SHARE: Shared Access Research Ecosystem – Jisc and CNI conference 10 July 2014

SHARE:Shared Access Research Ecosystem

Elliott Shore

A talk in five parts

1. Quick introduction to SHARE2. A surfeit of individual projects3. An historical interlude4. Searching for Coherence5. Back to SHARE

1. Introducing SHARE

SHARE is a higher education and research community initiative to advance the preservation of, access to, and reuse of research

outputs.

SHARE will develop solutions that address the compelling

interest shared by researchers, libraries, universities, funding agencies, and other key stakeholders to maximize research

impact, today and in the future.

SHARE aims to make the inventory of research assets more discoverable and more accessible and to enable the research

community to build upon these assets in creative and productive ways.

SHARE Partnership

Center for Open Science

SHARE Development Partner

Building open scholarship infrastructure

• Open Science Framework• Reproducibility Projects• Badges for Open Practices

centerforopenscience.org

Center for Open Science

What Is The Goal of SHARE?

– Creating robust ecosystem of repositories– Leveraging existing research environment– Capturing and exposing research outputs– Enabling and enhancing discovery, access,

reuse, preservation

Current Situation

• Difficulty in keeping abreast of release of publications, datasets, other research outputs

• No single, structured way to report research output releases in timely and ubiquitous manner

• Emphasis on publications = data silos, data version control morass, incomplete contextualization

2. A surfeit of individual projects

Here is a subset of another space

That also cries out for coherence

3. An historical interlude

Continuities: Legacy Thinking

• The library is the institution that bears the deepest marks of the thinking of the last century and a half.

• It was a time when many thought that the increasingly complex world that was emerging in the mid-to-late 19th century could be managed through reducing each problem to discrete parts and tasks.

• The legacy of 19th century thinking can perhaps be seen most clearly our organizational structures.

Change: Digital Disruption• The penetration of the dynamic, changeable nature

of digital, Web-based, linked information technologies to universities and to research libraries has shown the fissures and exposed the assumptions in some of the fixed structures into which we have organized ourselves and how we think about our work.

• Then: Discrete Now: Fluid• Then: Contained Now: Ubiquitous• Then: One profession Now: Many professions• Then: Hierarchal and rigid Now: Collaborative

Finding a Middle Ground• Old ways of thinking effect how we tackle

new problems.• Can we weigh our older ideas of order

against the new realities we face?

• Can we get beyond binary oppositions:– centralization versus decentralization– control versus openness– fixed versus shifting categories

4. Searching for Coherence

“The inherited norms, customs, traditions, and institutions that have structured research and teaching now need to be constructively challenged, redefined, and subsequently reassembled. The next two decades could witness an extraordinary fluorescence of activity among universities and colleges focused on repositioning, consolidation, and convergence.” - Charles Henry, “Higher Ground.”

The Opportunities

• We are a long way down the path of experimentation.

• We have many of the parts of the puzzle in our hands.

• We have sympathetic funders.• We have a need to reduce the cost of higher

education.• We have a tradition of cooperation and

collaboration.

How Coherence at Scale could work

Discovery Curation Access and Reuse Preservation

Instead of every institution recreating the cycle alone…

… can we connect existing large-scale digital initiatives into a coherent system?

The Concerns• We take pride in our own projects and want to see them grow

and prosper, tend them, and protect them.• We compete with one another for funding these projects – in

the US its called the $20,000 person – securing each individual project rather than the whole field.

• We are subject to our own local issues which usually trump the larger good.

• We are both goaded on by commercial interests and often take cheaper immediate measures rather than looking towards long-term solutions.

• Crisis moments often lead to institutional rather than collective decision-making processes.

5. Back to SHARE

Notification Service

Research Release Events (Source)

Research Release Events (Consumer)

Registry

Registry and Discovery

Who Benefits?ResearchersUniversities

Funding AgenciesIndustry

General Public

SHARE and Other Researcher Initiatives

CHORUSORCID

CrossRef/FundRefInternational

What about …

Data?Author rights?

Institutional rights?Text- and data-mining?

Sharing? Reuse?Interoperability?

Final Thoughts

• “The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.” James Baldwin

• “…collaboration, diversity, the exchange of ideas, and building on other people's achievements are at the heart of the creative process. An education that focuses only on the individual in isolation is bound to frustrate some of those possibilities.” Sir Ken Robinson

Web: www.arl.org/shareE-mail: [email protected]: @SHARE_researchKnowledge Base: bit.ly/TTE6jt

Questions?