Autumn School a success

The Autumn School on Tools for researchers finished yesterday. This proved to be very interesting. Though the topic was rather broad this also allowed for the exchange of insights across disciplines and at different levels of tooling. Common issues are: responsibility for the tool (is it for the IT department, the research group itself or the library), how to discover and manage researcher demands (usually come up with just in time requests), sustainability (how to ensure maintenance, development and archiving) and open source vs closed source software.
Typical for the Netherlands is the challenge faced by the universities of Applied Sciences (HBOs). They have only recently been given the responsibility to undertake research. This raises questions on: which research should we be doing, what is our position relative to the research universities and which tools do we need.

Animation on the Elements by Tom Lehrer

This does bring back memories. Having a chemist as a dad means you learn all sorts of strange quirks of science. Excellent animation by the way :-)

Tools for Researchers Autumn School

Just a quick plug from my work ;-)
Sorry, this is in Dutch, but the actual activity will also be in Dutch...

Van 2 tot 4 november 2009 organiseert SURFacademy in samenwerking met de Universiteit Leiden de Autumn School ‘Tools voor Onderzoekers’.

Er zijn veel (generieke) tools die handig kunnen zijn bij zowel het verrichten van onderzoek, als het communiceren over en publiceren van de resultaten. Deze Autumn School biedt de gelegenheid om kennis te maken en ervaring op te doen met deze tools. De Autumn School richt zich op onderzoekers en ondersteuners voor onderzoekers, werkzaam aan universiteiten en hogescholen.



De school start met een inleiding op het onderzoeksproces en geeft een overzicht van het brede scala aan tools dat van belang kan zijn. Vervolgens worden hier vier thema’s uitgelicht. De tools zullen in de vorm van presentaties en workshops worden uitgediept.



· In het thema e-science/grid computing wordt uitleg gegeven wat deze technologie inhoudt en de mogelijkheden die deze biedt voor onderzoek. Aan de hand van voorbeelden wordt getoond hoe deze techniek in projecten is toegepast.

· ICT biedt ook mogelijkheden om onderzoeksdata gemakkelijker op te slaan en te delen. In dit thema worden voorbeelden gegeven van faciliteiten voor het online opslaan en delen van onderzoeksdata.

· Onderzoekers werken meestal samen in nationale en internationale teams. Deze samenwerking kan met collaboratories worden ondersteund. Verschillende samenwerkingsomgevingen worden getoond die zijn gebruikt in het onderzoek en ervaringen worden gedeeld.

· Als laatste thema zullen een aantal Web2.0 tools worden gepresenteerd die kunnen worden ingezet op verschillende plaatsen in het onderzoeksproces.



Naast de tools in deze thema’s wordt u bij deze Autumn School ook gevraagd een eigen tool mee te nemen die u kunt delen met de andere deelnemers. Dit kan een tool zijn die aansluit bij de eerdere voorbeelden, maar het kan ook een hele andere tool zijn.

Voor meer informatie, waaronder het volledige programma en de mogelijk om je op te geven, zie: http://www.surffoundation.nl/nl/bijeenkomsten/Pages/AutumnSchool.aspx



Het SURFacademy programma wordt gezamenlijk uitgevoerd door SURFnet en SURFfoundation, in samenwerking met de Nederlandse universiteiten en hogescholen. De bijeenkomsten van de SURFacademy staan open voor iedereen die werkzaam is binnen het Nederlandse hoger onderwijs.



Datum: maandag 2 november 2009 t/m woensdag 4 november 2009

Kosten: € 150

Locatie: Leiden

Open Access week: activities in the Netherlands

19-23 October is the international Open Access week. There will be a lot of activities in the Netherlands to promote Open Access. You can find a (hopefully quite comprehensive) list here.

Video on Open Access

A great little video on Open Access, created by Sparc...

Open Access 101, from SPARC from Karen Rustad on Vimeo.

Can I reuse research data? The answer according to Dutch law

A new report has just been published on the legal situation regarding the reuse of research data, according to Dutch law. This report was commissioned by SURF and has been written by CIER. The report (in Dutch) can be found here.

Of course this is quite complicated legal stuff, so to keep it simple there are a few standard questions which have been answered. This straightforward explanation can be found here.
(Don't forget to read the disclaimer though)

Great holiday in Slovenia

I have just returned from a great holiday in Slovenia. I was very impressed by the beautiful landscapes: mountains, waterfalls, lakes and hills. Ljubljana is a small but very attractive and friendly capital. The mediterranean was hot but beautiful. Piran was very pretty, yet rather busy. But most of all I was impressed by the original Karst: rills, gulleys, Dolines, huge sinkholes, natural bridges, a veeery large Polje and of course the caves. I was especially impressed by the huge canyon in the Skocjan cave.

A golden road with a green lining?

As more and more organisations are realising the benefits of open access a discussion is still taking place on the road to take to Open Access. I do wonder where we will go? Perhaps there will not be two separate roads, Green and Gold. Perhaps the future is Gold OA, if enough publishers will adopt this model. This would certainly make it a lot easier for researchers, rather than having to also add their publication to a repository. A number of publishers are past experimenting on switching their business model to earning their income from article processing costs. It would be helpful if the research funders mandate Open Access to all their funded research. This is now taking place, as the NIH, Welcome trust started off and now also EUROHORC and ESF have taken position.

However (Institutional) Repositories will probably continue to exist. Not all materials are published in journals (take grey literature, data and learning materials for instance). However: nobody wants to refer to the same publication in different places. The journal is where the articles are and where traffic and publicity goes to.

Institutional Repositories can still perform a valuable function for archiving reasons and can form a place to collect all the research materials together. The questions remains who will provide aggregations which collect usage statistics and citation scores and will provide persistent identifiers.

Comparison of Costs and Benefits of Open Access for UK, Netherlands and Denmark

The Houghton studies on the costs and benefits of Open Access from the UK (commissioned by JISC), the Netherlands (commissioned by SURF) and Denmark (commissoned by DEFF) were compared in a study commissioned by Knowledge Exchange. Noticeably in all three countries benefits can be achieved by switching to an open access model. The benefits are different in the three countries though, these are mainly due to difference in scale between the three countries and how the education is organised in the three countries.

On the 22 June 2009 this combined report was discussed in a seminar with various members of the European commission and other European bodies present. At this seminar not only the report was presented, but responses from various stakeholders and implications for funders were also discussed. Two speakers from the European commission gave a presentation on the activities they are undertaking in the field of Open Access.

For the details please see : http://www.knowledge-exchange.info/Default.aspx?ID=316
The photographs of the seminar can be seen at: http://www.knowledge-exchange.info/Default.aspx?ID=321

Video on the archiving of enhanced publications

The video below was created as a part of the European DRIVER II project. In this animation created by Eugene Durr for the royal library and Delft University you can see how the archiving of enhanced publications is organised. The main challenge is to archive the text, the data and the relationship between these two quite different files.
You might recognise the voice over ;-)
See: http://www.surfmedia.nl/app/video/D5CHvHq2d27nAnHDhOrbxaOo/play?format_id=GyhlyRi8C5t5dzDRwit19kDf&mode=object