Universities and research organisations across the world from The Open University in the UK to Landcare Research in New Zealand have launched open access initiatives, moving beyond a centuries-old paper-based platform for sharing research.
Open Access
Universities and research organisations across the world from The Open University in the UK to Landcare Research in New Zealand have launched open access initiatives, moving beyond a centuries-old paper-based platform for sharing research.
A great example is NARCIS in the Netherlands, founded in 2005 and now hosts over 1.1 million open access publications across nearly 3,000 member organisations.
Australian tertiary institutions have also moved towards open access with the Australian Open Access Support Group (AOASG) whose membership includes the Australian National University, University of Western Australia and Macquarie University.
There is also the Research Data Australia repository, a collaboration between the Australian National Data Service and data providers including the University of Melbourne, Monash University, Geoscience Australia and CSIRO.
Open Access encourages sharing and collaboration by making research easier to find, use and cite. It also reduces the reliance on collections of journal subscriptions and publications that can cost universities millions of dollars per year.
Research Management Systems (RMS)
Universities implement research management systems to assist with workflows and business intelligence surrounding the administration of research grant applications through to the publishing of papers and research artefacts. They have a number of options to consider but might select providers such as ResearchMaster or Symplectic who have developed specialised platforms for research management. Or, they might choose to extend existing workflow, record or document management systems to accomodate the use cases of research management. Utilising products like HP Trim with the support of companies such as iCognition, or products like Infiniti provided by Intelledox.
CKAN as a Platform for Open Access and Executable Papers
Whatever the RMS solution an integrated open data publishing platform enables moderated and automatic publication of metadata about grants and research from the RMS workflow as well as the actual research outputs.
A range of intellectual property licensing options can be provided to a university and its researchers to protect rights and control usage of data and research artefacts including Creative Commons (CC) and Open Data Commons Open Database License (ODbL).
CKAN is an open data publishing platform developed and maintained by the software community worldwide under the same open source movement that inspired Open Access. As an open data management system CKAN being used by the United States Government, national, state and council jurisdictions in Australia, the UK Government and many cities and municipalities from Ottowa to Buenos Aires and Taipei City.
Link Digital specialises in open data platforms and is heavily involved in the open knowledge community. One of the natural extensions for CKAN is its use for publishing a wide variety of research artefacts. This can include image and video assets via CKAN Galleries for research within the humanities or it can include a wide variety of specific data formats used by research teams.
Link Digital has also recently developed a proof of concept to successfully delivered scalable, on-demand high performance computing environments which simulate super computer facilities used by research teams worldwide. This work allows the publishing of papers, data and the scripts to generate public cloud infrastructure required for rapid peer review of research by research labs at extremely low cost with very low technical barriers.
Expanding Horizons for CKAN
Link is a Gold Member of the CKAN Association and our director Steven De Costa is a member of the project’s Steering Group. Link Digital manages and supports CKAN for the Australian Federal Government, South Australian Government, Victorian Government, NSW Government and Brisbane City Council. We have the expertise and experience in guiding organisations towards open data and implementing open data publishing platforms, particularly via CKAN.
Through adoption of a data first and open access approach Link has identified opportunities to expand the use case of CKAN in the following areas:
- Digital Asset Management – particularly via CKAN Galleries
- Community and Government Service Management
- Research Management
- Record Management
- Programme Management
- Information Asset Management
If you would like to learn more about how the open data management system CKAN might help your organisation to generate better value from its data then please feel free to get in touch.
