STATUS REPORT ON THE NATIONAL eRESEARCH CAPABILITY
Response by the Council of Australian University Librarians (CAUL)
This response was prepared on behalf of CAUL by the CAUL Research Advisory Committee and the CAUL Executive.
Contact the CAUL Office at or 02 6125 2990
28 August 2014, updated 23 September 2014
Introduction
The Council of Australian University Librarians (CAUL) is pleased to have the opportunity to make a submission to the Status Report on the National eResearch Capability. CAUL, as the peak leadership organisation for university libraries in Australia, seeks to enhance the value and capacity of Australian university libraries and to influence scholarship, learning, and information policies and practices relevant to Australian higher education. Our members are the University Librarians or equivalent of institutions which have representation on Universities Australia.
CAUL is committed to strengthening the role of university libraries as partners in the research process and in promoting their libraries’ unique contribution to scholarship and scholarly communication. The contribution made by university libraries is critical to the success of Australia’s higher education system, one of the chief components of a successful national research and innovation system. Of particular relevance is CAUL’s encouragement of, and involvement in, open scholarship initiatives, including the development of members' capacity in provision of repositories, research data management services and involvement in government research assessment programs.
Over the past few years the role of university libraries has been changing to provide greater support for research through:
- provision of open access repositories to store, promote and preserve the digital scholarly assets and outputs of universities;
- management and, increasingly, curation, of research resources such as datasets and digital collections;
- publication, especially electronic and often open publication, of material based on research; and
- research data management services, systems, policy and advice
Further details about CAUL and its activities can be found at
Submission
This submission addresses the following four (of nine) main elements of the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) program in which member libraries have been most involved, addressing each against the elements suggested where appropriate.
2. Australian Access Federation (AAF)
3. Australian National Data Service (ANDS)
6. National eResearch Collaboration, Tools and Resources (NeCTAR)
9. Research Data Storage Infrastructure (RDSI)
2. Australian Access Federation (AAF)
Appropriateness and take-up
The AAF has delivered a valuable framework to enhance researcher collaboration, with all Australian universities being members of the AAF. University libraries have been involved in the implementation of some NeCTAR projects which use AAF authentication. The AAF has been used to enable researchers’ access to numerous project-based infrastructure and collaborations. A growing, but still relatively small, number of publishers can work with Shibboleth authentication and have joined the AAF list of services.
Governance & Lessons Learned
Perhaps the inclusion of a CAUL representative on the AAF Executive Committee may have assisted to extend and enhance the use of AAF provisioning to publisher and other scholarly resources.
Take-up
Research groups, projects and publishers continue to adopt the AAF..
University libraries can and do play a role in referring researchers to the AAF for the provision of services to research groups.
CAUL members have not generally seen the benefits of accessing publisher resources using Shibboleth instead of IP authentication. The advantage of IP authentication is that it requires minimal set-up and works seamlessly via EzProxy or similar systems. Also as not all publishers are Shibboleth-enabled, libraries would be required to maintain dual authentication systems.
Without a central imperative, or significant and clear improvements on current services and access, few libraries have opted to implement Shibboleth authentication for the relatively few publisher resources or to local resources currently available, and only on an ad-hoc basis.
Comparable developments / comparisons
Shibboleth authentication has been used in the UK to provision access to publisher resources to universities. The move to Shibboleth, as with its predecessor Athens, was a direct result of not having a comprehensive IP authentication option across UK universities.
3. Australian National Data Service (ANDS)
Appropriateness
CAUL has a strong working partnership with ANDS and through this partnership our members, recognise the contribution that ANDS has made to the whole university research community, including libraries, through the development of infrastructure, expertise and services, assisted by the implementation of many institution-specific funded projects. It is unlikely these developments in infrastructure and expertise could have been achieved operationally without the funded ANDS program. ANDS has provided leadership in the development of a research culture which manages, describes and shares data. The establishment of ANDS was very timely, as the discussion on research data management has become very active in recent years. ANDS has given Australia a leading voice internationally in this discussion.
What may now be valuable is a national approach which better links research outputs in a more holistic way – from data through to tools and publication.
Contribution to technology platform
The development of the Research Data Australia repository and institutional metadata repositories for capturing data descriptions has created a valuable registry of Australian research datasets. Sustaining the Research Data Australia service will be necessary if we are to continue to advance research data sharing.
Funding to build institutional metadata repositories has enabled development of a number of solutions based on RedBox and VIVO open software solutions. Development of, and support for, the RIF-CS metadata schema promoted the importance of data description in the management, sharing and discovery of research data.
ANDS’ support of the DataCite Digital Object Identifier (DOI) standard has positioned the whole Australian sector well as it is increasingly required by international publishers when making research data available. The centralisation of this service has been more efficient than all institutions pursuing it individually. ANDS’ recent role in advocating the use of ORCID identifiers for researchers looks to be similarly useful. CAUL supports the use of this type of persistent identifier for long term access to research.
ANDS projects also funded many data capture projects which have fed data and metadata to institutional storage. This has been widely beneficial across the sector.
Governance
The ANDS Steering Committee has been able to ensure that benefits are received by the wider academic community. ANDS has encouraged units within institutions, e.g., Library and Research Offices to work collaboratively to encourage 'better research through better data'. The majority of CAUL member institutions received some funding from ANDS commensurate with their size, and this has enabled a broad spread of new research data management services, practice and capability to be developed and supported. ANDS actively sought advice from the sector, and has encouraged both internal and external collaborative practices including a community or communities of practice.
Take-up
All universities have benefited from the ANDS program through the semi-competitive project funding process, and through its education programs. Most institutions have developed a research data metadata repository which can contribute data descriptions to Research Data Australia, many of which are operated and managed by CAUL members.
The CAUL members have also benefited from the capability building opportunities that ANDS projects funded, with a wide range of staff being able to work with researchers and other parts of their institutions.to develop and support research data management. Before the ANDS funding, few institutions had institutional research data management policies but now most do. CAUL members have generally been able to be part of the process of creating them as a result of ANDS funding and training.
Universities have been able to operationalise research data management processes, and the population of their respective metadata repositories to varying degrees, relative to institutional preparedness, strategy and funding. Impact on research culture and practices continues to develop as researchers become aware of research funding agency policies and benefits of open data, and CAUL members have been an active part of this process.
Lessons learned
The approach taken by ANDS to fund the development of both a central and institutional metadata repositories presented some risks, however these were largely successfully managed. The separation of responsibility for storage (to ARCS/RDSI) and metadata/data management (to ANDS) did create some inefficiencies and confusion, and the establishment of a single governance model going forward would simplify planning and expenditure.
There is some feeling in the sector that the RIF-CS metadata scheme, although highly functional, is too complex to ever be rolled out to researchers to describe their datasets directly, and it is suggested that simpler tools or a RIF-CS Lite schema be developed to promote self-description of datasets by researchers. This might be a suitable project for future funding.
Comparable developments / comparisons
The ANDS program has positioned Australia as a world leader in research data management and open data.
6. National eResearch Collaboration, Tools and Resources (NeCTAR)
Appropriateness
The NeCTAR program has funded a wide variety of virtual laboratories and eResearch tools which serve the disciplinary needs of many research communities in Australia. These services could not have been produced without the leadership and funding provided. While most CAUL members have had little direct involvement in NeCTAR projects, some libraries have had the opportunity, through these projects, to collaborate more with Information Technology staff/groups and researchers..
Governance
The competitive funding process may have created capacity issues for many institutions with a sense that institutions needed funding and dedicated expert staff resources to bid for research funds. Some projects were not successful in achieving a second tranche of funds and so could not reach their full potential.
Take-up
There is some feeling in the marketplace that although supported and represented through the HUNI project, the social sciences and humanities remain largely underrepresented in the range of funded projects.
Lessons learned
CAUL provided a response to the NeCTAR consultation paper in 2010 and at that time noted a concern about possible confusion in the research community between ANDS and other providers. Specifically, services with names such as the Research Data Storage Infrastructure (RDSI) and the Research Cloud may confuse the intended audience. At that time, CAUL recommended that NeCTAR and ANDS determine a joint communication strategy or otherwise make the demarcation and means of engagement clearer.
NeCTAR ran webinars and workshops to help spread new knowledge and skills amongst developers to try to standardise approaches to common problems
9. Research Data Storage Infrastructure (RDSI)
Contribution to technology platform
CAUL believes that robust storage infrastructure is an essential complement to research data management initiatives and that the development of usable interfaces for authors and end users is a work in progress and this work will ensure datasets are discoverable.
RDSI nodes have been implemented in collaboration with state based eResearch service providers to various timelines and degree of completion to date. Some nodes still require the provision of considerable technical support in order for researchers to use them, as user friendly researcher interfaces are still in development.
Governance
Many decisions appeared to be made without reference to related projects such as ANDS,and stakeholders such as CAUL were rarely consulted.
Take-up
Datasets change in significance over time and the classification of potential datasets for storage has presented problems. The service continues to be developed with author interfaces and services which would promote self-service. At present the deposit of datasets requires significant support from IT professionals. Increased scale of the service to more authors will be possible through the development of author side interfaces for deposit, metadata creation and rights management. Service providers should be providing the home institutions of authors with reports on collaborations and data deposited, so library staff (or data management staff in other departments) can add records to metadata repositories and curate the datasets as a managed institutional resource.
Lessons learned
Partnering with state based research support agencies has proved effective, however agencies have tended to customise the implementation to local conditions which has resulted in some duplication in development work, for the same desired outcome. The data storage application process could consider that research good enough to be funded by agencies such as the ARC and NHMRC should be considered important enough to store. Author side services and interfaces could have been developed at a national level, or better shared across service providers in order to ensure timely delivery.
While the existence of the data storage infrastructure has been beneficial, more work needs to be done to ensure its proper ongoing management and to ensure that the maximum benefit can be derived. The focus of RDSI on hardware has meant that some aspects of research data management have been neglected. Again, the artificial division between ANDS and ARCS/RDSI meant that there were inefficiencies in the implementation of this infrastructure.
Conclusion
Continued national investment in research information infrastructure will be critical to Australia’s competitive position through research and innovation. At the very minimum it is critical that we sustain the significant amount of valuable services and infrastructure currently underpinning research if we are to retain and realise the benefit from valuable research data and tools already in existence.
As library and information professionals, CAUL recommends that any future governance and investment model realises the value of taking a holistic approach to the research lifecycle, linking investment in research data, scholarly outputs, publications and tools, to form a sustainable national research information ecosystem.
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