATE WHERE IT MAKES SENSE< WHERE IT DRIVES INNOVATION< PROVIDE THAT BASIS …BUT YOU MIGHT WANT TO ALSO SAY SOMETHING ELSE ABOUT SUPPORTING LOCAL NEEDS, DIFFERENT REQUIREMENTS – PERHAPS WE CAN PROVIDE THE PLATFORM ???Pushing the boundaries Janet Aurora Infrastructure(Notes - JANET Aurora, a high quality fibre network that provides a platform for photonics and optical systems research. With approximately 350km of dedicated fibre, this is amongst the largest test-beds for optical networking research in Europe and enables a wide range of projects that hitherto have been impossible on existing research network infrastructures.) JISC is building a Cloud (Notes – there are many question to consider though, what do you want? How can we engage with researchers? Are there common requirements? How do we convince your research staff to use Cloud and Central Shared Services) 
• #8: National negotiation to journalsWorking through JISC Collections to provide best value access to content. in a time of reductions in funding how can we maintain access to research ? Currently academic publishers are indicating deals where there will be increases of up to 6 per cent? How can we sustain this when budgets are to be reduced? This is not a viable proposition when HE faces these cuts? Access to journals is essential to flourishing research and learning…what is our response? Either access to research will be squeezed or budgets squeezed further - Can we act together as a sector to maintain access ? You can say that at the same time we are supporting Open Access – and moves towards this but we have the current issue of access to existing journals.
• #9: (Notes - Analytical and visualisation tools will allow users to explore and understand the environment and ecology - central to our understanding of climate change impacts)(Notes – For £1 funding to the JISC Collections, we provide services with a commercial value of over £34 through the negotiation and licensing of datasets (e.g. Digimap, Britannica Online), heritage collections (licensed in perpetuity and made freely available to the academic community, e.g. 20th Century House of Commons Parliamentary Papers) and electronic journals (NESLi2 negotiations).
• #10: NOTE SARAH : THIS IS NOT JUST RESEARCH WITH THE CERIF / RESEARCH INFO MGT WE’RE TALKING THE ADMIN PROCESS TO SUPPORT RESEARCHThe National Centre for Text Mining - first publicly funded text mining centre in the world. (notes - the burgeoning of published text means that nuggets of insight or new knowledge are at risk of languishing undiscovered in the literature. Text mining offers a solution to this problem by replacing or supplementing the human reader with automatic systems).Text mining tools(Notes - Drug discovery is a long process, which often begins with a literature search for new associations between genes, proteins, symptoms and diseases. Without text mining tools to narrow down searches, hundreds or even thousands of documents could be returned, many of them irrelevant, rather than a handful of highly relevant papers)myExperiment social networking site for scientists (Notes - that allows them to share workflows, data and research outputs with their colleagues within the department and across the world)Open Access(Notes - for the major categories of research expenditure in the UK in 2006 a 5% increase in accessibility and efficiency provided by Open Access is conservatively estimated to be worth £172 million per annum to public sector research and development)Research Information Management:In a time of constrained resources, the informed, strategic management of research is essential. Such management requires reliable information, for benchmarking, planning and external reporting. Many institutions are investing in IT infrastructure and business processes to address this requirement. However, without the appropriate use of open technical standards, information will not be available to the right people at the right time. A case can be made that the appropriate use of the CERIF standard could significantly benefit the sector.using CERIF to support the interoperability of systems and processes within one or more institutions (for example repositories, HR systems, research management systems) to enable better internal management informationusing CERIF as a basis for data warehousing within one or more institutionsusing CERIF as a structure for research information gathered from outside the bidding institution but relevant to it, for example from funder databases, sources of bibliographic information or services offering authoritative information about the names of people, organisations, etc.using CERIF as a wrapper for research information about one or more institutions, enabling it more easily to be shared, for example in preparation for the REF# this is about supporting the Research Administration process - Reduce the burden on uni admin, good data management, working with HESA, RCs etc – CONFERENCE THEME COLLABORATION (ADMIN WISE) …TO ACHIEVE EFFICIENCY .Recent report showed that adopting CERIF could save money – Research information – administrative information about researchers, projects, outputs and funding that arises from the research process– is currently fragmented and is also often stored in incompatible formats.It can be spread across different systems, in university departments such as finance and human resources, in institutional repositories or with external bodies such as research funders or the Higher Education Statistics Agency.The report: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/reports/2010/businesscasefinalreport.aspxBy Stuart Bolton and published in July this year. Showed: The new JISC report found that using a common data model as a basis for exchanging this kind of information will, along with other benefits, significantly reduce the costs associated with information interchange - between 25% and 30% following the adoption of the Common European Research Information Format (CERIF) as the basis for exchanging research information across the sector.The issue is becoming a priority for universities as they need to have their systems talk to each other internally, collaborate more effectively and submit more and different information to funders. Institutions spend around £85 million each year submitting and monitoring grant applications to research councils and the RAE 2008 Accountability Review reported a sector cost of £47,335,706 or £1,127 per researcher submitted.  So this is about efficiency and effectiveness. Although it is clear that this can help with REF returns the exact position on the REF is currently unclear( awaiting govt and hefce to decide, also funding throws up issues) – BUT don’t say that _ HEFCE say they will go ahead with something similar to RAE 2008, but the definition of impact is being further determined via the HEFCE Impact pilots. These are due to complete shortly. http://www.hefce.ac.uk/research/ref/impact/*Open science report - open, collaboration, improved research http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/reports/2009/opensciencerpt.aspx* open science including open notebook science : making methodologies, data and results available on the Internet, through transparent working practices* citizen science including volunteer computing : where volunteers who may not have scientific training, perform or manage research-related tasks such as observation, measurement or computation* predictive science : data-driven science which enables the forecasting, anticipation or prediction of specific outcomes. Dicky has also added in My Experiment in the slides - which also supports the same messages in terms of sharing methodologies - Research Object : work objects built, transformed and published in the course of scientific experiments. Sharing methods are essential for more reusable, repeatable hence rapid and robust research.Expansion in scientific commodities : primary and secondary data sets, metadata to support interpretation and re-use and algorithms, software tools, scripts, procedures through community services: e.g. OpenWetWare and nanoHub.So message is that the Web and new technologies are supporting new research practice - more rapid sharing, quicker collaboration, more open sharing - some argue that open science/ research increases impact, effectiveness and innovation - there appear to be incentives that are making this happen, what do we record and measure? What infrastructure and policies do we need to enable this to flourish so the UK can take advantage ? Restrained resources …need to invest collectively ? Etc. IMPORTANT : we should not overstate the Open Science stuff , it is happening and it is in the increase but it is NOT mainstream.