SPARC Repositories, Baltimore, November 8-9, 2010

On November 8 and 9 I attended the SPARC Repositories conference in downtown Baltimore. (For whatever they're worth, I've attached my notes below.)

The highlights of this conference for me all happened on the second day. First, it is always a great pleasure to hear Clifford Lynch, Executive Director of the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), speak. As always, a little voice inside admonishes me to "Sit up straight, Sonny, and listen to the Master." Truly. Lynch openly mused about global repositories and the problems associated with Big Data: How far away from Big Computation should they be? Big Bandwidth? Should these all be co-located? Big Questions were raised here.

The luncheon keynote, by Dr. George Strawn, Director of the National Coordination Office, Federal Networking and Information Technology Research and Development program, was another highlight, an enjoyable, entertaining, even folksy lunchtime
survey of the evolution of, well, the Internet, the Web, disruptive technologies, everything that's current. Direct quote, aimed at commercial publishers: "Hell hath no fury like a vested interest masquerading as a moral principle." !

I actually found the closing panel on sustainability, particularly the final panelist in this session from Hong Kong University, to be the most interesting. And what I found most interesting about it was tangential to the subject of the panel itself: David Palmer from HKU, in addition to noting how his repository is sustained (through a grant from Hong Kong's higher education directorate), showed off some of the things they've been able to do with it. They are using their repository as a "reputation management system" and have created a page/space for every single professor at their university. They've reaped data from their university's research management database; they've reaped data from departmental Websites about each professor; they've created a ResearcherID for every professor, then used it to reap bibliographic and bibliometric data from the indexing/abstracting services; in an effort at authority control, they've had each professor load a copy of the Publish or Perish software locally, then use it to identify his/her authoritative name in Google Scholar, and have likewise used Publish or Perish to cut and paste bibliometric data directly into each professor's space inside the repository. They have reaped so much data that the internal organizational flow has begun now to change, from a Departmental-Website-to-Repository flow, to a Repository-to-Departmental-Website flow. I say "Bravo!"

Mark Cyzyk

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Mark Cyzyk's Notes

SPARC Repositories
Baltimore
November 8-9, 2010


November 8

Opening Keynote
Michael Nielsen: Quantum Physicist

Open science
Linux industry
Survey of "open" projects. Open source projects. Wikipedia
Might this be used in the science community?
Polymath Project Mathematics in the open
Gower's blog. Fields medalist
rules of collaboration
Be polite; only one idea per comment
"restructured expert attention"
Not the future of scientific publishing, but fundamentally changes the way scientific knowledge is constructed.
Citizen science
Galaxy Zoo, e.g.
Failures: Scientific wikis; open peer review; scientific social networks
Little incentive to participate
No reputational reward for participation
What is successful? Open projects supporting conventional scientific goals and practices -- generating papers
Conservative ends
Genesis and evolution of scientific communication/publication
"Bermuda principles" for release of genome data
We all agree to release our data
But only for human genetic data
Need to apply this idea
Open data
Grant agencies can mandate sharing
But scientific communities must agree


Panel:
REPOSITORY-BASED PUBLISHING SERVICES: STRATEGIES FOR SUCCESS (OR FAILURE)
Moderated by Patricia Renfro, Columbia University
Wendy Robertson, Digital Resources Librarian, University of Iowa
Mark Newton, Digital Collections Librarian, Purdue University Libraries
Ventura Pérez, Assistant Professor of Bioarchaeology, UMass Amherst
Nathan MacBrien, Publications Director, Institute of International Studies, University of California, Berkeley

University of Iowa Libraries, believe libraries should be actively involved in ePublishing.
Digital Commons.
Not tied to specific technologies
Interaction with UIowa Press. Humanities monographs
Working paper series
Small society journals
Special digital projects. Iowa City Flood digital exhibit
Host back volumes for University Iowa Press
Conversion of Biographical Dictionary of Iowa into online version
MOU between Library and Press/Faculty/Editors
Graphic design/usability
Editors are not particularly technology savvy

Purdue University Libraries
Collabortation with Press
Press is a unit of the Libraries
Digital Commons repository
Press uses infrastructure too
10 repository journals. eJournals published directly to the repository
Repository as publishing platform
IMLS one year planning grant, with University of Utah, Georgia Tech
3 workshops to be held in May 2011. Survey

UMass Bioarchealogist Narco violence US Mexico border
"Landscapes of Violence" journal. Open access journal. Interdisciplinary
BEPress
Lack of access to peer-reviewed journal content counts as "structural violence"???
Yaqui massacre 1902. Repatriation of human remains, US to Yaqui
Local access to scholarly publications about them
Took two years to get his journal up and running
Difficult to assemble an Editorial Board
Don't want mere figureheads
Cultural changes in tenure process required if Open Access is to be successful

Institute for International Studies, Berkeley
Open access book publishing
GAIA
Collaboration with CDL and UC press
Publish 5-8 titles per year
One person staff
UCPubS publishing platform
Print on demand through Press. online retailing
Digital edition available through eScholarship repository
Humanities and social sciences, nervous about open-access, bottom-up publishing


[NOTE: A lot of institutions using BEPress/Digital Commons.]


OPEN DATA
Moderated by Kathleen Shearer, Canadian Association of Research Libraries
Kevin Ashley, Director, Digital Curation Centre
Gail Steinhart, Research Data & Environmental Sciences Librarian, Albert R. Mann Library, Cornell University
Charles K. Humphrey, Head of Data Research Services, University of Alberta

Digital Curation Centre
Ways of thinking about Open Data: Government data; research data
World data centers - atmospheric; oceanographic
Legal obligations to deposit
UK Data Archive - 40+ years old
Must retrain people to be data curators. Not a lot of data curators out there right now.
Data Management Planning (DMP)
DCC checklists for DMP. Online tool.
DCC training, 1-5 day course
Citing data, linking data
UK Research Data Service (UKRDS)

Data collections at Cornell
Topology: Research; Resource; Reference data collections
"Small" data is important
Need for data librarians. Not many out there
Data eScience librarians
Research Data Management Service Group (RDMSG) at Cornell
Data Staging Repository (DataStaR): A place for researchers to post datasets in a controlled setting
Curating and preserving datasets and providing them for cross-disciplinary discovery and use
Submit data, share data, publish data via DataStaR. RDF store for metadata. Data files stored in Fedora
In production now
Have published a few dozen datasets
Data discussion group at Cornell libraries

Data library at University of Alberta
No national data archive
The data landscape in Canada, a patchwork
MS Excel as primary tool for entering and managing data! This is what researchers use.
Distribute OAIS functions across organizations? One model of how to tie things together
Or create a cloud of services, micro-services
Community cloud of services. No silos
Canadian Research Library Association -- adopting this at the national level

How they do it in the U.K; how they do it at Cornell; how they do it in Canada.


Tuesday, November 9


GLOBAL REPOSITORY NETWORKS
Moderated by Neil Jacobs, acting Program Director for the Information Environment, JISC
Jun Adachi, Director of Cyber Science Infrastructure Development, National Institute of Informatics, Japan
Clifford Lynch, Director, Coalition for Networked Information
Martha Giraldo Jaramillo, Executive Director, RENATA

SPARC Europe. Why is Europe far ahead in open access? European Commission mandate.
Establishing European PKP network, fall 2011

JISC definition/rationale for repositories
COAR Confederation of open access repositories. European
Mentions EDF in France mid-seventies, does not mention its failure! (Bruno Latour book)
Topology of repository tools, platforms, gateways, networks
Growing -- not building -- a global repository network.

500 nmember library consortium in Japan. Negotiating power.

Clifford Lynch
Is the repository the right unit of infrastructure to be thinking about?
Global infrastructure. Big data, staging areas, moving it, local workflows
Repositories situated relative to large computational facilities, large bandwidth networks.
Difficulty of coordination, internationally
E.g., human subjects research across institutions. Difficult nationally; all but impossible internationally
The notion of global repository networks slams up against this.

CLARA Latin America network
82 repositories in LA


LUNCHEON & KEYNOTE
George Strawn, Director of the National Coordination Office, Federal Networking and Information
Technology Research and Development program
On Publishers: "Hell hath no fury like a vested interested masquerading as a moral principle."
Excellent and entertaining overview of the evolution of all that is current.


MAKING THE CASE FOR FINANCIAL SUSTAINABILITY
Moderated by Sayeed Choudhury, Johns Hopkins University
Sue Kriegsman, archivist and librarian, Harvard University
David Palmer, Scholarly Communications Team Leader, Hong Kong University Libraries
Oya Y. Rieger, Associate University Librarian for Digital Scholarship Services, Cornell University Library

Harvard Office for Scholarly Communication, under the Libraries.
Three years old. Support open access policies
Five Harvard Open Access policies
DASH - Dspace repository -- Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard
Drupal on top of Dspace
Students hired to collect content from faculty
Faculty Activity Reports, put a button on the form "Upload to DASH"

Sustainability of arXive. Requesting voluntary contributions from top 200 institutions. $391K in 2010.
Main principles for supporting Open Access scholarly resources, a list
Open Access is not necessarily free -- there are costs involved
$7 per submissions; 1.4 cents per download
380K per year budget
Main expenses: Programming and user support

Hong Kong University Scholar's Hub
2005 institutional repository in Libraries
Knowledge Transfer grant to HK higher education, 6 million shared
--> Knowledge Exchange. part of Vision
Dspace
25,000 grants
1500 HKU researcher pages. Each professor gets a page. Author profiles
Web scraping of info on departmental Websites
Mandate for theses since 2001
ResearcherID from Thomson-Reuters. Created ID for every HKU professor. Used this to reap bibliometic data. COOL.
Publish or Perish software. Please choose preferred name. Asked individual professors to copy and paste from Publish or Perish into Scholars Hub bibliometrics page. COOL.
Automated data updates to HKU departmental Websites. Data now flows in a different direction. COOL.
Hub for collaborative research.
Decision support. Fund allocation. Research assessment.
Reputation Management System
A big mashup
A big success!