Knowledge and Wisdom: the role of
research libraries in supporting the
European research agenda
Dr Paul Ayris
Director of UCL Library Services and UCL Copyright Officer; President of
LIBER (Association of European Research Libraries)
e-mail: p.ayris@ucl.ac.uk; Twitter: ucylpay
IGELU meeting 2012, Zurich
Contents
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
EU Digital Agenda
 European Research Infrastructures - Europeana Libraries
Discovery and retrieval
Open Access developments
 PEER project
 Finch Report
 Gold Open Access monographs
Data-driven science
 ODE project
Conclusions
2
Contents
1. EU Digital Agenda
2. Discovery and retrieval
 New model for UK cataloguing?
3. Open Access developments
4. Data-driven science
5. Conclusions
3
1. Europe’s Digital Agenda
 Charting a course to maximise the social and economic
potential of ICT
See
http://ec.europa.eu/inf
ormation_society/digit
alagenda/index_en.htm
4
5
Libraries: Great Library at Alexandria
Said to
contain 70%
of all human
knowledge
See http://www.crystalinks.com/libraryofalexandria.html
6
Digital Agenda: Digital Libraries Initiative
 The EU's digital libraries initiative sets out to make all
Europe’s cultural resources and scientific records –
books, journals, films, maps, photographs, music, etc. –
accessible to all, and preserve them
 See
http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/activities/digital_libraries/
index_en.htm
 The challenge for the digital age is to do even better
than that – and make the result last longer
7
Priorities for Libraries
 Cultural heritage – creating electronic versions of the
materials in Europe's libraries, archives and museums,
making them available online, for work, study or leisure,
and preserving them for future generations
 Scientific information – making research findings more
widely available online and keeping them available over
time
 Developing Europeana – a single access point for
consulting digital copies of the materials held by libraries,
museums, galleries and archives
8
Research Infrastructures
 Original aims of LIBER’s Europeana Libraries project
 Bring to Europeana the digital collections of some of Europe’s
leading research libraries from 11 countries. The content is of the
highest quality and is also significant in terms of scale – over
5,000,000 items
 Be the first project to offer digital collections where the text will be
fully searchable in Europeana, making it possible to search inside
books and other materials
 Establish systems and processes capable of ingesting and
indexing significant quantities of digitised material, including text,
images, moving images and sound clips
9
Research Infrastructures
 LIBER is also a partner in the EU-funded Europeana
Newspapers project
 17 European partners providing 18 million pages
10
Underpinning themes
 Innovation through co-operation
 Creation of a critical mass of content
 Availability of the content to researchers
largely in Open Access
 ‘Research libraries’ engagement with RIs has been low…
it now represents a big gap in the European strategy…’
 See Lossau, N (2012) ‘An Overview of Research Infrastructures
in Europe – and Recommendations to LIBER’ at
http://liber.library.uu.nl/index.php/lq/article/view/8028/8386
11
Europeana Cloud
 Europeana itself is a cultural
heritage portal, aimed at the
European citizen, not primarily at a researcher audience
 New project - Europeana Cloud
 To establish a cloud-based system for Europeana and its
aggregators. Europeana Cloud will contain new content, new
metadata, a new linked storage system, new tools and services
for researchers and a new platform - Europeana Research
 Researchers require a digital space where they can
undertake innovative exploration of digitised content
12
Benefits of Europeana
Cloud
 2.4 million new metadata records and 5 million research–
focused digital items of research-focussed content
 Develop a subscription model which is open to all
European research libraries
 Develop a digital platform, named Europeana Research
 Provide tools and services for researchers that permit
innovative research that exploits digitised content
13
Challenges for Europeana
Research
 Visibility of libraries in research workflow
 Will researchers visit one platform,
Europeana Research, to access all content?
 Europeana Research will initially concentrate on materials
in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences
 Is this sufficiently broad to capture researchers’ interests? What
about Science, Technology and Medicine?
 Sustainability
 A subscription model underpins the sustainability of the service
Will libraries pay to have their content visible here?
14
Contents
1. EU Digital Agenda
2. Discovery and retrieval
 New model for UK cataloguing?
3. Open Access developments
4. Data-driven science
5. Conclusions
15
The Problem
Our key finding is that the current
arrangements for producing and
distributing bibliographic data for both
books and journals involve duplications of
efforts, gaps in the available data, and
missed opportunities. ...[T]here would
be considerable benefits if libraries, and
other organisations in the supply chain,
were to operate more at the network level.
16
Open and Linked Data
 The Open Knowledge Foundation identifies a number of
advantages to libraries opening up their bibliographic
data:
Shared cataloguing
New services
 Linked Data refers to a set of Best Practices for
connecting structured data on the web
 See http://www.w3.org/standards/semanticweb/data
17
Open and Linked Data
 Library catalogue becomes re-positioned in terms of its
relationship to the wider context of the web, and the
social network of links that the web represents
 Benefits to a shared approach
Cost savings
Improved access
18
Recommendations
 Best solution is for a cloud-based implementation to stand in
for both local and central management of systems
Local library management functions
Centrally shared metadata catalogue
E.g. community zone, using the Ex Libris tools
 Metadata issues will need to be addressed
Duplication of records for same item needs to be
replaced by concept of Master record
19
20
Strategic
Recommendations
 RLUK databases need to be re-positioned in the wider
context of the web
Expand coverage to include new media types, e.g. blogs,
wikis, Open Access content, E-Books
 Shared cataloguing service reduces the footprint of local
library management system and so will re-define how
libraries work
21
Strategic
Recommendations
 That funding is identified to investigate the requirements
and feasibility of a shared UK cataloguing service
 To co-sponsor with the JISC a full cost-benefit analysis of
providing an overall, above-campus shared cataloguing
system solution
22
Contents
1. EU Digital Agenda
2. Discovery and retrieval
3. Open Access developments
 PEER project
 Finch Report
 Gold Open Access monographs
4. Data-driven science
5. Conclusions
23
Open Access – a perspective
from the Commission
 17 July 2012
 Neelie Kroes, European Commission Vice-President,
talks to scientific experts about openness in science - and
the great results that can be achieved with open access
 See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94CtpXuuq5Y
24
PEER project
 PEER project
 See http://www.peerproject.eu
 Investigated the potential effects of the large-scale,
systematic depositing of authors’ final peer-reviewed
manuscripts (so called Green Open Access or stage-two
research output) on reader access, author visibility, and
journal viability, as well as on the broader ecology of
European research
 The project ran from 1 September 2008 – 31 May 2012
25
PEER – main findings
 Author self-archiving alone is unlikely to generate a
critical mass of Green OA content
The author deposit rate in the PEER Project was
exceptionally low
 The acceptance and utility of open access publishing has
increased rapidly
Open access publishing is increasingly important for
publishers, repositories and the research community
26
PEER – main findings
 Overall, PEER is associated with a significant, if relatively
modest, increase in publisher downloads, in the
confidence range 7.5% to 15.5%
 Publisher downloads are growing at a faster rate the repository
downloads
 The likely mechanism is that PEER offers high quality
metadata, allows a wider range of search engine robots to
index its content than the typical publisher, and thus helps
to raise the digital visibility of scholarly content
27
 See http://www.researchinfonet.org/publish/finch/
 Report to Department of Business, Innovation and Skills
 UCL responses
 See http://poynder.blogspot.com.es/2012/06/finch-report-in-globalopen-access.html and
http://poynder.blogspot.com.es/2012/06/finch-report-ucls-davidprice-responds.html
28
Finch Recommendations
 Gold Open Access is the future
 UK produces 6% of world’s global research output
 For an extra £38 million to UK HE, UK research outputs
could be published as Gold OA research outputs
 Green OA would be for grey literature, theses
29
Finch Recommendations
 National licensing solutions could extend access to the
National Health Service, SMEs (Small + Medium sized
Enterprises)
 £6 million - £12 million extra a year for equality of access across
HE
 £1 million - £2 million a year for access by the NHS
30
For an individual
institutional policy, as
things stand, Green is
the only affordable and
practical option
JISC Report by John
Houghton and Alma
Swan - Going for Gold?
– see http://ierepository.jisc.ac.uk/610
31
Debate in the UK
 Debate in the UK is polarised between the benefits of
Green or Gold
 2 solutions not mutually exclusive
 Finch talks about a Gold OA future, not set in a timeframe
 Also relies on the whole world going Gold OA
 Houghton and Swan look at transition issues and the
position NOW
 World will not go Gold OA overnight
 For the short to medium term, Green route is more cost effective
32
UK Government funding
7 September 2012
33
LERU Universities
Going for Gold
Professor Kurt Deketelaere
Secretary General of LERU
 One of the recommendations of the Finch Report is that
experiments in Gold Open Access monograph publishing
should continue
 Debate to date has been largely about Gold Open Access
journals, not monographs
 Some LERU universities, with others, bidding for EU
funding for pan-European Gold Open Access publishing
infrastructure for monographs
34
Library
plugin?
Catalogues
Orders
plugin?
Public
Catalogue
Orders
plugin?
APIs
OAI-PMH
etc
Orders
plugin?
Requests
Ordering
plugin
DOAB
Other
services
Paid-for
versions
Secure
payment
OA Book
PDF
Metadata
Fulfilment
Book
Master
XML
Master
Repository
DP support
Technical
Publication
Management
Suite
Editorial
Order
management
Secure delivery
Finance
Other eversions
Kindle
Hard
copy
BPCs
Subs
On
demand
Format
transformer
University
Admin
OA Book
PDF
Orders
plugin?
Editorial boards
Authors
IGELU 2012
Institutional
repository
35
Contents
1. EU Digital Agenda
2. Discovery and retrieval
 New model for UK cataloguing?
3. Open Access developments
4. Data-driven science
5. Conclusions
36
5. Research Data
 Data-drive science is replacing hypothesis-driven science
as a methodology for scientific enquiry
 Riding the Wave (2010) sets the scene for data-driven
science
 See http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/ict/e-infrastructure/docs/hlg-sdireport.pdf
37
See Science
as an open
enterprise
from the
Royal Society
(UK).
At
http://cordis.e
uropa.eu/fp7/i
ct/einfrastructure/
docs/hlgsdireport.pdf
38
39
UK developments
 EPSRC – Engineering and Physical Sciences Research
Council has taken the initiative in the UK
 See
http://www.epsrc.ac.uk/about/standards/researchdata/Pages/default.
aspx
 Policy founded in seven core principles
 No. 1: EPSRC-funded research data is a public good produced in
the public interest and should be made freely and openly available
with as few restrictions as possible in a timely and responsible
manner
40
EPSRC expectations
 What do institutions need to do?
1. All institutions will promote awareness of the EPSRC
policy
2. Published papers will explain how data can be accessed
3. Each institution will have relevant policies and
procedures, and researchers and students will comply
with them
4. Research data not in digital form must still be made
available for sharing
41
EPSRC expectations
5. Appropriate metadata describing the data will be available
within 12 months of the data being generated
6. If data is restricted, the metadata must explain why and
indicate how access would be possible
7. EPSRC-funded research data must be digitally curated for
at least 10 years from the time it is public
8. Effective digital curation will be provided throughout the
whole lifecycle
9. Organisations will pay for the infrastructure for data
curation via existing funding streams
42
Roles and responsibilities of the Library
 One of the issues identified in the Royal Society Report is
the role and responsibilities of libraries
 ‘A particular dilemma for universities is to determine the
role of their science libraries in a digital age’
 Report analyses the traditional role of the Library in
research processes
 repository of data, information and knowledge
 source of expertise in helping scholars access them
43
Libraries and data-driven science
 The ‘processes and the skills that are required to fulfil the same
function are fundamentally different. They should be those for a world
in which science literature is online, all the data is online, where the
two interoperate, and where scholars and researchers are supported
to work efficiently in it’
 LIBER (Association of European Research Libraries) has
produced ten recommendations on what Libraries should
do NOW about Data
 Emanating from the E-Science Working Group
 See http://www.libereurope.eu/news/ten-recommendations-forlibraries-to-get-started-with-research-data-management
44
ODE – Opportunities for Data Exchange
 ODE is looking at the potential of the data deluge
 See
http://www.alliancepermanentaccess.org/index.php/community/cu
rrent-projects/ode
 This potential can only be realised by adding an
interoperable data sharing, re-use and preservation layer
to the emerging eco-system of e-Infrastructures. The
importance of this layer, on top of emerging connectivity
and computational layers, has not yet been addressed
coherently at ERA or global level
45
Where do researchers store their data?
PARSE
Insight
survey of
2009
asked
academics
(n=1202)
where
they
stored
their data
46
ODE conclusions
 ODE identified 7 areas of opportunity:
 Availability
 Findability
 Interpretability
 Re-usability
 Citability
 Curation
 Preservation
 Each stakeholder group was mapped against the criteria
47
Opportunities
Libraries/ Data Centres
Availability
Lower barriers to researchers to make their data available
Integrate datasets into retrieval services
Findability
Support for persistent identifiers
Engage in developing common meta-description schemas &
common citation practices
Promote use of common standards and tools
Interpretability
Support crosslinks between publications and datasets
Provide and help researchers understand meta-descriptions
of datasets
Establish and maintain knowledge base about data and their
context
48
Opportunities
Libraries/ Data Centres
Re-usability
Curate and preserve datasets
Archive software needed for analysis of data
Be transparent about conditions under which data can be reused
Citability
Engage in developing uniform data citation standards
Support and promote persistent identifiers
Curation/
Preservation
Transparency about curation of submitted data
Promote good data management practice
Collaborate with data creators
Instruct researcher in Best Practice
e.g. data formats, preservation formats, documentation of
experiment
49
Contents
1. EU Digital Agenda
2. Discovery and retrieval
 New model for UK cataloguing?
3. Open Access developments
4. Data-driven science
5. Conclusions
50
Conclusions?
 For vendors/suppliers
1. Your services and software need to have the ‘Open
Agenda’ at the heart of your offering
2. Future is collaborative, and pan-European
3. No single Library can offer services and software
facilities to meet all its users’ needs. Vendors need to
understand that pan-European Research Infrastructures
are the way forward for European research libraries
51
Conclusions?
4. The European researcher requires/wants a one-stop
shop for resource discovery. Is this Primo and Primo
Central? Is this the mission and vision that Ex Libris
has?
5. The EC is fully committed to Open Access and Open
Data – we need to develop software and services to
deliver on this Agenda
6. Research Data. We need platforms and services which
support research universities
52
Conclusions?
7. Platforms which support digital curation for cultural
heritage do not in themselves meet our needs
8. Research Data and Data-driven science represent a
revolution in the way science is performed in Europe,
and globally
9. For vendors to thrive, they have to make a credible
offering in this space
53
Conclusions?
 For Libraries
1. The agenda for Libraries has changed and Libraries
need to change too
2. European Libraries need to model how they can
participate in European Research Infrastructures
 This is the way that European Research is progressing
3. The ‘Open’ Agenda is THE agenda for European
research libraries in the next 10 years
54
Conclusions?
4. Digital curation is a vital part of the future for European
Research Libraries. We performed this role in a paper
world and we are best placed to carry this forward in a
digital world
5. Data-driven science represents a revolution in the way
that research is undertaken
6. Unless Research Libraries embrace the requirements of
research data, they will be marginalised in the University
55
Conclusions?
7. Research Libraries should not under-estimate the level
of change that is required
8. In the late fifteenth century, the invention by Gutenberg
in the West of moveable type printing transformed
scholarship. In the twenty-first century, the prevalence of
the Internet and the ‘Open’ agenda could do the same
9. Librarians in Research Libraries need a new raft of skills
to meet the demands of Data-driven Science
56
If you have been…
 Thanks for listening
 LIBER is happy to
participate in a
discussion
57