In an article for The Australian (newspaper), Bernard Lane points to some examples of universities re-using their publications data: publishing their research output online for easy, open access and using the repository’s bibliographic details for mandatory reports to government.
Most Australian universities have an online repository of their research papers, articles and theses. Some have adopted a policy of requiring academics to add their finished documents to these repositories (copyright and publishers’ contracts permitting, of course).
Striking an attitude of well-meaning befuddlement, Lane identifies an opportunity for institutions that are keen to improve the public impact of their research. In general, I agree with him; Australian universities don’t do much to promote their eprints repositories as sources of free learning. Thus far, we’ve tended to leave the repositories in the hands of librarians, computer programmers and occasionally to the advocates of so-called e-research.
By recognising eprints as valuable information assets, and treating them as we would other business assets, we could substantially improve the levels of public awareness of, and access to, the brilliant research being done across the country.
It ain’t rocket surgery. For starters it would be relatively simple to:
- provide a link from the main university home page
- provide a link (or even a search box!) from the university library’s home page
- feature new Open Access publications in the “news and events” section of the institutional web site
- include repository contents in results from the university search engine
- link repository records to the online staff directory and to the web pages that profile individual staff members
- as Melbourne University has done, link the repository records to the “find an expert” list that’s produced mainly for the benefit of journalists and prospective PhD researchers
- track and publish statistics on the finding and usage of those Open Access documents
What else could you suggest? How could your institution make more use of its eprints?
If you work in a large company, could you find a similar use for the articles, white papers and other documents your people produce?
How could you link people and systems to streamline the procedures for collecting and using this kind of information?
Tags:
knowledge transfer,
content management,
scholarly communication,
journals,
open access,
research impact
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About a month ago I blogged about the Victorian Parliament’s Inquiry into Improving Access to Public Sector Information and Data.
Submissions to the Inquiry are now available online.
I’m reasonably pleased with the Melbourne University document (PDF 1.2 Mb). M’colleague Sally and I were able to gather some useful input from well-informed people on very short notice — observe, if you will, the lengthy list of acknowledgements at the back of the document.
More than one of the contributors raised a wry grin when I told them we couldn’t publish the University’s submission on the University’s web site — we were obliged by the Inquiry’s terms of reference to wait until the official version was published on the Parliament web site. (This was an inquiry about access to *public* information, after all!)
Tags:
governance,
public policy,
victorian parliament,
public data,
yes minister,
public sector information
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The 2009 IA Summit organisers are calling for proposals. See the updated “Forthcoming” page on this blog for links and details about other conferences, workshops etc that may be of interest.
Tags:
IA Summit,
conference
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At CNet.news, Matt Asay summarises my own reservations about the value of large IT market analysis companies like Forrester and Gartner: “Analysts… are a lagging indicator of success. They tell an enterprise buyer from whom she should have purchased software and hardware a few years ago, not where she should invest IT dollars tomorrow… [In contrast to the large analyst companies] small analyst firms do a much better job at spotting the future, primarily because they actually spend time talking with customers and vendors involved in buying and selling that future.”
David Donathan observes that, “Unfortunately, there are always those who just don’t get it. You know — those who think organizations need to adapt to remain competitive, that change is good and results in greater efficiencies, that failure to adapt to ‘modernalities’ is evil and counterproductive. Since they usually mean well and truly believe they are trying to improve our situation, we don’t want to cull them from the herd…” Donathan offers 10 steps for dealing with change agents before they ruin everything.
At BBC Radio Labs, information architect and web developer Michael Smethurst is using Ruby on Rails to create a semantic online database of 113 years of Proms concert information. Smethurst describes his first steps and foreshadows future developments, including linking the Proms records to external sources of information; keep an eye on the Radio Labs blog to find out what happens next.
CERN’s LHC Computing Grid will transfer, store and process the largest datasets ever produced. Its success relies partly on an “open-source middleware platform called Globus… designed to gather that information seamlessly as though it’s sitting in a folder on one’s own desktop PC… [In the future, a similar system could enable] home computers to provide instant weather forecasts by accessing information from nearby environmental sensors. Or it might help sift through a life’s accumulation of personal medical records or years of home video footage looking for dimly remembered events. Ironically, CERN’s next great contribution to the Internet could be all but transparent to the end user.”
Microsoft’s US$300 million Vista advertising campaign was doomed before it hit the airwaves: a sad case of yesterday’s guys selling last century’s ideas.
Tags:
Gartner,
Forrester,
lagging indicator,
physics,
research data management,
lhc computing
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The Australian Research Council (ARC) has asked universities to provide information about their researchers’ publication records, so that it can test a suite of performance indicators. The aim, apparently, is to propose that the new performance indicators form part of the Commonwealth Government’s proposed Excellence for Research in Australia (ERA) framework.
Peter Merholz observes that conferences are increasingly popular as revenue-earners for design consultancy and media companies. The TED Talks have set a new standard for such events, both in the immediate face-to-face experience they offer and in the way they make content freely available online after the event. On 22 November 2008 the University of British Columbia will hold its first Terry Talks event, modelled on TED but with students as the speakers.
Yale University Press has published a commentable version of The Future of the Internet and How To Stop It by Jonathan L Zittrain. The online version of the book caught my attention for two reasons:
- The web site organises comments by linking them to the relevant paragraph in the book’s text; the ‘comments box’ moves down the page as you scroll through the book’s text, keeping pace as you read and enabling you to flip easily between the original text and the comments. I saw a prototype of a similar comments system earlier this year: the Zittrain book is the first time I’ve seen it ‘in production’ on a professional publisher’s web site.
- The ability to relate a comment to a specific paragraph could be remarkably valuable for the author, for without the Internet it can be hard to get such detailed feedback on a draft manuscript.
The UK government decided a couple of years ago to streamline its hundreds of departmental web sites. The aim was to create just three sites that would deliver the full range of egovernment services and information in a user-friendly, accessible manner. If Guardian columnist Michael Cross’s experience is typical, it seems the strategy is successful.
A consultant’s case study about the Sabre airline reservations company’s intranet implies that it’s the semi-casual ’social networking’ vibe that makes the intranet so successful as a knowledge-sharing forum. While agreeing that the vibe is important, I’d wager it’s actually the ‘relevance engine’ that they can’t do without. No matter how pretty or user-friendly your web interface, if staff can’t find what they’re looking for (with a minimum of fuss) then they’ll abandon the intranet and find another workaround.
Tags:
Excellence for Research in Australia,
interaction,
intranet,
social media,
analytics,
performance indicators
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