Sunday 7 October 2007

The Future of Scholarly Communication : workshop report

Report of a joint NSF/JISC workshop:
http://www.sis.pitt.edu/~repwkshop/NSF-JISC-report.pdf

Some highlights:
  • Access to research : "Success stories, such as TREC for information retrieval research [Voorhees] or the Human Genome Project [HGP], have devoted substantial expertise to creating the necessary infrastructure and managing the datasets with a very clear understanding of how they fit the research practices in their fields."
  • Access to research : "Cyberscholarship needs superdata centers, which combine the storage and organization of vast amounts of data with substantial computing power to analyze it. Building such centers requires investment and long-term commitment on the part of an organization or discipline. While equipment can be purchased, expertise takes longer to establish. Superdata centers and the researchers who use them will need several years before they become truly effective."
  • Value-added services : "As our systems grow more sophisticated, we will see applications that support not just links between authors and papers but relationships between users, data and information repositories, and communities. What is required is a mechanism to support these relationships that leads to information exchange, adaptation and recombination – which, in itself, will constitute a new type of data repository."
  • Also a reference to the need for summarisation on p 10 referencing humanities research in particular.
The CyberScholarship roadmap includes automated metadata generation; provenance establishment; source validation; annotation tools; and contextual semantics.

No comments: