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Why should universities care about identifiers?

Talat Chaudhri — Fri, 17 Aug 2012 15:19:53 +0000

Why do identifiers matter for research?

Imagine that you are a senior manager in an institution within the UK Higher Education sector with responsibilities for research: you have read some basic details about unique researcher identifiers and perhaps institutional identifiers. However, it may not be immediately apparent just how important these issues are, which may seem on the face of it to be a relatively superficial and/or trivial organisational matter. Clearly, any such strategic decision-maker will long have been aware of the demands of the Research Excellence Framework (REF) and its predecessor the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), in which successful reporting of the best research outputs of university departments is crucial to the on-going funding of the institution. This is particularly central to the work of research-led universities, which is an increasingly competitive sector: even universities that formerly focussed more on teaching than research are increasingly aware of the need to drive up standards of quality research in order to secure additional funding.

The reality of unique identification in research

However, as anyone who has actually engaged with the business of research reporting to any degree will tell you, it is far from a superficial or trivial matter to carry out such an exercise without thinking very carefully about how researchers are identified; moreover, identifying the research groups, departments, projects and institutions that they may have variously belonged to at different times, all of which may have been re-organised on many occasions, is a considerable challenge raising considerable technical as well as organisational issues.

Perhaps the biggest problem of all derives from the scale of research reporting. On such a massive scale, it has to be done in a systematic way across higher education institutions in order to be useful. Any lack of a systematic approach in collecting the information on the institutional level will inevitably result in higher costs in processing the information later into a useful form, for example by governmental organisations such as HESA and the Research Councils (RCUK) relevant to each area of academic study. This may be carried out for a variety of reasons, amongst them for example:

The need to produce statistics at a national and at an institutional level in order to gauge how successful different parts of the research community are performing in comparison to each other and to similar institutions internationally, which may be a determinant of how funding is allocated.
The production of good, widely accessible information about the work of academic researchers and research groups for the purposes of future research, both in identifying research as a basis for future work and for guiding individuals and groups in terms of who they might work with in future, who their competitors may be, and in creating wider bibliographic information for a whole range of related purposes related to future publications.
Open Access, an increasing requirement imposed by funders where research is publicly funded.
Accountability in the use of public funds for research.

It is precisely the lack of a national approach to providing consistent metadata about individuals and groups connected with research that raises costs, creates inefficiencies and frustrates the development of new software functionality that makes the jobs of research managers more difficult and ultimately reduces the funds available to research and their best use within the sector. It is therefore the business of senior managers of academic research to care about identifiers.

Researcher identifiers: a crucial first step

Before any wider metadata about research may be considered, the most fundamental issue is identifying individuals who carry out research. Before this happens consistently on a national level, there is little point addressing the subsequent issue of identifying groups and institutions engaged in research consistently. It is also important to consider any national approach in terms of interoperability with other international approaches wherever possible: while, on the one hand, funders and statistics agencies can only hope to mandate national identifier schemes, at the same time it is clear that research collaboration is cross-institutional and international in scope, in some cases including researchers from numerous countries in one project or even in the production of one individual paper, data set or other research activity. This is the approach that has been taken by the JISC, together with RCUK, HESA and other partners in setting up the Research Identifiers Task and Finish Group, which is due to report in October 2012.

One emerging candidate with cross-sector and international support is the ORCID researcher identifier scheme, whose rapid development in 2011-12 is scheduled to culminate in a public launch in October 2012. There are, of course, existing, widely-used but relatively simple identifiers such as the HESA researcher identifier, and identifiers provided through commercial providers' web interfaces, but thus far these have not provided dependable unique identification. All such identifiers could be linked to a system like ORCID that is designed on interoperable principles and is not dependant on any particular software platform or web interface. An alternative approach is taken by the ISNI number: whereas ORCID seeks to offer individual researchers and institutions the ability to manage their data on a distributed model, ISNI represents a centrally moderated, bibliographic approach led by national libraries and other similar institutions with national and strategic responsibilities. It remains to be seen whether these different approaches are in competition or whether they will offer different but complementary functionality within the sector, and much may be dependent on how software vendors implement them.

Current Research Information Systems (CRIS)

It is not simply a matter of tracking publications and other related ouputs, for example in institutional repositories. This part of the equation is by now relatively well established in the UK HE sector, although it continues to develop: the issues surrounding Open Access, for example, have not been fully resolved. This, however, is just at the level of the final outputs of research and does not provide anything like sufficient insight into the processes of research, the projects and groups carrying out, the staff involved or the costs. Traditionally, this information has been gathered in a very long-winded process that is individual to each institution's particular workflows and processes (although there are obviously great similarities of approach between them), often a partly paper-based exercise that has been migrated to an extremely varied range of systems and databases, few of which are interoperable or complete. Many departments may be involved in the process apart from the institution's research office and the department in which the researchers are based, but perhaps the most significant would be the finance office, the human resources department and the library, to name just the key players. It will be necessary to keep some information confidential, e.g. personal staff information, salaries and so forth, to share some information internally and with research funders, and to publish other information, e.g. in a research repository that forms the institution's "shop window" of public outputs, library databases and so forth. The term Research Information Management (RIM) has emerged to cover all of these information gathering and information processing activities.

In order to do this systematically, more sophisticated research information management software has been developed, often known as Current Research Information Systems (CRIS). The market in the HE sector is currently led, in terms of the number of institutions adopting the software, by PURE, produced by ATIRA; other major players are Symplectic Elements, and CONVERIS, produced by AVEDAS. More recent entrants to this market are Thomson Reuters' Research in View. There are currently no open source products, although a JISC-funded modular approach by the Research Management and Administration Service (RMAS) project may have an increasing impact in this area, depending on subsequent adoption by HE institutions. It is not an overstatement to say that HE institutions are currently in a rush towards early adoption of these CRIS systems, motivated by the need to use research data to compete with each other for funding opportunities.

Next steps: organisational identifiers

In the next 2-3 years, it is likely that the matter of unique researcher identification will be resolved through the emergence of a dominant standard that has sufficient take-up and leverage in the UK and international HE sector to faciliate the work of research institutions and funders. Following this, there will be organisational structures associated with research that will require unique identification, often on a multi-layed basis: for example, a project may be at several institutions, perhaps internationally, and their staff may be in various departments or similar units whose names have changed or have been merged or de-merged at various times, all of which will require careful date and time stamping to make the information reliable for the period that it covers. There will be issues related to copyright, commercialisation and spin-off companies that make the precise provenance of research critical to the future success of academic research and development. Standards for organisational indentifiers are therefore the next important issue on the horizon. Like researcher identification standards, research managers and senior managers with strategic responsibility for research will need to keep abreast of this rapidly developing area.

Microservices in (and beyond) Research Information Management

Talat Chaudhri — Fri, 25 May 2012 15:37:53 +0000

Microservices: are they all that new?

Recently there has been something of a revival of interest in a small-scale development approach towards software design for repositories: microservices. This is far from an entirely new idea but seems to have been somewhat slow to develop in practice, even to date; a useful summary of the approach was given by Neil Jacobs back in 2010. Moreover, a modular approach towards software that fulfils various related functions in managing web content related to research clearly has a much longer history, and is not in itself particularly surprising in software development more broadly. However, it seems that microservices as an approach is gradually acquiring a clearer identity within this space, so it may be worth taking a look back at the nature of the types of software used in managing research content of various types, how they are related, and whether and to what extent terms like "repository", "Current Research Information System", "Research Information Management system" and so forth overlap in terms of software functionality that they offer.

Defining terms: "repository", CRIS, RIM etc

Institutions within Higher Education are often faced with questions of procurement such as technical suitability and sustainable technical support. Although these areas are broader than those normally covered by the Technical Foundations web site, since they encompass non-technical considerations related to funding, policy and practice that drive software acquisition in universities and related institutions, the purely technical aspects are securely within scope and of considerable interest to the community at large in terms of developing useful technical guidance.

The question "What is a repository?" is likely to have a range of possible answers, but Neil Jacobs noted the revival of an approach summarised in Cliff Lynch’s 2007 description of the institutional repository as “a set of services that a university offers to the members of its community for the management and dissemination of digital materials created by the institution and its community members”. Without reiterating the points made by Neil Jacobs in detail, suffice it to say that these efforts have been led by institutions such as the California Digital Library and notably by John Kunze and others. The difficulty with this approach in general is not a purely technical one but one of technical resources, and it is not unique to the microservices approach but can for example be seen with systems such as Fedora Commons as well.

Software development approaches

While the most modular, customisable and flexible technical approaches are often able to be adapted most quickly (and arguably most effectively) to the challenging technical demands placed on them, it is usually the case that significant development resources, usually in-house, are required in order to tailor the software to local requirements. In practice, the result is often that only certain large institutions are able to justify and support software systems such as Fedora or even "roll their own" local software solutions. A useful example is the eSciDoc suite of services, developed by the Max Planck Foundation and FIZ Karlsruhe. Together, these effectively represent what in other contexts (e.g. the Linux world) might be called a "distribution", in this case based on Fedora. It is also worth noting that these services have been developed so that they can be used independently of eSciDoc, for example with DSpace or another repository system. In this way, true to Cliff Lynch's definition, each aspect of what together we call a "repository" is handled by a different piece of software, which then interoperates with a range of other web services according to local requirements.

"Does it do more than we already do?"

This, in a nutshell, is the microservices approach. However, there is no reason why the question should be restricted to repositories, since "repository" is itself something of a catch-all term for a class of web content services that are by no means identical in their principal functions and aims, even where they are using the same underlying software. Where, for instance, does the functionality of a repository end and that of a research management system, research information management system or Current Research Information System begin? Without a clear understanding of what these systems do, it is possible if not likely that higher education institutions, especially where decisions about procurement could be made by relatively non-technical managers, might easily end up acquiring more than one system with overlapping functions. Clearly, in times of difficult financial circumstances, this ought to be avoided wherever possible. It is worth spelling out what exactly different systems do in order to minimise duplication of effort.

Similar software issues facing HEIs

The question need not be limited to repositories and research information management either, although it is not the intention to get into great detail in this particular blog post. For example, libraries are frequently offered new products either by vendors with whom they have existing contracts or by their rivals. It is always in the interests of a vendor to sell a new product, so the question of duplication of technical functionality and/or the most effective technology to address a local need is of far more pressing concern to the institution than the vendor. A range of commercial library portals are on offer, built on but extending the functionality of library catalogues and commercial publications databases related to e-journals such as Web of Science. It is a common experience amongst library staff to feel unsure to what extent new software is offering new functionality, how it fits their technical requirements, and to what extent it may be re-packaging existing functionality in new clothes. The same could perhaps be said, for example, of systems relating to human resources or institutional finance offices.

What else can these systems do?

Returning to repositories and research information management, it is clear that a wide range of resource types are being published on the web through a range of related systems. The best recognised use of the repository is as a research publications repository, which is unsually how the wider term "institutional repository" is understood within the context of higher education and issues relating to but not confined to Open Access. Increasingly, attention has turned to Current Research Information Systems, based on the CERIF standard, and similar research information systems. Of particular interest is the RMAS approach, effectively building such a system from a range of related pieces of software, i.e. a microservices approach outside the limits of the repository sphere. Research information management covers all aspects of the processes of research creation and dissemination, including research reporting, human resources, finance and publication, while publications repositories commonly focus only on the last of these. This is usually the area where institutions operate systems whose functionality overlaps, as there is no reason in principle why a CRIS, for example, cannot expose research publications on the Web: this is possible with the main commercial systems such as PURE and Converis, for example.

In any case, there is no necessary limitation on the term "repository" to cover only resources relating to the outputs of research. Teaching and learning materials, amongst a wider range of educational resources, are another major area that has seen substantial growth in the last two or three years. Various types of media resources from images to time-based media such as audio and video recordings are found in institutional repositories for a number of different academic purposes, e.g. art collections, media archives, music collections, health information and so on, not all of which are the direct products of either research or teaching but may be connected with one or both. In this context, it is as well to remember that the term "repository" means little more in essence than "organised place or system to put something [on the Web]" and that many such systems, especially older ones, have always been known as "digital archives", "electronic libraries", "media collections" and so on, in contexts where the word "repository" would still not generally be recognised. Large data collections are often stored in systems that are, in effect, repositories, but whose development has been through systems not normally known by that term.

Solutions that fit problems

In summary, dividing the world of software systems in academic and related outputs too rigidly into "repositories" and "research information systems" may be at the root of much of the difficulties that may arise in understanding which technical functionality is required for any given local purpose and the extent to which systems overlap. A better, more precise understanding of these functionalities would help to avoid unnecessary duplication of effort and proliferation of systems. Some approaches are effectively bundled within one piece of software for a particular purpose, e.g. DSpace and EPrints in the repositories space. These offer a conventional set of services that fit the requirements of most institutions but may place some limits on the ability to customise those services indefinitely. Even these systems are built to be general purpose systems with considerable potential for local customisation. However, there is the tendency seen elsewhere (for instance in open source software with a large and disparate user base) to introduce software bloat: more and more functionality, some of it never used by the majority of implementations, is shipped with each succeeding version as new scenarios are met with.

While potentially introducing the problem of sufficient availability and sustainability of technical development effort, microservices are the opposite end of this spectrum. Each service is ideally a separate entity on the web server, built for maximum interoperability with the other services that may be required for local purposes. Rather than acting as plug-ins to a base software system (which is perhaps an intermediate approach), these are separate code bases able to run independently, even where they may have been intended, as in RMAS or eSciDoc, to be used frequently together. The technical issues and demands of each system will be different in every case.