A Thorough Thought: Enterprise Architecture Reflection

In my last post I did a fair bit of mocking of “The Enterprise” and “SOA” as being dead.  However I do want to point out that the original ideas around SOA as put forward by the original Whitepaper by IBM was a significant programmatic pattern at the time and one that every person who types on a computer keyboard should understand.  None the less, understanding and agreement with the “soa” (aka the modular programmatic pattern) should not confuse people that “SOA” as a technology is dead:

SOA as a concept for modular compartmentalisation for “services” is an important programmtic pattern to understand; conversely, SOA as a technology made up of the technology stack of: SOAP/WSDL, BPMN/L and EBSs is not only too expensive for any small/medium enterpise but also overkill for organisation who do not need “robust -aka Enterprise- transaction”.  In short, the Web via HTTP, its error codes and mime types is all any University will ever need to achieve an Enterprise Architecture Stack.

Are Repositories Now Enterprise?

Prologue: “Web Wonk, pushing toy technologies, tells us SOA is dead. Doesn’t he know the Gartner Hype Curve? It’s in the “Trough of Disillusionment”!” -’Enterprisey‘ on Twitter-

Over the past six months there has been a recent set of activities taking place in the repositories community that have made me wonder if repositories are finally coming of age, so much so that they could be considered “Enterprise”?!

The trends I have noticed that I think have enabled us to reach this “Enterprise Enlightenment”, includes:

• Mandates for deposit of Open Access content by both MIT and UCL [1]
• Development of two new repositories that have been coupled together via OpenSource tools: one at Oxford, (EntityStore by Ben O’Steen) and the second at the University of Rocheste,r New York (IR+ by Nate Sarr and co).
• Cloud Provision by the DuraSpace Foundation.
• The establishment of ePrints as a core business system for Universities to manage the upcoming REF.
• Growing number of Research Management Systems, such as Symplectic, Mendeley, Zotero, MePrints, BibApp and other systems that are intended to sit atop repositories to leverage the individual researcher’s awareness of related research on the Web.

But what is “Enterprise” or rather how does a University view repositories in terms of being a core business process that fits in with their overall distributed technology stack?  The definitions on the Web about what “Enterprise Architecture” is, compounds the fact that “Enterprise” is mostly just marketing hype, somewhat like “Web 2.0 and The Cloud” but worse as it doesn’t have any consensus amongst those who use it the most (recently asked an IBM project manager to define it for me via what technologies it used and the best they could say was “robust transaction” (please note: SOA is dead and not even good for corporations who have the budget for it, and is especially not relevant now or in the near future for Small/Medium Institutions!!!).

However, despite my general disregard for Enterprise “Architectural Astronauting” terms and the management speak that justifies it, there is still a real need by medium/large organisations (HEIs <15K students/staff) to understand what core systems and applications that their various distributed departments are using (emphasis on “distributed department” selection of systems over central procurement):  Central IT Dept. (email/IM, CMS), Marketting/Business Dept. (CRM), Accounts Dept. (expenses, finance), Student Support (VLE), Library Dept. (LMS, OPAC), various Subject Specific Depts (MatLab, Office), and most significantly the rise of Web 2.0 applications that students, lecturers and researchers can micromanage themselves to change as their immediate end user needs arise.

But what about the quality scholarly content that sits in all of the above systems (on the Web, in the Central IT server and on the local departmental computer)? Basic agreement on how two departments can pass each other their data and understand it, has mostly been limited to passing spreadsheets (CSV) over email and calling each other up to explain the meanings of each column header (I’m not criticising this process entirely BTW).  The core question being: how we can make this process streamlined and easily repeatable? It should be easy for two individuals from different departments to meet over coffee and have the data they were telling each other about in the hands of the other in a *meaningful* and *repeatable* way in the same amount of time it took to have that single cup or coffee.  <–! THIS IS WHAT AN ENTERPRISE ARCHITECTURE SHOULD BE TRYING TO ACHIEVE (NOT SOME OVERALL BLUEPRINT OF THE WORLD THAT MAKES US FEEL GOOD BECAUSE IT FITS ON A SINGLE POWERPOINT SLIDE).  If we are going to actually start understanding this thing called the Web and how our users use it, we need to stop being so deterministic that our systems are going to slot together like some big puzzle (despite what Microsoft clip-art suggests).

So where do repositories fit in my view of what a University Enterprise Stack should be trying to achieve?  Well first off systems have to be simple enough to describe in terms of “push” and “pop” on a stack.  This means having a core business process and defined meaning that everyone can understand.  I now believe that repositories have found their core business proposition via the REF and making sure Universities list research outputs to obtain research ratings (we have not succeeeded in making the business case that IRs should be doing the job of archiving, a core library platform, or the job of an institutional demonstrator/poster space).  Hence, Repositories fit in the “University Enterprise Stack” by their virtue of being a system that delivers a business solution to a real financial problem.

So if we are all in agreement that the core business case of repositories are to collect all the research that needs to be submitted for the REF (or for any other assessment body that needs to get an overview/rating of the research being produced by a department), then I think we have reached a place where repositories can be placed within the context of other institutional systems, i.e. Repositories -as described by this business case and management speak- are Enterprise.

We can now start to have other services built atop Repositories in the layer cake that is becoming the University Enterprise “Stack”, including the ability to swap out repositories systems within the stack if Institutionally required, e.g. for cheaper storage costs via DuraSpace or further customisation via EntityStore.  The immediate layer that is emerging above the repository layer is “Research Management Technologies”, i.e. Symplectic, Mendeley, Zotero, BibApp, etc.  Accordingly, if Repositories are about listing of research content that is worthy of assessment, then “Research Management Systems” are there to make sure that worthwhile research can compete against similar research as well as get noticed amidst competing research.  Notice here the business case of lecturers/departments getting higher research ratings (repository layer), and then being able to get more research funding because they know what, where and how they can leverage their research for more funding.  The latter is the emerging business case that Research Management Systems are making so they too can become a push/pop layer on the University Enterprise Stack.

Of course, this brings in the question of where the innovation space is and how repository platforms might seperate the various tools in their systems to leverage a new layer in the university Stack, e.g. be able to “sell” a new system that couples with the repository (please keep in mind I am not advocating transaction of money but rather a well defined system that can be “sold” alongside other similar products be that Open Source system of Closed Source systems, e.g. ePrints has the functionality emerging of a Research Management System but have not separated it out as a layer that sits atop the repository, hence it is really two products in one).  Further questions in my mind include:

A side note: This post is partially trying to categorise the emerging layer of “Research Management Systems” (RMSs) that are emerging over the top of repositories (this includes everything from the modern Web 2.0 Systems for Researchers like Zotero and Mendeley to the ‘Common Research Integration Systems’ (CRISs) that originally populated this space .  I am not suggesting all of these systems have the same functionality, but rather that these systems are competing to fulfil the same business case need.

• What does the core business case for ‘research management systems’ look like, how do you sell this new systems to University higher ups?
• What other systems lower in the stack could feed into the repository to help leverage further data that would enable a higher research rating, e.g. could the University website CMS provide further insight to either the repository or rather more likely the “Research Management System” layers in the stack?
• What systems could be coupled with both the ‘research management layer’ and the ‘repository layer’ that could result in further business cases for the institution?
• What systems sit atop ‘research management systems’ that will leverage their core business case to enable further business models.
• What should innovators be exploring to fully leverage the business case of research management, e.g. is it individual tools that inform researchers where their ideas could/should compete or should ‘research mangement’ be departmental effort to do team research in specific research fields for further funding?

[1] = http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/

Google Wave (not as communication tool) but as a notebook (IDEA 2 of 3 from from Barcamp London 7)

London, Thames River South Bank. While at BarCampLondon7 (took place at the IBM offices over 48 hours) where an extended crowd of neurodiverse brilliance showed up.  Dozens of the conversations I would like to follow up, but alas am only able to publish the top three IMHO of which I hope will give me an opportunity to encourage further (hence being published and citable here).  The three ideas came about via three very smart developers:

• The 1st IDEA on ‘Providing URLs for Periods of Time” by http://twitter.com/jonathantweed
• The 2nd IDEA on ‘GoogleWave as an editable Notebook for Journalists and Scientists‘ by http://www.cubicgarden.com/
• And the 3rd IDEA on ‘The Pragmatics of a PUSH Web‘ by http://friendfeed.com/ade

IDEA 2: Google Wave as Notebook (not as communication tool, necessarily):

Mr Forrester from the BBC sat in on a talk with me by regarding the pragmatic technologies that are starting to emerge in the PUSH architecture that is fundamentally changing the architectural paradigm of the Web (see IDEA 3).  The post conversation emerged when we started asking ourselves what this means for real people like academics and journalists.

Most people would agree that Google Wave is a lossy technology that we are still trying to understand with regards to “what itch it scratches”.  Well, I think part of the answer that Wave is suggesting is as a notebook for the individual (with the option for human collaboration but by no means necessary, in fact I would argue it is more about machine and single human collaboration than human community collaboration?).

Use Case 1: a journalist begins to monitor a story and quickly jots down the story idea and some other key contacts and ideas that emerge.  In addition the journalist starts a couple of keyword robots to monitor for any news on the topic.  She then leaves the robots to collect some headlines and thoughts for a week.  When she comes back to the story with some additional ideas she also notices that the robots have found five leads that might provide additional information, she also notices a story local story that mirrors her most recent idea, she quickly adds her idea below the story and also notes down some names and contact details below the other leads the crawlers have found her.  Also at this point she begins to put down an outline for the story and highlights some missing gaps.  Upon contacting and interviewing some leads she add her notes.  This continues so and so forth, in the same way that she would populate her notebook with ideas, however Wave give her one significant advantage: that each idea is presented both chronologically and ideologically with each entry in those lists having their own URL.

This same use case can be repeated for the Academic Scientist whose lab notebook needs a way of progressing along as ideas emerge and as robots in the forms of experiments automatically log data against ideas.

Both Journalist and Scientist can then write their story/research article referencing what they found and in what order they found it by linking to the individual posts with in the Wave.  This give the story/research a level of back-end data that has never been availble to their audiences.

What is different here, or rather what problem do these scenarios solve?  Primarily this is a problem about lists and being able to make humans and machines understand a list both chronologically (which machines are good at keeping track of) and ideologically (which humans are good at keeping track of). In the machine world what is missing is the ability to make lists and then edit them according to the way humans think -> ideologically = keeping track of multiple lists occurring at the same time (as opposed to a single list which is what machine’s like).

The framework that is difficult to understand here is that the Web is good at making lists that are chronological in time (e.g. RSS/ATOM), but they have yet to enable the making of lists that can go back and edit the list (inserting a new item) without confusing the human with regards to when the item appeared both ideologically and chronologically in time.  GoogleWave because of “concurrent transaction” aka ‘the fastforward button’ enables the listing of items in chronological and logical order to exist concurrently thereby finding the sweet spot of what machines like (a single list of chronological order) and what human like (multiple lists of ideological order).

So there is my simple explination of what Wave has given us, a single list that can encode both chrnological data and ideological data. Do you see more of an innovation in Wave than this? <– if so, you know where the comment button is.

Book Review: Corey Doctorow’s ‘Maker’

A book every geek needs to read.

Doctorow’s latest book ‘Maker’ takes the reader on a three part theme park ride (CC): first, dangling the ultimate geek future in front of you in part one (a world of maker teams that spend their days being inspired and inventing the fantasies of their mind in a global geek movement); part two, a downward spiral into the trough of despair (a reality we are all too familiar with after the technology doesn’t deliver); and, finally into a third part where the penultimate question of big top down business vs the small bottom up innovation team is put to the test to see who ends up as victor. And of course, a short epilogue to bring the reader back to the tonic note that is life.

Postpartum, the reader is left with a better understanding that through Docotorow collective subconscious story is a world of geeks who have finally grown up and want a better more ethical world of thinking and invention. I feel more profound in my belief that there are more of you out there who want to make the world a better place by shear imagination, tinkering and play.

To my fellow geeks, you would do well to only read the first part of the book and leave the fantasy Doctorow so superbly paints to just that: by the end of part 1 you honestly believe the world could be a better place if only we were to embrace intellect and the true purist state of humankind’s ingenuity. However, crushing on the first part of the book only leaves you wanting more and so you continue to part two, but before that some quotes that still sing like a geek oracle to my heart and mind:

It’s like this: engineering is all about constraint. Given a span of foo feet and materials of tensile strength of bar, build a bridge that doesn’t go all fubared. Write a fun video-game for an eight-bit console that’ll fit in 32k. Build the fastest airplane, or the one with the largest carrying capacity… But these days, there’s not much traditional constraint. I’ve got the engineer’s most dangerous luxury: plenty. All the computational cycles I’ll ever need. Easy and rapid prototyping. Precision tools.

“They just make this stuff, do it, then make something else?” – “Exactly – no permanence except for the team, and they support each other, live and work together. You’d think that because they live and work together that they don’t have any balance, but it’s the opposite: they book off work at four or sometimes earlier, go to movies, go out and have fun, read books, play catch. It’s amazing, I’m never coming back…”

Part II sends you down the slope of dillusion and back into the muddy waters of reality, a well painted futuristic modernity but a real world none the less filled with the politics and complexity of humankind that does not need my re-quoting of passages for you all to understand.

As a bittersweet ending, Doctorow hands over part III which perhaps asks some of the most significant questions for technology that remain unanswered today: the un-trodden paths of how this thing call technology makes money (business models) and how the only thing left standing in our way of a better world is IPR.

It’s like an emergent property. Once you get a lot of people under one roof, the emergent property seems to be crap. No matter how great the people are, no matter how wonderful their individual ideas are, the net effect is shit. Remind me of reliability calculation. Like if you take two components that are 90 percent reliable and use them in a design, the outcome is 90 percent of 90 percent – 81 percent. Keep adding 90 percent reliable components and you’ll have something that explodes before you get it out of the factory. Maybe people are like that. If you’re 90 percent non-bogus and ten percent bogus, and you work with someone else who’s 90 percent non-bogus, you end up with a team that’s 81 percent non bogus…

Part III is a pleasure right up to the end, but I’ll leave that for you to find out as it is well worth getting to the end and beyond.

Doctorow does provide a subtle Epilogue to tie the whole thing together and remind us that no corporate strategy or vision statement will ever achieve what a couple of determined DIYers can do.

Not exactly – but there’s no way they’re going to be perfect, so we built in a bunch of stuff that would make it funnier when it happened. It is not officially a feature, not a bug.

As I said, a book every geek needs to read:

http://craphound.com/makers/Cory_Doctorow_-_Makers.html

To note: this is the first book I read entirely on my Android Phone (using the Aldiko App), I found it very enjoyable to read as well as bookmark as I went (see above).

All passages above are licensed by Corey Doctorow with a Creative Commons license as is this blog.  Long live the Creative Commons Massive!

Why do we not have human understable URIs for TIME?!? (IDEA 1 of 3 from from Barcamp London 7)

This weekend I was at BarCampLondon7 (took place at the IBM offices over 48 hours) where an extended crowd of neurodiverse brilliance showed up.  Dozens of the conversations I would like to follow up, but alas am only able to publish the top three IMHO.  I hope publishing these ideas will give me an opportunity to encourage them further.  The three ideas came about via three very smart developers:

• The 1st IDEA on ‘Providing URLs for Periods of Time” by http://twitter.com/jonathantweed
• The 2nd IDEA on ‘GoogleWave as an editable Notebook for Journalists and Scientists’ by http://www.cubicgarden.com/
• And the 3rd IDEA on ‘the Pragmatics of a PUSH Web’ by http://friendfeed.com/ade

IDEA 1 (with Mr. Tweed): Providing URLs for Periods of Time

This is such a simple idea it is easy to miss the brilliance it is suggesting. Quite simply it comes down to when anyone talks about periods of time, be that an academic, a journalist or a school child.  For example, the Victorian Era, the Vietnam War or the Jurassic period.  All of these humans understand more or less (or at least we pretend to know) when these things actually were, when in fact knowing periods of time is often more art than science.  And yet scholarls, journalists and people define their existence, age, identity and understanding of history on given periods of time.

Solution: Go to a BBC web page and type in the time you are looking for, e.g. “the renaissance period”, BBC will return you a link eg http://www.bbc.uk/RenaissancePeriod which you can now take and embed into the body of your essay: as a footnote in your dissertation, as a link in your news report or at the top of your school paper as a keyword.  By placing this one simple link in your paper the world over can now search and discover content written on historical periods.  Better yet the BBC can start to crawl these artefacts to help better define what the time period means, i.e. at http://www.bbc.uk/ReanssancePeriod/rdf there will be lists and lists of categorised key word terms along with mathematical equations that suggest exactly when the period was considered to begin and end.  You combine these keywords and dates and suddenly you can begin doing general searches across all legacy research to suggest what time period they were talking about.

Note on Idea 1: In a way what is amazing about the above idea is that it has not been done yet, [see below] Wikipedia does not provide an authoritative source for exact time periods, but rather allows a debate on time which is good for humans but is extremely inefficient for exactness that time requires.

Post Script: Apparently it has been done (to a certain degree) by none other than Mr. Gutteridge, my notable and esteemed colleague down at Southampton: http://commoneras.ecs.soton.ac.uk/ <- Now we just need to have the URI be rdfa in xhtml or json with some logic behind the time based numbers. That and a little push by someone big enough to get end users to start using it!

Agile Protoyping in Academia

I’ve given this talk a couple of times, at the JISC Digtital Content Conference, The JISC INF11 Programme Start-Up Meeting and most recently (where I presented it virtually over twitter) at IWMW2009.  It orgins stem back to chats with Ben O’Steen while on the CRIGshow and most recently in more serious discussions with OSSWatch in their “Agile and Open Expert Group“.  I still have a lot of questions on how project jump from being small one or two user acorns into massive oak services with lots of users, if you have solutions please do comment or send me a tweet @dfflanders.

more about “Agile Protoyping in Academia“

From a Yankee Living in King Arthur’s Health Care System.

[Upon recently returning from a holiday in the States with far too much time to get involved in the great dummed down American debate (thanks to so-called popular news broadcasts), I felt the need to summarise the opinions I expressed to several family and friends]

“It doesn’t matter if a cat is black or white so long as it catches mice” -Deng Xiaoping upon transforming Mao Zedong’s purist Communist state to a hybrid Socialist-Capitalist regime (December of 1978)-

Let me say this as plainly as possible.  Everyone has the human right to be healthy and it doesn’t  matter what ideology we use to achieve it*. Be it a mix of democracy, socialism, tyranny, monarchy and/or communism: so long as we all are healthy to pursue “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”, then by all means we should pursue it with all the ingenuity and innovation that America has been so successful in achieving the past two-hundred years.

For those of you who wish to make this a black and white debate, I would ask that you stop for a moment to consider the multiple ideologies working in your life: at home where the bread-winning man raises his family and hands down orders to be lovingly carried out by his family (monarchy), where the single mother goes to work to diligently carry out the emailed instructions of her boss (tyranny), where the soldier fights upon the fields in Afghanistan following the orders of his commander (dictatorship), where the volunteer worker gives up their weekends to join in a fellow cause to help other people suffering from unjust circumstances (socialism)… in fact as I look around I find very few pure democracies at work in the real world.  In fact, the very system that America has relied upon all these years to elect it’s officials is anything but a pure democracy (not that we shouldn’t pursue a truly egalitarian democracy).  Rather, if we look around to the real situations and relationships in our lives we will quickly discover that some of the most effective things we do are hybrid political ideologies.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that living in a National Health Care system (which I have been doing for the past ten years in England) is flawless (nor is it a pure socialistic model governed over by a single government authority, rather it is more kindred to a truly pure democracy at times, aka an anarchy .  Rather, there are flaws with it and many of them: the English would not be English if they didn’t criticise everything in the pursuit of making it better!  But do not be fooled in believing that living in a social health care system is something that any true thinking English individual would give up for the current tyrannical ideology employed by so called “capitalistic” insurance companies and biomedical copyright conglomerates that currently dictate health rights to the so-called “free American”.  And let me be explicit why the English would not give up their half-baked Health Care System (lest there is an American or Englishman who thinks otherwise):

1. Birth: because no one should have to pay to give birth to their children!  Still a free right that every democratic English citizen has the right to as a human born upon this planet; i.e. my cousin had to pay in excess of £10K/$15K to see his wife give birth to their first born despite having average health insurance in the US of A.
2. Children: because even more important that providing a high school equivalent education to every 18 year old so we must also make sure that the 18 year old has the brains and physical ability to employee that education; i.e. I met an eighteen-year old who despite having straight A’s in her educational life was not able to find a job because her parents could not afford dental insurance for her gnarled teeth <- if only she would have come to England ;-D
3. Young adults: People just starting out in life whether straight out of High School or University should not have to stand on a precipice of insurance uncertainty until they get a job; i.e. my sister as a self-employed photographer had to live at home under our parent’s insurance until the age of twenty-three when she got married because she was not insurable as an individual because of a physical condition she has had since birth: no one should have to live with their parents at an age when they should be living life to the full with their friends (it is unfair to both the child and parents).
4. Families: because no man or women responsible for being the primary bread winner should have to feel impotent if they are injured while out of work, i.e. a family friend of ours was injured on the last day of a major building project and was not able to get his knee operated upon until he was able to find another job, however he walked with a limp to every construction job he tried to get and because of it was not considered an “employable labourer” (in comparison to younger fitter workers).
5. Recession and my own personal view: because while I have a job at this time of economic instability, I am still able to take risks at my job (for the greater good) because my concern is not in just retaining my job (but to do more than just pay the bills), i.e. I could get fired tomorrow and find enough work with my two hands to pay my rent and food for my partner and myself without having to worry about being injured if I did have to do a manual labour job.

So what is the moral of these stories: let us stop quarrelling as to what political ideology we as Americans embrace and instead recognise the primary ideology that has made “America the Experiment” be a success these past two-hundred years: innovation, innovation, innovation*!  The singular ability to make things work without letting our religious, political, gender, sexual or nationalistic dogma get in the way of achieving the singularly greatest health care system to date (regardless of what ideology we use to get it to work).  Stop arguing across political lines and instead embrace the opportunity to once again be the world’s brash and bragging citizens by saying “we have given all our citizen’s health and we are as a City upon a Hill for the whole World to see!”   Would this not be the greatest achievement America has achieved to date, and indeed a manifestation of the word’s of our declared Constitution: “Life, liberty and pursuit of happiness”!

To end with a few numbers:

1799 Aboltion of Slavery in Main Land Great Britain… 66 years later… 1865 aboltion of slavery in The United States.

1948 creation of the National Health Care System in the United Kingdom… 66 years later… it is 2014.

Yours Sincerely,

A Hybrid American-Englishman.

Notes from Author Publishing Mandates for Researchers

Notes from Deposit Mandate Meeting

Overview and schedule for the days talks

My bookmarked links from the day: http://delicious.com/dfflanders/rsp

Funders Mandates by Robert Kilney from the Wellcome Trust

• 48 funders now have a OA policy (“mandate”) to deposit published content, including: UKMPC, HIM HNMI, etc… 10:05:25
• Wellcome wants publishers to offer service to author to auto publish XML paper with CC license (publishers are mostly keen) 10:07:07
• authors don’t want to deposit themselves, they expect publisher to deal with it, though this costs Wellcome up to 2% of their budget 10:09:07
• author self publishing could result in an additional £80million of funding that could go into research 10:14:02
• chriskeene: will be publishing my notes from mandates event later noticing a few familiar faces here (little wave at @dfflanders)10:14:38
• workflow for publishers (email to author) has resulted in a significant “box ticking” of OA route 10:17:08
• many publishers still do not have an OA policy and have not adopted an OA option workflow for authors 10:21:31
• nice = blog post of presentation up as last slide of presentation #wellcome http://bit.ly/X6Vcm 10:25:07
• Q: how Wellcome will also provide policy on research data that goes up alongside publication, A: 2 policies that need to be connected 10:28:01
• Wellcome supplements grant with OA publishing fee (is not included in Grant budget) so money has to be spent on OA 10:30:18
• OA money is not given to publisher but paid to author so they are aware of the costs they are spending on OA 10:31:52
• research councils perspective up next 10:33:04

Research Councils UK by Astrid Wissenburg, ESRC

• chriskeene: will be adding to the same blog post throughout the day http://sn.im/j0677 ‘pinch of salt’ sorryfor spelling. 10:38:59
• Research Councils have very different cultures in how hand’s on they are with their funding and mandates http://tinyurl.com/kq8t5s 10:40:46
• RT: Why Research Councils are interested in OA (aka repositories) = 1 speed of dissimination, 2 priciple of “free” for end user… 10:43:37
• jury is still out on if OA increases citation rates, but RC’s could respond more if evidence for this. 10:44:55
• still no decision on if Research Councils are subject to FOI request for publically funded research 10:45:58
• Institutions could add OA publishing costs to fEC <–what systems do Grants departments monitor this by, CRM? 10:47:10
• RAE funding has clear business case for why institution should be actively maintaining OA publishing workflows 10:49:31
• STFC required OA for projects Oct 2006, should see affect five years anon, so still waiting to see response. 10:53:06
• 3/4 of researchers still not aware there is a mandate, senior researchers aware, new researchers not (despite willingness 4 new models) 10:57:09
• embargo periods are difficult to mandate or monitor, need institutions to have internal (fEC) workflows to assure 10:58:51
• RCUK position on OA here http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/access/default.htm 11:23:35
• chriskeene: nice coffee on a sunny balcony, now in next session at 12:07:55
• embargos are the “problem space” that need to be explored <–could OAI-ORE have a real use case for embargo parts of papers? 12:15:32
• UKPubMed using Whatizit text mining pipe via iHop to enhance search 12:15:49
• jimdowning: @dfflanders You weren’t in the ICE-TheOREM presentation then? Yes. It can. 12:19:17
• Oppenheim up next on Houghton Report 12:20:30

Economic Implications for Alternative Schoarly Publishing Models by Charles Oppenheim from Loughborough University

• Oppenheim insisting that at start of report he was open to publishers as offering a good deal to scholarly communication 12:21:05
• Houghton report here: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/news/stories/2009/01/houghton.aspx 12:22:47
• @jimdowning sorry should have cited you! Yes ICE-Theorm was first to show pragmatics of ORE, re embargo of sections in papers 12:25:49
• ~100million in cost savings if we embraced open access publishing of publically funded research content 12:26:18
• 2,300 activities were identified in publish process model for Houghton report so as to provide estimate of cost 12:29:25
• used a solow-swam model (Nobel Prized model) for economic costing (publishers contested though no alternative model suggestions) 12:32:04
• Houghton looking to extend this model to all countries (UK and Australia thus far) 12:33:49
• Houghton Report recommendation is that OA cost saving would equal greater funding for research (bottomLine) 12:34:53
• Houghton report data is available OA so anyone can update data so model will churn out alternative findings 12:37:58
• moving forward: publishers in conversation with JISC to fund further study to have more accurate figures to put into model 12:39:34
• Loughborough response to report was to mandate OA starting Oct 2009, will be enforced via Personal Research Plan meeting with author. 12:50:11
• chriskeene: have updated blog post http://sn.im/j0677 12:52:49

Lunch happened somewhere around here, and Chris Keen gave an audio summary of the morning.

• aclobridge: RT @dfflanders ~100million in cost savings if we embraced open access publishing of publically funded research content 15:19:47

Institutional Policies and Processes for Mandate Compliance by Bill Hubbard from SHERPA

• mandates as a way of harmonising view (not as god’s commandment from on high) 15:20:52
• liking hubbard’s movement around room, shows his passion for what we can achieve. 15:25:27
• pointing out the multiple decisions authors could make in deciding how to publish OA, need to “mandate” common workflow decision easier 15:28:44
• “compliance…big it up” <- there are repository groups in every Russell and 1994 group who are there to support mandate 15:37:32
• RSP will look to compile a list of ppl in each HEIs so funders can go to them to find out who to contact that will follow up mandate compliance 15:50:54
• publishers need to see repo managers as friends as they police copyright

Notes from Deposit Mandate Meeting

Overview and schedule for the days talks

Funders Mandates by Robert Kilney from the Wellcome Trust

• 48 funders now have a OA policy (“mandate”) to deposit published content, including: UKMPC, HIM HNMI, etc… 10:05:25
• Wellcome wants publishers to offer service to author to auto publish XML paper with CC license (publishers are mostly keen) 10:07:07
• authors don’t want to deposit themselves, they expect publisher to deal with it, though this costs Wellcome up to 2% of their budget 10:09:07
• author self publishing could result in an additional £80million of funding that could go into research 10:14:02
• chriskeene: will be publishing my notes from mandates event later noticing a few familiar faces here (little wave at @dfflanders)10:14:38
• workflow for publishers (email to author) has resulted in a significant “box ticking” of OA route 10:17:08
• many publishers still do not have an OA policy and have not adopted an OA option workflow for authors 10:21:31
• nice = blog post of presentation up as last slide of presentation #wellcome http://bit.ly/X6Vcm 10:25:07
• Q: how Wellcome will also provide policy on research data that goes up alongside publication, A: 2 policies that need to be connected 10:28:01
• Wellcome supplements grant with OA publishing fee (is not included in Grant budget) so money has to be spent on OA 10:30:18
• OA money is not given to publisher but paid to author so they are aware of the costs they are spending on OA 10:31:52
• research councils perspective up next 10:33:04

Research Councils UK by Astrid Wissenburg, ESRC

• chriskeene: will be adding to the same blog post throughout the day http://sn.im/j0677 ‘pinch of salt’ sorryfor spelling. 10:38:59
• Research Councils have very different cultures in how hand’s on they are with their funding and mandates http://tinyurl.com/kq8t5s 10:40:46
• RT: Why Research Councils are interested in OA (aka repositories) = 1 speed of dissimination, 2 priciple of “free” for end user… 10:43:37
• jury is still out on if OA increases citation rates, but RC’s could respond more if evidence for this. 10:44:55
• still no decision on if Research Councils are subject to FOI request for publically funded research 10:45:58
• Institutions could add OA publishing costs to fEC <–what systems do Grants departments monitor this by, CRM? 10:47:10
• RAE funding has clear business case for why institution should be actively maintaining OA publishing workflows 10:49:31
• STFC required OA for projects Oct 2006, should see affect five years anon, so still waiting to see response. 10:53:06
• 3/4 of researchers still not aware there is a mandate, senior researchers aware, new researchers not (despite willingness 4 new models) 10:57:09
• embargo periods are difficult to mandate or monitor, need institutions to have internal (fEC) workflows to assure 10:58:51
• RCUK position on OA here http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/access/default.htm 11:23:35
• chriskeene: nice coffee on a sunny balcony, now in next session at 12:07:55
• embargos are the “problem space” that need to be explored <–could OAI-ORE have a real use case for embargo parts of papers? 12:15:32
• UKPubMed using Whatizit text mining pipe via iHop to enhance search 12:15:49
• jimdowning: @dfflanders You weren’t in the ICE-TheOREM presentation then? Yes. It can. 12:19:17
• Oppenheim up next on Houghton Report 12:20:30

Economic Implications for Alternative Schoarly Publishing Models by Charles Oppenheim from Loughborough University

• Oppenheim insisting that at start of report he was open to publishers as offering a good deal to scholarly communication 12:21:05
• Houghton report here: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/news/stories/2009/01/houghton.aspx 12:22:47
• @jimdowning sorry should have cited you! Yes ICE-Theorm was first to show pragmatics of ORE, re embargo of sections in papers 12:25:49
• ~100million in cost savings if we embraced open access publishing of publically funded research content 12:26:18
• 2,300 activities were identified in publish process model for Houghton report so as to provide estimate of cost 12:29:25
• used a solow-swam model (Nobel Prized model) for economic costing (publishers contested though no alternative model suggestions) 12:32:04
• Houghton looking to extend this model to all countries (UK and Australia thus far) 12:33:49
• Houghton Report recommendation is that OA cost saving would equal greater funding for research (bottomLine) 12:34:53
• Houghton report data is available OA so anyone can update data so model will churn out alternative findings 12:37:58
• moving forward: publishers in conversation with JISC to fund further study to have more accurate figures to put into model 12:39:34
• Loughborough response to report was to mandate OA starting Oct 2009, will be enforced via Personal Research Plan meeting with author. 12:50:11
• chriskeene: have updated blog post http://sn.im/j0677 12:52:49

Lunch happened somewhere around here, and Chris Keen gave an audio summary of the morning.

• aclobridge: RT @dfflanders ~100million in cost savings if we embraced open access publishing of publically funded research content 15:19:47

Institutional Policies and Processes for Mandate Compliance by Bill Hubbard from SHERPA

• mandates as a way of harmonising view (not as god’s commandment from on high) 15:20:52
• liking hubbard’s movement around room, shows his passion for what we can achieve. 15:25:27
• pointing out the multiple decisions authors could make in deciding how to publish OA, need to “mandate” common workflow decision easier 15:28:44
• “compliance…big it up” <- there are repository groups in every Russell and 1994 group who are there to support mandate 15:37:32
• RSP will look to compile a list of ppl in each HEIs so funders can go to them to find out who to contact that will follow up mandate compliance 15:50:54
• publishers need to see repo managers as friends as they police copyright

Auto paste of JISCBIDS spreadsheet marks.

So @cardcc suggested at #rpmeet that most everyone was using an offline template spreadsheet to mark #jiscbids and that it would be a real time saver if there was a way to auto copy and paste the offline spreadsheet in one go.  Well I don’t have a one go solution but I do have a three step solution that I was able to piece together over the weekend (while marking bids).

DISCLAIMER: THIS IS ONLY A PROTOTYPE AND IS NOT THE OFFICIAL WAY TO SUBMIT MARKS FOR JISCBIDS, THIS IS ONLY AN PROTOTYPE TO SHOW HOW THIS MIGHT BE ACHIEVED.  YOU STILL MUST SUBMIT BIDS USING THE CURRENT APPROVED FORM.

None the less, if you would like to help me tweak this form so that it could be useable in the future then please follow the below instructions:

1.) Download this Excel Spreadsheet.  This spreadsheet is the marking template.  Use the template spreadsheet exactly as it is set up.  If you change any of the headings rows or columns it will render the spreadsheet useless.

2.) Once you have completed filling out the template spreadsheet follow this screencast (w/audio) step by step for uploading to GoogleDocs. The above screencast will also show you how to publish an RSS feed from the document.  TO NOTE: this RSS feed must be a “cell” rss feed so the data can be sliced and diced in multiple way so that it is exposed on the backend system to multiple outputs.  Eventually, I’ll enable it for just the simple url for the SS, for now please just make sure you are exposing the right RSS feed.

3.) Once you have the RSS feed go to this form and fill it out.  Job done, well then there is a lot of back end processing that takes place to parse your spreadsheet into the various forms it needs to go to as part of the next step in the marking workflow.

Resources used in this work:

• http://docs.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=75507y
• jQuery and the joy of arrays

Independent UK Hardware Review of HTC Magic (Vodaphone) vs HTC G1 (T-Mobile)

Having fun with FlipCam lead to this quick side by side review of my G1 Android vs my partner’s new Magic Android (though if I had a mirror I could be doing the review using the new camcorder built into Magic, which auto pushes to YouTube as well).

In short, if you are looking to get a phone right now (May 2009) then the Magic outshines anything on the market (I am of course biased in favour of a open source operating system but my partner is not) and this is why she choose the Magic over the iPhone:

• Cheaper! £35 per month vs £45 for same tarriff/use.
• Battery Life! This was my biggest concern considering the G1, and thus far (two days in) the battery has lasted over eight hours on each charge and that is with us using the 3G continually to pull down new apps and muck about using the 3G between the two phones (IMing one another and sending pics/videos).
• Shorter Contract! 2 year contact for O2 iPhone (this is truly is an eternity in mobile technology considering the jump we have already seen from version 1 Android to version 2 <- can’t wait til my contract runs out to get v3!) vs. 12 month Vodaphone contract (aka will get two free phones in the same amount of time you one have your one iPhone).
• Smaller! What I would call the handbag factor, this will fit in one of those small pockets in the front of  your purse or a  front jean poket (do not keep in back pocket <- it is how I cracked my screen on the G1).  Also I’ll take another quick jab at my iPhone friends who can’t run multiple apps at the same time: which actually means more screen real-estate to get stuff done on the go than that giant black and silver brick!
• Sexier! Honestly I had my partner hold an iPhone and the Magic side by side and she liked how much lighter and less sharp the corners where on Magic.  She also thought the white Magic was more “Apple” like than the black shiny iPhone? <- go figure?
• Insurance bargain! Honestly get the business insurance from Vodaphone for an extra £3 per month, it means you can walk into the store at any time and they will hand you a new one on the spot (almost no questions).  I have my bank insurance and it is a nightmare, hence me not getting my cracked screen fixed yet.
• No proprietary plugs! There is a miniSD slot which means the storage can be increased and it uses USBmini to plug everything in, which means we can share our headsets and power plugs let alone ease of plugging into computer (and not paying fortunes for replacements).
• Ethical computing! <–! Last but certainly not least (IMHO)–> In an age of global financial crisis and corporate bastardising the technology we decide to spend our money on says a lot for how we want the world to turn out for the next generation.  In my opinion using an Open Source phone (like Android) says you want a world where we as a global community decide what we want, NOT one where a company decides how we want it.  Choice is yours, but this phone proves without a doubt that you can have both the ethical openness of Open Source while still having all the functionality and services of a proprietary company.  Truly, this could be the first time Open Source is the top of the stack and I can only hope it will stay this way (for a month or two anyways