Towards a change process planning tool

The relationship between a product and its design process is generally complex and not fully understood. When modifying a product, industry still rarely considers the implementation process and its consequences for other design activities in the company, which is hard to assess with conventional planning methods. Although change processes are highly constrained, product and process constraints are not usually considered together or traded off against each other when planning the change. Inadequate assessment and planning of the change implementation process can lead to costly knock-on effects across the product and the design process. This paper argues for a combination of change and process research and discusses requirements for a change process planning tool. It proposes a system for the analysis of the impact of change on the product as well as other company activities. Then, a more informed selection between change alternatives is possible

Next generation repositories: Scaling up repositories to a global knowledge commons

The current system for disseminating research, which is dominated by commercial publishers, is far from ideal. In an economic sense, prices for both subscriptions and APCs are over-inflated and will likely continue to rise at unacceptable rates. Additionally, there are significant inequalities in the international publishing system both in terms of access and participation. The incentives built into the system, which oblige researchers to publish in traditional publishing venues, perpetuate these problems and greatly stifle our ability to evolve and innovate. The Next Generation Repositories offers an alternative vision, “to position repositories as the foundation for a distributed, globally networked infrastructure for scholarly communication, on top of which layers of value-added services will be deployed, thereby transforming the system, making it more research-centric, open to and supportive of innovation, while also collectively managed by the scholarly community.” An important component of this vision is that repositories will provide access to a wide variety of research outputs, creating the conditions whereby a greater diversity of contributions to the scholarly record will be accessible, and also formally recognized in research assessment processes. This is very much is aligned with others strategic thinking, such as MIT’s Future of Libraries Report and Lorcan Dempsey’s notion of the “inside-out” library, that are defining a new role of libraries in the 21st century. This future involves a shift away from libraries purchasing content for their local users, towards libraries curating and sharing with the rest of the world the research outputs produced at their institution. However, to achieve this vision, we need to adopt new functionalities and technologies in repositories and build additional services such as standardized usage metrics, peer review and social networking on top of them. The Next Generation Repositories report provides recommendations for these new behaviours and technologies to move the vision forward. There are already several groups actively working on the adoption of these technologies and services, including OpenAIRE, National Institute of Informatics (Japan) and a US Implementers Group facilitated led by COAR. This paper will present the vision for next generation repositories, provide an overview of the conceptual model including the role of libraries and hubs that will offer services to the network of repositories. In addition, we will provide an overview of current activities to put the next generation repositories infrastructure and services in place

Practical webby FDOs with RO-Crate and FAIR Signposting:Experiences and lessons learned

Research Object Crate (RO-Crate) is a lightweight method to package research outputs along with their metadata. Signposting provides a simple yet powerful approach to navigate scholarly objects on the Web. Combining these technologies form a "webby" implementation of the FAIR Digital Object principles which is suitable for retrofitting to existing data infrastructures or even for ad-hoc research objects using regular Web hosting platforms. Here we give an update of recent community development and adoption of RO-Crate and Signposting. It is notable that programmatic access and more detailed profiles have received high attention, as well as several FDO implementations that use RO-Crate

Next Generation Repositories: Behaviours and Technical Recommendations of the COAR Next Generation Repositories Working Group

In April 2016, the Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) launched the Next Generation Repository Working Group to identify new functionalities and technologies for repositories. In this report, we are pleased to present the results of the work of this group, including recommendations for the adoption of new technologies, standards, and protocols that will help repositories become more integrated into the web environment and enable them to play a larger role in the scholarly communication ecosystem. At COAR, we believe the globally distributed network of more than 3000 repositories can be leveraged to create a more sustainable and innovative system for sharing and building on the results of research. Collectively, repositories can provide a comprehensive view of the research of the whole world, while also enabling each scholar and institution to participate in the global network of scientific and scholarly enquiry. Building additional services such as standardized usage metrics, peer review and social networking on top of a trusted global network of repositories has the potential to offer a viable alternative. The vision underlying the work of Next Generation Repositories is, “to position repositories as the foundation for a distributed, globally networked infrastructure for scholarly communication, on top of which layers of value added services will be deployed, thereby transforming the system, making it more research-centric, open to and supportive of innovation , while also collectively managed by the scholarly community.

Understanding information needs of Australian business organisations

Over the past decade, universities have used repositories as channels to create access to research outputs. Increasingly government and universities are seeking to optimise the impact of their research, particularly to improve public policy. This study looks at the impact of access to research from the perspective of business associations and researchers. It finds that business organisations value trusted timely, relevant research. Accessibility and peer-reviewed research outputs are highly valued but little used. Barriers to use of the research include availability (material not openly accessible), discoverability (ranking on search engines) and knowledge by trusted mediators and connectivity (presentation as part of a cohort of scholarly knowledge). Barriers for researchers include lack of rewards and recognition for research outputs focused on these organisations. The theories used in the study include triple helix, Kautto-Koivula and Huhtaniemi’s model for knowledge and competence management and actor network theory. The study concludes that significant work is required to improve the accessibility and discoverability of research. In particular, the search paradigm is insufficient to provide optimal awareness of and impact of research.Australian Library and Information Associatio

Evaluating FAIR Digital Object and Linked Data as distributed object systems

FAIR Digital Object (FDO) is an emerging concept that is highlighted by European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) as a potential candidate for building a ecosystem of machine-actionable research outputs. In this work we systematically evaluate FDO and its implementations as a global distributed object system, by using five different conceptual frameworks that cover interoperability, middleware, FAIR principles, EOSC requirements and FDO guidelines themself. We compare the FDO approach with established Linked Data practices and the existing Web architecture, and provide a brief history of the Semantic Web while discussing why these technologies may have been difficult to adopt for FDO purposes. We conclude with recommendations for both Linked Data and FDO communities to further their adaptation and alignment.Comment: 40 pages, submitted to PeerJ C

Web-based writing support: making it useable for distance teachers

This paper considers the issues that distance teachers in higher education who are not writing specialists face in supporting their students’ academic writing development. We discuss the usefulness of open web-based writing support resources, and propose the need for a system that serves as an interface with these resources. Such a system should help teachers to make quick selections of materials that can be offered to students to address specific problems in the students’ assignments. We consider principles for the design of such a system, based on the experience of building and testing a small prototype for tutors on an Open University Masters in Education course

Reminiscing About 15 Years of Interoperability Efforts

Over the past fifteen years, our perspective on tackling information interoperability problems for web-based scholarship has evolved significantly. In this opinion piece, we look back at three efforts that we have been involved in that aptly illustrate this evolution: OAI-PMH, OAI-ORE, and Memento. Understanding that no interoperability specification is neutral, we attempt to characterize the perspectives and technical toolkits that provided the basis for these endeavors. With that regard, we consider repository-centric and web-centric interoperability perspectives, and the use of a Linked Data or a REST/HATEAOS technology stack, respectively. We also lament the lack of interoperability across nodes that play a role in web-based scholarship, but end on a constructive note with some ideas regarding a possible path forward