Knowledge Base+ Advisory Board
Agenda Item 3 Annex D
SafeNet
SafeNet Briefing for KB+ Advisory Group
Adam Rusbridge, November 2014
-
-
-
Background
SafeNet is a two-year project to setup a consortially-managed archive, which will enable
universities and colleges to backup and preserve subscribed e-journal content and provide a
shared service of benefit to all UK Higher Education Institutions (HEIs).
SafeNet builds on our experiences in UK LOCKSS Alliance and PECAN and will simplify the
route to articles when a current subscription is no longer in place and access via the
publisher's platform is either unavailable or unaffordable.
Update
Jisc Collection EIRWG have agreed to give some oversight to SafeNet at key project points
-
We're currently consulting with publishers to get their feedback on barriers to participation
and to aid our definitions of service access triggers and local load license agreements.
-
We've drafted a design document for the Entitlement Registry and implementation of a first
iteration is underway. Our objective is to have an initial internal version (with API stubs) by
the end of January to aid overall SafeNet system development. We then wish to start
populating this with appropriate entitlement data and to start testing that data.
-
In 2015, we look to build relationships with publishers and other service providers, like KB+,
to see how best the entitlement registry can be developed and populated. The purpose of
the 'Entitlement Registry', a term coined during the PECAN project, is primarily to govern the
release of content from SafeNet, when content is not available otherwise. This requires that
the entitlement data it contains is mutually agreed by publisher and libraries, and has a
different focus than that KB+ has had on current access. We plan to learn from the KB+
project as we keep separate focus:

To allow simplicity and design flexibility when testing our understanding of workflows,
interfaces and data models, and

To let us test data and provenance requirements with publishers, ensuring we can
develop a system that contains a set of data accepted by publishers as a source of
authorization.
As we progress, we anticipate finding common data and opportunities to share knowledge
between KB+ and SafeNet. For example, we plan to investigate how the Entitlement Registry
can gain leverage from the work done to improve the quality of data in KB+, amongst other
sources. Adam Rusbridge has made an initial visit to Jisc Collections to meet with Liam
Earney and Magaly Bascones to discuss data issues.
-
We are preparing a website / blog for SafeNet. The next project team meeting for SafeNet is
scheduled in mid-January.
-
The final six months of the project will include a Transition to Service. We will be looking to
our governance structure for advise throughout this process.