[GOAL] Re: Wikipedia founder to help in [UK] government's research scheme

[Tim Brody]

On Wed, 2012-05-02 at 19:00 +0900, Andrew A. Adams wrote:
> >     "The [UK] government has drafted in the Wikipedia founder Jimmy
> >     Wales to help make all taxpayer-funded academic research in Britain
> >     available online to anyone who wants to read or use it."
>  
> I was hoping that the new government might be less star-struck than the 
> previous one. Plus ca change, plus ca meme chose, it would seem. We really 
> don't need Jimmy Wales advising on this. The team behind eprints has been 
> (with minimal funding) developing the technology needed for many years and 
> there are many academics in the UK much better versed in the intricacies of 
> UK academic work and life than Mr Wales. Sigh. I foresee another lost couple 
> of years wasted on this instead of getting to grips with the known problem 
> and the known solution (including providing better funding for eprints 
> development to the team that created it and still does the software 
> engineering for it).

Thanks for the kudos.

This article did take me to the UK.gov working group:
http://www.researchinfonet.org/publish/wg-expand-access/

Unfortunately they seem to have a focus on "big deal" licensing (!) and
author-pays economics. I haven't heard anything from their institutional
repository sub-group, although there are a lot of layers between me and
them ... hopefully IRs - a solution to access - won't get drowned out by
licensing/author-pays reform - a solution to library budget constraints
- in their report.

In terms of the UK "Gateway to Research" I expect that is the political
equivalent to "data.gov.uk". It doesn't make much sense to have national
gateways as a research tool and anyway in implementation I can't see
much chance of a "one solution to rule them all" working. In all
likelihood we will continue as we are - institutional based
EPrints/DSpaces/etc. that are harvested into a central tool for tracking
mandate compliance and "value for money" for UK spending.
(This is already in the pipeline with the RCUK ROS system - most likely
using something like CERIF to share data within and between
institutions, funders, and the UK and EU governments)

-- 
Tim Brody

School of Electronics and Computer Science
University of Southampton
Southampton
SO17 1BJ
United Kingdom

Email: tdb2 at ecs.soton.ac.uk
Tel: +44 (0)23 8059 7698
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