Representing the point of view of chief research officers for this talk.
Most of concerns relate to current economic conditions and uncertainties, particularly concerned about overhead costs. Also concerned about policies that turn into unfunded mandates. Concerned about roles and liabilities.
Size and scale issues – big universities can do things smaller ones can’t – need to find ways of federating so the smaller institutions can participate.
AIM – Access, Integrity, Mediation
Access – what goes in must be able to come out. Need to focus on users, defining “users” as widely as possible. Need metadata, which requires people. Also need to understand the costs of migrating data as technologies become obsolete.
ICPSR is a good model of an inter-institutional data consortium.
Interoperability – never easy. Referential integrity degrades over time. Decisions tend to get made on the fly.
Increased public access is a trend, supported by the government funding agencies. NSTC report expected next spring.
Integrity – We need to plan for preservation across the entire lifecycle. What are going to share? raw data? processed, analyzed datasets? instruments? calibration? analytical tools?
Mediation – needed at all stages of lifecycle. Where there is high intensity of interaction, it may make sense to have lots of replication and different mediation. Mediation may not always need to be formal, but for repositories and analysis it does need to be more formal. But must make sure that creating new repositories is not a solution in search of a problem.
Players and relationships among them are constantly shifting, vying for funding and attention. Issues about research directories. For data to be discovered, must have a shared overlay of connections. An ecosystem of multiple stakeholders.
Serge points out that large swaths of disciplines don’t have disciplinary repositories. Jose replies that there is a role for institutional repositories, but there are challenges – we don’t know enough about building a sustainable economic model. We don’t have good metrics about progress in cyberinfrastructure. All we have is number of high speed connections to institutions.
Oren Sreebny 