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According to the report, institutions could do more to show students the breadth of online courses available, and accessibility could be improved by structuring the information to mirror the searching methods of potential students.
The report recommends ways to improve the situation for both students and institutions.
David Kernohan, programme manager at JISC, said: "This is a timely and powerful piece of research that will inform the debates around online learning for years to come. Dave White and his team have delivered a comprehensive survey of e-learning activity coupled with a high level of critical analysis, setting the bar for the forthcoming department for Business Innovation and Skills (BIS) and HEFCE Online Learning Taskforce report."
The report was commissioned by JISC at the request of the Online Learning Task Force (OLTF), which was set up as an independent advisory panel by BIS to help the UK higher education sector maintain and extend its position as a leader in online learning.
Shortly after its inception last year the OLTF identified that there was a lack of information about HE-level online learning being offered in the UK. This study has helped to shape the work of the task force, and points to a number of possible areas of development for institutions.
The OLTF is chaired by Dame Lynne Brindley, chief executive of the British Library, and includes members from universities, the National Union of Students and private sector representatives. The OLTF is considering the findings and is due to publish its final report by the end of the year, in which it will make recommendations to HEFCE, the government and the higher education sector.
UK Open Access week and the JISC Future of Research conference have seen persuasive calls for the sector to unite on key issues facing UK higher education and research. Now ten leading organisations from the higher education and research sector have joined forces to drive the implementation of open access in the UK, both in terms of policy and promoting a deeper understanding of the opportunities it offers for the UK to maintain its world-wide reputation and impact.
Open access is a part of a movement toward more openness and transparency in the public sector and in universities, which promises significant benefits for universities and the UK economy as papers, educational resources and data are more widely available to support teaching, research and innovation.
While the adoption of open access is growing, some researchers and institutions still worry that it amounts to a “Robin Hood” approach that gives away research freely. The evidence, however, shows that opening up access to research outputs provides substantial gains for both. These gains vary across an increasingly differentiated sector but, to be more fully realised, policy and infrastructure need to be better coordinated across the sector. This is the role the UK Open Access Implementation Group will take on.
At the moment the group consists of senior representatives of two UK universities (Edinburgh and Salford), Universities UK, Research Libraries UK, the Society of College, National and University Libraries, JISC, the UK Research Councils, Wellcome Trust, the Association of Research Managers and Administrators UK, and a leading open access publisher in the Public Library of Science. It will coordinate evidence, policies, systems, advice and guidance, to make open access an easy choice for authors and one that benefits all universities. The group have asked JISC to map out a programme of practical work to make progress in these areas.
Meeting at the Wellcome Trust and chaired by Martin Hall, Vice Chancellor at the University of Salford, the group agreed that existing evidence and guidance on open access should be brought together and presented as a coordinated summary of why and how to adopt an open approach. The group noted that the ways in which research excellence and impact are measured play a key role in influencing behaviour. Where necessary, for example around the practical arrangements for paying open access publication charges, further work should be done to clarify what is possible at the moment and where further provision might be needed.
The group were united in their support for innovation and will encourage debate in the sector around new publication models. “If we don’t collaborate across publicly or semi-publicly funded institutions and if we don’t take hold of the agenda as a sector then we will be pushed into an environment where we increasingly compete for diminishing resources”, Hall summed up the debate. “The UK has consistently led the way in opening access to research. A UK alliance is now established at the highest level to ensure that we don't lose that lead, and that the impact of UK research (and therefore the contribution of UK universities to the economy and society) is maximised.”
Find out more about Open Access and JISC's work in this area
Debate on the future of research attracted vice chancellors, heads of research and UK funders to JISC’s conference last week (Tues 19 October) – and you can still interact and follow the conference online.
The conference discussed how research intensive universities can maintain and expand their work and what other institutions need to do to build their research, based on the key areas of institutional reputation, efficiency and effectives, and collaboration in a competitive environment.
The keynote speakers, who you can watch online, were:
Track the whole conference via the dedicated twitter feed, #jiscres10.
Dr Malcolm Read, JISC’s executive secretary, said: “I’m really pleased – though not surprised – that the conference is generating so much interest from senior managers in universities. Cuts in research funding are leading people to look carefully at where they can make cost savings. Working openly, whether in the arts and humanities or the sciences, helps universities to become considerably more efficient, not just because there is less duplication but also because openness allows for a real problem-solving approach and fast distribution of ideas and results.
“JISC’s role in advising and assisting universities and colleges on how to use technology to achieve cost savings is therefore going to be crucial at this time,” he concluded.
According to evidence submitted to the Browne review, research contributes £30bn annually to the UK, equivalent to 2% of gross domestic product.
Films and notes from the sessions are online after the event
Find out about what JISC is doing to support decisions about open access publishing
JISC has teamed up with Taylor & Francis to produce the first Open Access issue of the New Review of Academic Librarianship, edited by Graham Walton from Loughborough University. The special issue on 'dissemination models in scholarly communication' is guest edited by with Hazel Woodward, university librarian and director of Cranfield University Press.
JISC programme director Neil Jacobs comments: “The contributions have come from all over the world and show that open access and scholarly communications clearly are international issues. There are huge benefits to society in making the outputs of publicly funded research publicly available and thus facilitating the free exchange of knowledge.”
The journal contains a longitudinal study on how different disciplines view open access and highlights major differences between disciplines in terms of motivation and how they understand open access. The journal contains a longitudinal study on how different disciplines view open access and highlights major differences between disciplines in terms of motivation and how they understand open access. There are different perspectives on OA textbooks – a publisher is looking at a different business model while a contribution from the Netherlands examines the attitude of librarians towards open access publishing for text books. The role of the library is changing to support scholarly communications and a paper from Griffiths University in Australia describes how the entire library structure has been changed to reflect the research lifecycle.
Graham Walton says: “Readers will get a very good overview of current developments and how academics are communicating with each other. State of the art review articles are looking at future directions for publishing and the issue features new research about authors’ awareness and attitudes towards open access repositories. Open access books are a key topic at the moment and the issue provides a much-needed perspective from both libraries and publishers.”
John Nosal from Taylor & Francis comments: “Routledge is excited to be a part of this special issue of the NRAL, which explores and details the changing face of publishing now and into the near future, and works to preserve this journal as part of the forefront of academic librarianship. The open-access nature of the issue will help to bring many of its themes full-circle, and its release is coinciding with Open Access Week which aims to raise awareness of the potential benefits of open access publishing models in scholarship and research.”
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At the Future of Research event this week we will explore taking risks with research.
Professor Mike Brady and Professor Alan Bowman are two eminent researchers, one from the sciences and the other from the humanities, who came together to explore how techniques from medical imaging could support the analysis of ancient documents. Nicola Yeeles spoke to Professor Mike Brady about how his own research in hospitals had impacted on the study of manuscripts and what the implications are for interdisciplinary collaboration.
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Research ratings and the calibre of academic staff are crucial to the public face of a university, but how can institutions maintain their reputation in the current economic climate?
Ahead of the Browne review Sarah Mowl spoke to the Research Conference keynote speaker, Professor Julia Goodfellow, vice chancellor of the University of Kent, to discuss those challenges and what she planned to gain from next Tuesday’s conference.
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The public are being asked to revisit the voyages of World War One Royal Navy warships to help scientists working on a JISC project to understand the climate of the past and unearth new historical information.
Visitors to OldWeather.org, which launches today (12 October 2010), will be able to retrace the routes taken by any of 280 Royal Navy ships including historic vessels such as HMS Caroline, the last survivor of the 1916 Battle of Jutland still afloat.
The naval logbooks contain a treasure trove of information but because the entries are handwritten they are incredibly difficult for a computer to read. By getting an army of online human volunteers to retrace these voyages and transcribe the information recorded by British sailors we can relive both the climate of the past and key moments in naval history.
Alastair Dunning, programme manager at JISC which is funding the project, said: "Solving complex scientific problems used to be restricted to the laboratories of the university campus. But with sites like Old Weather, the general public can play an important role in uncovering the data that underpins the arguments behind climate change. Hopefully, Old Weather can spark a whole range of similar cyber science projects, engaging the public in the grand scientific issues of our time."
The ‘virtual sailors’ visiting OldWeather.org are rewarded for their efforts by a rise through the ratings from cadet to captain of a particular ship according to the number of pages they transcribe. The project is inspired by earlier Oxford University-led ‘citizen science’ projects, such as Galaxy Zoo and Moon Zoo – that have seen more than 320,000 people make over 150 million classifications – which have shown that ordinary web users can make observations that are as accurate as those made by experts.
Dr Peter Stott, Head of Climate Monitoring and Attribution at the Met Office, said: "Historical weather data is vital because it allows us to test our models of the Earth's climate: if we can correctly account for what the weather was doing in the past, then we can have more confidence in our predictions of the future. Unfortunately, the historical record is full of gaps, particularly from before 1920 and at sea, so this project is invaluable."
Dr Robert Simpson of Oxford University, one of the OldWeather.org team, said: "Luckily, these observations made by Royal Navy sailors every four hours without fail – even whilst under enemy fire! – can help to fill this ‘data gap’. It’s almost like launching a weather satellite into the skies at a time when manpowered flight was still in its infancy."
OldWeather.org forms a key part of the International ACRE Project, which is recovering past weather and climate data from around the world and bringing them into widespread use.
Most of the data about past climate comes from land-based weather monitoring stations which have been systematically recording data for over 150 years. The weather information from the ships at OldWeather.org, which spans the period 1905-1929, effectively extends this land-based network to 280 seaborne weather stations traversing the world’s oceans.
It isn’t just gaps in the weather records that the team hope to fill but gaps in the history books too. OldWeather.org is teaming up with naval historians in an effort to add to our knowledge of the exploits of hundreds of Royal Navy vessels and the thousands of men who served on them.
"Life in the trenches is well documented but the maritime struggle that took place during World War One is less well known," said historian Gordon Smith of Naval-History.Net. "This was a global conflict that reached across the world’s oceans to every part of the globe and was about far more than just the Battle of Jutland. We hope these new records will give people a fresh insight into naval history and encourage people to find out more about Britain’s naval past and the role their relatives played in it."
Professor Paul Webley is director and principal of the School of Oriental and African Sciences at the University of London and we are pleased to welcome him to chair the debate at JISC’s Future of Research conference.
As research funding hits the headlines, Maike Bohn speaks to Professor Webley about the priorities for universities and how technology can support the UK’s researchers.
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