The University Library has a leading role in establishing standards, procedures and services to help researchers preserve their original data. We were therefore delighted to meet Robin Rice, who visited this month.

In a meeting with our Discipline Librarians in February, Robin shared some of her expertise in data sharing, data libraries and roles for librarians in providing data management services for researchers.

As the Data Librarian at the University of Edinburgh, Robin is the service manager for that university’s Data Library, a collection of information produced by Edinburgh scholars in the course of their research activities. Robin is also project manager of DISC-UK DataShare, a JISC-funded project to establish institutional data repositories at three UK universities.

Conducting university research often involves creating new data, processing it, analysing it and perhaps transforming it through visualisation or other methods. Modern technologies allow us to create enormous quantities of data and analysis . Once the research is completed and an article or other ‘finished’ output has been published, the original data needs to be preserved and possibly made available to other researchers in the future. Some data can be destroyed after just a few years; other information will be preserved indefinitely, just like other historical documents.

Whilst in Melbourne, Robin Rice spent most of her time at Monash University. Her presentation to the Victorian eResearch Strategic Initiative (VeRSI) group is available as an MP3 (streaming or download) and presentation slides (PDF 1 Mb).

1. E-publishing Your Thesis and Research Papers
2. Copyright, Your Thesis and Future Publications
3. Research Data Management – humanities
4. Research Data Management  – sciences
5. Tools for Collaboration and Networking – wikis, blogs and social bookmarking
6. Using the Web for Surveys
7. Legal Framework for Your Thesis

The e-research workshops are designed for new research students, and for those considering a research higher degree (master’s or PhD). Participants will gain familiarity with skills, methodologies, tools and issues to enable them to participate effectively in the e-research environment.

New technologies are transforming the research environment in every academic discipline. E-research is any research activity that uses information and communication technology (ICT) and embraces new research methodologies.

The e-research training program for graduate researchers is a joint venture of the School of Graduate Studies and the University Library.

Library consultant Jennifer Warburton also provides specialist support for graduate research students throughout the year.

The site explains why Open Access publishing is beneficial to academic researchers, teachers and students, and how to find appropriate avenues for publishing your academic work.

The project was developed by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) and is supported by the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL). These are all USA-based organisations.

From Eigenfactor’s home page you can also search for a specific journal and find two numbers that describe the journal:

• Article Influence (AI): a measure of a journal’s prestige based on per article citations and comparable to Impact Factor.
• Eigenfactor (EF): a measure of the overall value provided by all of the articles published in a given journal in a year.

Eigenfactor is a research project sponsored by the Bergstrom lab in the Department of Biology at the University of Washington.

The Information Aesthetics blog describes Citespace as “a powerful network data visualization technique that facilitates the detection of emerging trends & transient patterns in scientific literature. CiteSpace is based on 2 concepts: ‘research fronts’, defined as an emergent grouping of concepts & underlying research issues & ‘intellectual base’, the network of citations & co-citations of a research front in scientific literature. the size of a node is proportional to the normalized citation counts in the latest time interval.”

Created by Chaomei Chen at Drexel University, Citespace is Java-based and rather less user-friendly than Eigenfactor (by which I mean you have to download the software and feed it some data in order to produce a pretty picture), though it seems to have potential as a visual analysis tool.

Videos are now available on the Information Futures web site — follow the links below. Each presentation is 20-30 minutes long.

Blackboard’s Regional Manager, Tony Macguire, talked about the changing expectations and behaviors of our students, particularly younger people who are part of the Net Generation. Blackboard is a major component of our online learning management system, LMS+ (pronounced “Ell Em Ess Plus”).

Simon Phipps is the Chief Open Source Officer for Sun Microsystems, and we were lucky that he happened to be visiting Australia at the right moment. As Sun is a major supplier of computer hardware, you might expect Simon to talk mainly about data storage and servers. No, indeedy — Simon talked about changes in society, in politics, in business practices, in how people interact with each other in everyday life. (For background about these ideas, try reading The Cluetrain Manifesto and Small Pieces Loosely Joined.)

Richard Siegersma, Executive Chair of DA Books, spoke enthusiastically about the exciting possibilities of new technologies for accessing books, both in print and digitally. Imagine being able to download your entire reading list onto an ebook reader at the start of semester, including textbooks, articles and extracts. And if you want a printed copy of a book or reading pack, simply place an order at the campus bookshop and pick up your nicely-bound printed-on-demand book less than an hour later. These technologies aren’t quite fully developed yet — but they’re just around the corner…

Michelle Selinger is the Director of Education in Cisco’s Asia-Pacific division. Again, you might be surprised by the content of Michelle’s presentation. Cisco is known as an IT network specialist — cables, routers and so on — but they also take an interest in what their university clients are doing. Michelle explored questions about who owns knowledge, how it is shared and acquired, the nature of authority, learning through games and rich media environments, and the meaning of “academic rigor” in this new world.

Blackwell Ltd is a global supplier of books and other library materials. Area Sales Manager Carolyne Cohn’s presentation started with some observations about the challenges facing academic libraries: currency exchange rates, declining funding, competition for space on campus, different copyright laws in different countries, the changing expectations and preferences of academics and students — I’m sure this struck a chord with many of our own library staff! Publishers of monographs and other scholarly works are responding to these challenges in different ways, and Carolyne gave several examples of new ways to provide access to scholarly information.

Crispin Blackall, Telstra’s Director of Future Technology Solutions, gave an overview of the IT industry’s growth to date. Mobile computing — via your phone, ebook reader or other portable device — is predicted to be the major change in digital communications in the next few years. The future is fast, portable and flexible. (Oh, and don’t get too attached to that keyboard — in the next 10 years you will probably learn several other ways to interact with digital devices and information environments.)

Huge thanks to Kylie Nickels, Reuchlin Teo and James Beckford Saunders for organising the Vendors’ Day.

Instead of selling their elegant innovation to a pharmaceutical company, they have published their method in an Open Access refereed journal called “Public Library of Science: Neglected Tropical Diseases.” Articles in this journal have a Creative Commons licence that allows free downloading, adaptation and sharing of their content provided the authors receive attribution.

Here is the paper:

• Njiru ZK, Mikosza ASJ, Armstrong T, Enyaru JC, Ndung’u JM, et al. (2008) Loop-Mediated Isothermal Amplification (LAMP) Method for Rapid Detection of Trypanosoma brucei rhodesiense. PLoS Negl. Trop. Dis. 2(2): e147.

See also:

• Simarro PP, Jannin J, Cattand P (2008) Eliminating Human African Trypanosomiasis: Where Do We Stand and What Comes Next. PLoS Med 5(2): e55 doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.0050055

In the Murdoch case, the ‘public good’ factor is a clear winner in the debate over whether to provide open access to a university’s research output: people in poor and developing countries need low-cost medical and health care, particularly for endemic diseases that don’t occur as widely in developed countries (trypanosomiasis is one; malaria is another). Publishing this particular research in a free, Open Access journal helps to remove economic barriers from potential users of the new technique (assuming that the researchers have not patented the technique itself).

Is the public good a sufficient reason for a university to release all of its innovations for general usage?

Should we seek to earn income from the inventions of our staff?

What about the inventions of students? (Sun Microsystems and the Google search engine both started as graduate student projects.)

In an era when universities are using multiple income streams to offset declining government/public funding, how do we decide when to commercialise and when to donate our intellectual products?

Note: This post was originally published on 6 March, then revised on 11 March. Thanks to Stephen Young for his off-line comments about the original version. As I understand it, Stephen was keen to draw a distinction between the copyright on the research paper and the ownership of intellectual property in the laboratory technique described in that paper. The copyright is covered by the Creative Commons licence; regardless of copyright in the paper, it may still be possible to patent the intellectual property.

EPIC was first released in 2005. It was made for the (fictional) Museum of Media History. It’s a timeline for the next decade, imagining what might happen to news media as the Internet became more ubiquitous. It questions the traditional notions of ‘authoritative information’ and the role of the Fourth Estate in civil society. This original video is now renamed EPIC 2014. The acronym stands for Evolving Personalized Information Construct.

Creators Matt Thompson and Robin Sloan blogged about EPIC at Poynter Online in July 2005.

The movie was released about 10 minutes[1] before podcasting burst[2] onto the interwebs. For bleeding-edge geeks, EPIC immediately lost some of its street cred.

Now a revised version of the movie is available, EPIC 2015, incorporating some of the podcasting, social networking, grid computing and other innovations that have emerged or matured in the last three years. Where Michael Wesch’s videos are optimistic about the future, EPIC strikes a more sombre tone.

Definitely worth a look, especially if you’re interested in scenario planning.

Notes:

[1] 10 Internet minutes, that is ;-) In the real world, it was about 3-6 months.

[2] When I say burst, I’m choosing the word carefully. You could almost hear the whooshing. On 28 September 2004 there were 526 Google results for “podcasts”, up from about 24 results just days earlier. On 1 October 2004 there were 2750 Google results for “podcasts”. By18 October 2004 there were more than 100,000 Google results for “podcasts”. From May 2005 to April 2006, the number of podcast feeds managed via Feedburner increased from 6000 to 45,000 — more than the number of radio stations worldwide. Feedburner said there were more than 1.6 million subscribers to its podcast feeds. In mid-2007, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation alone was serving up 5 million audio and video downloads per month.

When you participate in such online communities, you give up some of your right to privacy and some aspects of control over the intellectual property you create in that environment. In return, the service provider makes money by selling advertising or other spin-off goods and services that are targeted to fit (their idea of) your particular interests and desires. Somebody’s making money from this deal, and it probably is not you.

So why do we cheerfully hand over our private information? Fister observes:

“Here’s the interesting paradox: The only way to increase the intellectual property value of your identity is to give it away. That’s the only way it can be shared, linked to and recognized by others. Trading a little personal information for a public platform, whether for personal expression or self-promotion (or both), seems a fair exchange.”

Fister draws a parallel with the Open Access movement, which seeks to make academic publications (journal articles, books etc) freely available online.

The “privately owned digital public sphere is a fertile if febrile commons where millions of people play out their identities and share ideas… Scholars and librarians champion the value of free and open exchange of ideas for the public good. It’s time to take those values beyond the academy. If we made an effort to help the public understand the tradeoffs we make to be part of the digital social sphere, maybe we’d all think more critically about how our public identities are formed and exploited – for what they are worth.”

1. Size: Number of pages recovered from four search engines: Google, Yahoo, Live Search and Exalead.
2. Visibility: Total number of unique inbound links external links, based on results from Yahoo Search, Live Search and Exalead.
3. Rich files: Number of PDF, Postscript, Word and Powerpoint documents published, based on results from the four search engines.
4. Scholar: Number of papers and citations in Google Scholar.

Based on this ranking, Melbourne University is 6th in Australia and 128th in the world for the online profile of its research output.

Restricting the comparison to institutional repositories, our ePrints repository ranks 157th in the world. (what is an institutional repository?)

Webometrics is an initiative of the Cybermetrics Lab, a research group belonging to the Centro Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC), the largest public research body in Spain.

From the About Webometrics page:

The Web covers not only only formal (e-journals, repositories) but also informal scholarly communication. Web publication is cheaper, maintaining the high standards of quality of peer review processes. It could also reach much larger potential audiences, offering access to scientific knowledge to researchers and institutions located in developing countries and also to third parties (economic, industrial, political or cultural stakeholders) in their own community…

We intend to motivate both institutions and scholars to have a web presence that reflect accurately their activities. If the web performance of an institution is below the expected position according to their academic excellence, university authorities should reconsider their web policy, promoting substantial increases of the volume and quality of their electronic publications.

Given our relatively low ranking, does Melbourne need to change its approach to making research output available online? How committed are we to making the outcomes of our research freely available?

What level of rigor, if any, do we wish to exert in verifying the quality of what is published on University servers?

What is our commitment to making the underlying research data accessible to support our research? Our teaching? Our knowledge transfer obligations? If the research data is of national or international significance, who will ensure its long-term preservation and access? How will this be funded?

I’d love to hear your thoughts on these curly questions — just click the ‘comments’ link below and start typing!
(tip o’ the hat to Library Intelligencer for the Webometrics link, and to the Information Futures Commission project team for the list of questions)