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IR and Research Reports

 

« IR and eLearning | Question and Answer Session | IR and National Impetus »

Question (Keitha Booth, State Services Commission):

Just taking the national perspective a little bit further, we were discussing the issues relating to storing and making available by a single user interface publicly funded research reports and their data. Any advice on that?

Response:

JS — From our side we’ve been having conversations with people about the hosting of that material and how that might work, and the desire to make that material accessible in different markets and different environments, and so some of the concepts behind having different layers of repositories and different search levels across repositories. One of the major projects will be about making that material available, different ways to slice and dice the contents.

We are interested in projects like the humanities research network in Australia which has been funded to develop access to humanities resources, because that network of humanities researchers wherever they may be, whoever they may be linked to, has a common interest. That could form a repository overlay, in its own right, it doesn’t matter where but the contents actually still provide … and that’s in an academic environment, in a non-academic environment where this material becomes available it could be accessed in many different ways.

My belief is that we need to just get as much content up and out there and accessible as we can and then to design the access mechanisms that would suit the user base that needs to get access to that content in whatever way, shape or form. To some regard that whether it’s learning or research objects, I don’t know why would you split them off necessarily or keep them apart at a different time, if you can at least get them into somewhere where that becomes accessible you can make those decisions at a later time.

AS — A slightly different aspect to that, just to echo what Cathrine [Harboe-Ree] just said: getting the content is the important thing and in that regard there are several places in the world that have. I use the word mandatory because it’s a nice short word, but it doesn’t go down well in Australia. Probably the best way to go is we need to make it part of the routine process of research. For example, the National Institute of Health in the USA, the Wellcome Trust in the UK, the Research Council in the UK, are looking at a policy. And basically these policies run along the following lines, that if you get a grant to do research then part of your responsibility is to deposit an electronic copy of any publications that come out of it with your university. That’s all.

Or if you get a scholarship grant, then it’s your responsibility to deposit an electronic copy of the thesis. That’s all you need to do, and the universities would suddenly find people coming up and giving them CDs or sending them files and they would quickly learn they have to do something with the wretched things. We would find an immediate step change in behaviour.

That’s one of the things that the New Zealand Digital Strategy Group, whoever, needs to start thinking about, as to whether you actually issue directives or encouragements or an expectation that these sorts of things ought to happen. If you’re getting a publicly funded grant we expect to collect a copy of it. What happens to it? Whether it goes into its usual archive, whether it’s open access, whether it’s restricted and so on, those are details that can be tailored to the individual issue.

CHR — I take it by research report that you mean a pre or not necessary publication at all, and I think the thing around that that interests me, if your institution would value that, having a central repository of that material, then that’s an extremely good reason to collect it.

And the only question you need to ask then is does my software enable the appropriate access controls, because it’s … publicly available information at the point that you … so you need to have repository software that allows you to limit access to it to selected people.