ROS User Forum

Attended ROS user forum in Swindon on Friday 30th November.

Introduction – Mari Williams, BBSRC, Corporate Policy and Strategy

• Why is ROS needed :
o ROS, eVal, GtR needed to support argument for continued investment in Research in next Comprehensive Spending Review (CSR) .. was due 2013
o RCs subject to performance management by BIS
o Provide evidence for parliamentary questions (PQs)
o Lots of presentations and consultations to make case for research – need metrics

Aspirations
– RCUK continue to collaborate with HEFCE on alignment with REF
– Harmonise standards

Breakout sessions on Functionality and Communications

Priorities for Functionality

–       Reporting – HEIs want to get data back out and see where data is in workflow
–       integration with existing systems 2 way; bulk upload all data; how prevent individuals entering data also
–       standards and harmonization including lists instead of free-text
–       validation by HEIs ; sign-off .. similar to Je-S

Priorities for Communication and Guidance

–       why collecting .. roadmap/vision [tie-in to other data requirements eg HESA, REF, HEBCI]
–       simplicity of quantity of data ie descope
–       speaking with one voice [all ROS & RCs]
–       simple clear messages
–       actual examples of good practice
–       proper data specification
–       demarcation of responsibility … legal eg when leave or move; PI and CoI and how varies from institution to institution
–       does it replace final report; length of time to report over [RCs almost agreed about these] 

Gateway to Research

• Using data collected from ROS (and eVal/ResearchFish and historical final reports)
• Publications data and Impact and Key Findings
• GtR project working to harmonise data collected via different routes

Important for CiA schema to be extended to include this core set of data – particularly Impact and Key Findings

Open Access

[I had to leave to catch a train … delays due to floods  …]

Understand from Gerry Lawson and Simon Kerridge that RIOXX project due to circulate draft application profile for funder metadata – OA compliance –  for Repositories before Christmas; initially DC but also looking at CERIF. RIOXX aiming to comply with OpenAire also but not confirmed yet.

Would be good to get agreement internationally … 

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.

Technical workshop – review of CERIF projects

NotesOfMeeting

Excellent workshop today with presentations on CERIF mappings from

CRISPool, IRIOS, RCUK, R4R, CERIFy

Presentations will be posted shortly.

Main focus of discussions/debate :

• IDs – including issue of whether UUIDs should be used or not; multiple IDs describing the same entity
• Classification schemes in use … many overlaps and interesting ideas for scheme naming conventions referencing the ‘owner’ of the classification
• splitting of date into year, month and day components as some publications only have a publication year

Keith Jeffery and Brigitte Joerg from euroCRIS gave expert advice on best practice options and an preview of some of the new stuff in v2.0 of CERIF .. including improvements in handling external IDs e.g. HESA IDs and a new structure to the CERIF-XML to reduce fragmentation … Thomas Vestdam presented on the latter.

Much to ponder and we will continue discussions on the euroCRIS CERIF-TG forum [open to all members of euroCRIS] posting main outcomes to this blog.

A massive thanks to Sunderland for hosting the event … with many attendees both physically and virtually present it went very smoothly indeed 🙂