“As academics in most disciplines know, the unit cost of traditionally printed monographs is rising, while sales have been in steady decline. This is a particular problem in the humanities and social sciences, in which monographs are often the output of choice for scholars and the benchmark against which standing and academic performance are judged. Open Access (OA) is a model that has the potential to support a vibrant research environment, enabling non restricted access, widening readerships, facilitating collaboration and the creation of new ideas and increasing impact. Yet the problems inherent in moving to OA publishing for books seem so numerous, and so hard to solve, that even the Finch Report concluded that it couldn’t be insisted upon without further experimentation. Two organisations, leading experimentation, Jisc Collections and OAPEN, thought it was high time to bring together experts from across academia and publishing to explore open access as a means not just to secure the monograph’s future, but also to transform it, extending its reach and ‘making the scholarship better’.”
Archives des mots-clés : JISC
Benefits to the Private Sector of Open Access…
Benefits to the Private Sector of Open Access to Higher Education and Scholarly Research :
“This report is set out in five chapters which, following this introduction, look at:
• The study context and, in particular, available (past) evidence of businesses and benefits of engaging with publicly funded research, as well as access to and discoverability of research and business engagement in OA policy (Chapter 2).
• Business engagement with Open Access, including business models, knowledge transfer contexts, awareness and distinctive use of OA and its role and contribution to businesses (Chapter 3).
• Benefits of OA to the private sector including a review of the nature and limitations of the reviewed evidence, benefits and impact of OA, and in-company enablers and constraints to securing benefit (Chapter 4).
• Conclusions and recommendations (Chapter 5)”.
URL : http://open-access.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/OAIG_Benefits_OA_PrivateSector.pdf
Funding for Sustainability How Funders’ Practices Influence the…
Funding for Sustainability: How Funders’ Practices Influence the Future of Digital Resources :
“Over the past decade, philanthropic organizations and government agencies have invested millions of dollars, pounds, and euros in the creation of digital content in the not-for-profit sector. Their grants have facilitated major digitization efforts and encouraged innovative scholarly work possible only in an online environment. Still, the path from initial grant funding to long-term sustainability of these resources can be challenging.
Ithaka S+R, with generous support from the JISC-led Strategic Content Alliance, interviewed more than 80 individuals, including representatives from more than 25 funding bodies in Europe and North America with a focus on digital resources in the higher education and cultural heritage sectors. Through a year-long research process, Ithaka S+R observed a rich range of sustainability planning activities, but also identified areas for improvement in the funding process that are valuable to both funders and grant seekers. The report also offers funders and project leaders a high-level process for working together at the proposal stage to set plans for post-grant sustainability.”
URL : http://www.ithaka.org/ithaka-s-r/research/funding-for-sustainability
Handling Repository-Related Interoperability Issues: the SONEX Workgroup
Sharing of scholarly content through a network of Open Access repositories is becoming commonplace but there is still need for systematic attention into ways to increase the rate of deposit into, and transfer of content across, the OA repository space. This is a report of the work of a small international group, supported by JISC, with remit to describe, analyse and make recommendations on deposit opportunities and use cases that might provide a framework for project activity geared to the ingest of research papers and other scholarly works.
The multi-authored, multi-institutional work is put forward as the default, and nine use case actors are listed, as deposit agents, with four main use case scenarios. There is also some comment and pointers to projects in Europe which address some of these use case scenarios.
The ADMIRAL Project: A Data Management Infrastructure for Research Across the Life sciences
ADMIRAL is a project of the Image Bioinformatics Research Group and is funded by the JISC. The purpose of the ADMIRAL Project is to create a two-tier federated data management infrastructure for use by life science researchers, that will provide services (a) to meet their local data management needs for the collection, digital organization, metadata annotation and controlled sharing of biological datasets; and (b) to provide an easy and secure route for archiving annotated datasets to an institutional repository, The Oxford University Data Store, for long-term preservation and access, complete with assigned Digital Object Identifiers and Creative Commons open access licences.
URL : https://web.archive.org/web/20110828062449/http://imageweb.zoo.ox.ac.uk/wiki/index.php/ADMIRAL
A Guide to Web Preservation. Practical advice for web and records managers based on best practices from the JISC-funded PoWR project
The Preservation of Web Resources project (JISC PoWR) was funded by the JISC in order to identify emerging best practices for the preservation of web resources. The project was provided by UKOLN and ULCC and ran from April through to November 2008. A number of workshops were organised to help identify emerging best practices, and a blog was established to raise awareness of this work and to gain feedback on the approaches being taken by the JISC PoWR team.
The project handbook was published in November 2008. Since then we have seen a growing awareness of the importance of digital preservation in general and in the preservation of web resources (including web pages, web-based applications and websites) in particular.
The current economic crisis and the expected cuts across public sector organisations mean that a decade of growth and optimism is now over – instead we can expect to see reduced levels of funding available within the sector which will have an impact on the networked services which are used to support teaching and learning and research activities.
The need to manage the implications of these cutbacks is likely to result in a renewed interest in digital preservation. We are therefore pleased to be able to publish this new guide, based on the original PoWR: The Preservation of Web Resources Handbook, which provides practical advice to practitioners and policy makers responsible for the provision of web services.
URL : http://jiscpowr.jiscinvolve.org/wp/files/2010/06/Guide-2010-final.pdf