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IR Closing Remarks

 

« IR and Application Service Provision | Question and Answer Session | »

Closing Statements (John Rankin, Affinity Ltd):

I think it’s probably a good time to thank people for the amazing amount of information we’ve got both from our speakers and comments from the floor.

I am really not going to try and summarise all the information heard today. Just perhaps to touch on a few things that struck a chord with me.

Firstly, just bringing it right back to basics that we heard several times. That this is a basic information right, the right to access the results of publicly funded research. The citizens have a right to expect that, which means that institutions engaged in research have a duty to make that information available, this is not for debate, we really must be doing it.

Then we have to be clear about what are our institutional reasons, a number of people said there’s different kinds of repositories, these will determined by your reasons for putting one in place, your requirements and your priorities.

It’s really easy to get started, whether it’s an Arthur Sale coming across and doing something in two weeks, whether it’s a hosted service that can be bought off the shelf.

So the barriers to entry are very low, but we have even at the beginning we have to think about succession planning, what’s our future, because we’ll be doing this in perpetuity we have to know that whatever steps we take, we know how to get out of that down the track, because we can be sure we will need to get out of it.

We need to reach out to our research communities, and that’s hard work that needs to be sustained. We have to do things that show value to our researchers and make them willing participants, whether it’s voluntary or mandatory we still need our researchers to be willing contributors.

The software is really not important, whatever kind of repository you decide you want, there is a solution out there that will do the job, you can walk away with the University of Queensland CD and get started tomorrow.

We’ve heard a number of different styles and they are all successful for the roles that they have been seeking to fulfil.

Also heard the indication that the repository is almost a starting point, that once we have rich collections of digital content we can start to think about doing clever things with them, what you might call content remixing.

We heard about the notion that we can assemble in different ways for different purposes for different media. And it makes it easier to carry out interdisciplinary research activities.

We are going to need money to build the capability as a nation, we’re a small country, with scarce resources, everywhere in the world that’s doing this people are saying the resources are scarce, we have got to decide what is the optimum way to build a capability.

What capability do we need? How are we going to build it?

And then having built the capability, we need to be prepared to support this piece of research infrastructure in the long term. How are we going to keep this running potentially for ever?

We all need to walk out of here starting to think about the answer to one question: what am I going to do? It’s not what somebody else is going to do, what am I going to do?

And today I think we heard it’s because people have gone away to find out what it needs to make this a success, I’m going to lobby my institution, I’m going to lobby the funders, and I’m going to make it happen because I think it is really important, and so it’s about each of us taking responsibility, what small thing can I do to make a positive difference. It’s going to be very challenging but very worthwhile and I think we’ve heard from all the speakers how enthusiastic they are and it is fun to do this stuff, which is really good.

And with that I would like to ask you to join me in giving a huge thank you to the panel for all the thought and effort that our speakers have put into this.

Thank you.