Monthly Archives: June 2012

Jun 29 2012
Aside

The RIM CERIF Workshop was an extremely useful and productive event. It could easily have been extended to four days and still not have covered everything.

Discussions included:

  • Introduction of Brigitte Jörg to her new position at UKOLN as CERIF Support Project Coordinator – she will be a very useful resource in coordinating the various projects
  • RIM Support/InfoKit: New developments in InfoKit including updated Case Studies
  • HE Information Landscape Report: Redesigning HE data and possibilities of establishing a single collection agency to act on behalf of all stakeholders, extendign the remit of an existing agency and/or harnessing the collaborative culture that already exists to improve efficiency (or indeed, maintaining the status quo) – didn’t see much mention of research so re-read may be required!
  • ROS: Exciting news re ROS: Fully CERIFied test version of ROS about to become available and UK USer Forum to be established
  • Sustainability: How we maintain the sustainability of projects such as CIA (including extending entities, etc.) … and harvest the information from previous projects
  • Gateway to Research: portal to allow the public access to information (such as who, what and where the Research Councils fund; and the outcomes) on research funded by the UK’s Research Councils
  • Further talk on identifiers and the realisation that organisation identifiers could be even more complicated than person identifiers
  • Institutional repositories, including RepositoryNet+, the aim of which is to create and foster shared infrastructure, both social and technical, that will enable deposit, curation and dissemination of research literature, in line with JISC advocacy for Open Access and visibility of research at universities, including preparation for REF.
  • Useful elevator pitches from all the RIM projects
  • A whirlwind session about information flows now and where they should be in 3 years time – all simplified (except RCs!)
  • A talk on Project Snowball which fostered interest from many parties.
  • Inter-project collaboration: use of JISC wikis (or should other tools be used) and need for greater collaboration between all RIM projects, including completed ones.

Apologies if I’ve missed anything, please feel free to comment!

RIM CERIF Workshop, Bristol 27-28th June 2012: A brief synopsis

Jun 14 2012

Association of Research Managers and Administrators Conference

I attended the ARMA conference this week.

http://www.arma.ac.uk/

I gave out a number of handouts on the CIA project, chatted to a number of people, and had some handouts available on one of the stalls. 

Our fellow CIA project team member Dale Heenan included an eloquent summary of the project in his presentation.

There is some confusion about what data should be held and supplied by which institution when staff have moved organisation e.g. for ROS and REF reporting.  I think it would be useful for CIA to comment on this, or if outwith scope and resourcing at least note that production of  some guidance might be a potential follow on activity for the sector.  There are a number of processes to consider e.g. if RCUK have the old email address of the researcher they will be associated with a previous organisation.

Jun 9 2012

Breaking News …

Congratulations to Thomas Vestdam, a member of the project team, and Brigitte Jörg from euroCRIS on winning the Max Stempfhuber Award for their paper Streamlining the CERIF-XML data exchange format towards CERIF 2.0 at CRIS2012

Jun 8 2012

Entity Identifiers, Author Disambiguation

Interesting conversations being held around entity identifiers and author disambiguation at CRIS2012. Strong demand for global persistent IDs with an overriding feeling that the richer your data is, the easier to disambiguate and deduplicate entities. As found in CIA, unique person identifier is the ideal scenario.

Jun 1 2012

Roadmap for Adoption: Survey Plan

The next stage of the CIA project has been initiated with the production of a Survey plan. The aim is to propose a roadmap for adoption of the CERIF in Action approach and identify opportunities to extend and develop the proposed model. The following outputs are included in the plan:

  • Establishing the baseline: defining the current workflows and time/cost impact to various stakeholders;
  • Identifying issues: practical problems faced by these stakeholders;
  • Assessing potential impact of introducing CERIF in Action approach;
  • Estimating the costs to implement; and
  • Evaluating against the baseline and validating the implementation of the approach.

The stakeholders identified for participants in the survey are:

  • Research Administrators – those responsible for the practical aspects of processing transferring research information data for and on behalf of academic staff;
  • Researchers –  academic staff who are likely to be transferring between institutions and wish to take the record of their research activity with them to their destination institution;
  • Principal and Co-Investigators – those responsible for reporting on project outcomes to research councils;
  • Suppliers – Producers and maintainers of Research Information Systems;
  • Research Funders;
  • Funding councils; and
  • IT support staff – those responsible for supporting the process of exchange between institutions and from institutions to RCUK.

It is possible that we may be able to synchronise the surveys with those of RCUK to capture the elements above from an RCUK angle and, as a result, reduce duplication of effort on both project partners and participants in the surveys alike. It is anticipated that the RCUK survey will be released toward the end of June.