Furthermore, ‘Open Access‘ and ‘Repository’ typically go hand in hand. If you support Open Access you need a repository, and if you question the role of repositories you’re in the pocket of evil publishers who want to lock up everything ever written and lease reading rights back to the employers of those who wrote the stuff in the first place.

Nonsense.

Open Access is an important component of today’s scholarly ecosystem. It’s not the only answer, and it’s not perfect, but it does have a significant part to play. Institutions have a role in preserving, disseminating and exploiting the work of their employees, but these are very different tasks that may benefit from different solutions. In too many cases, the repository is by default seen as a preservation mechanism and a dissemination vehicle, and as such it may fail to cost-effectively achieve either aim.

There are some large, well known, and research-intensive institutions where it might be possible to make a compelling argument for projecting a strong institutional image around a single ‘home’ for all of that research output. Never mind, for a moment, that so much research today is the result of inter-institutional collaboration, or that the eminent researcher might wish to take ‘their’ research publications with them as they move from Oxford to Harvard to York during their glittering career.

Alongside those institutions sit a plethora of others where research of equal quality is also being conducted; there just, maybe, isn’t quite as much of it. Bombarded by ‘advice’ and funding, and desperate to keep up with the Russell Group, ever-more institutions blindly join the repository cult and wonder why their new toys do not fill to overflowing with the jewels of scholarly erudition.

As research becomes increasingly data-rich, the whole cycle looks set to repeat. The recently released Panton Principles for Open Data in Science are to be welcomed, but I’ll bet the institutional response will all too often be the commissioning of a ‘data repository’ to sit alongside the ‘publication repository’ they already don’t use.

All of which is a rather long-winded way of introducing the fact that Eduserv’s Andy Powell has asked me to facilitate a breakout afternoon on ‘Policy Issues’ at the Repositories in the Cloud event Eduserv and JISC are holding in London on Tuesday.

“This free event, organised jointly by Eduserv and the JISC, will bring together software developers, repository managers, service providers, funding and advisory bodies to discuss the potential policy and technical issues associated with cloud computing and the delivery of repository services in UK HEIs.”

In a post on 11 February, Andy invited participants to share some of their views ahead of the meeting, and on 19 February he wrote about some of his own thoughts.

Like Andy, I struggled somewhat to nail down a coherent set of thoughts about the issue of pushing today’s repositories into the Cloud. On one level, I wonder whether the vast majority of institutions with small (and relatively low traffic) repositories would see much of a tangible efficiency gain or cost saving by moving off an in-house computer to rent an equivalent Virtual Machine from Amazon, Rackspace, or any of their competitors. If we’re talking about IT systems within a typical university, there are others (email, calendaring, pools of compute resource for research jobs, etc) that appear more immediately compelling for the shift Cloud-ward. Which is not to say that there isn’t a clear opportunity for someone trusted to step into this space and offer a SaaS repository to which institutions might affordably subscribe. Eduserv? Mimas? Edina? The British Library? The National Archives? Duraspace? Any could, and if we’re not ready for something more then at least one probably should.

However, a bolder reconsideration of what repositories are and what they’re for might very well lead to something interesting, sustainable, and perfectly suited for benefitting from Cloud Computing’s strengths.

Why does a paper have to be ‘deposited’ in a repository? Why does a single paper with three authors from three institutions have to be deposited in three separate institutional repositories? Why does that same paper have to be deposited – separately – in the subject repository favoured by scholars in the relevant discipline? Why does the institution’s very reasonable desire to protect, preserve, promote and disseminate its excellence mean that it has to run systems in perpetuity that preserve and permit access? Why do we address the fundamentally different (perhaps even contradictory) problems of access and preservation in the same system? Why can’t the individual researcher easily assemble a view across their publication history, regardless of the institution within which they happened to reside as they wrote each paper? Why don’t the assemblages of papers reflect personal, professional and disciplinary relationships, alongside (or instead of) the contractual accident of employee-employer relationships? Why isn’t the wealth of metadata implicit to any publication (authors, subjects, dates, citations, and more) available and actionable, both inside the repository and far beyond it across the Web? Why isn’t there a tight and active association between the paper and the data from which its findings were derived (something for which Internet Archaeology was demonstrating utility a very long time ago)?

Scholarly papers principally comprise text, augmented by the occasional static image. They’re not big, and they don’t tend to change very fast. In many ways, they represent a fairly easy problem set with which to work. As more and more data becomes key to research in a growing number of subject areas, the problems are set to become far larger and far more difficult. For individual universities to even consider replicating the process by which they all ended up with their repositories of text surely seems madness in this data-rich environment. Even with levels of uptake as low as those seen in too many text repositories, the issues of data management, curation, access and dissemination are too great to be sensibly solved in the institutional machine room. Services like InfoChimps and Amazon’s own Public Data Sets offering show some of the ways that we might begin to work with data at scale. Might we, for example, come to recognise as Amazon has that it’s actually cheaper and quicker to entrust large data sets to FedEx rather than transmit them over the Internet?

‘The answer’ might be some central service for the community, funded by JISC like the Arts & Humanities Data Service (AHDS) of old. Or it might be something different, something nimbler, more responsive, more flexible to individual, institutional, and disciplinary requirements, and something more scalable to new disciplines; institutional support for and use of existing Cloud infrastructures extending far beyond UK Higher Education, aligned with a clear understanding of the separation between preservation and access.

I certainly don’t have all the answers, but I do believe that simply asking whether or not we should move existing repositories to the Cloud is to miss the point. Rather, we should ask what role the Cloud might play in addressing the business requirements to which the institutional repository was our initial – faltering – response. The answer might very well be ‘None,’ but I doubt it.

I look forward to Tuesday’s discussion. I’m not going there to push my personal view that individual institutions frequently shouldn’t be building, running or populating their own repositories at all. I’m going there to facilitate the discussion those in the room want to have, and to learn from their experiences and their perspectives.

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Carr blogged on Friday, noting that video from the event has been made available on YouTube, and I’ve been steadily working through the material ever since.

Krish followed up on CloudAve with his take, flagging Carr’s presentation as of particular interest. I liked Carr’s presentation too (although prefer our podcast, as I think he went deeper there), and found much to value in most of the other talks as well.

My particular highlights, I think, were three sessions later in the day;

Paul Cheesbrough (CIO at Telegraph Media Group), Francois Blanc (CIO at Valeo), Todd Pierce (SVP & CIO at Genentech) and Andy Beale (CIO at Guardian Media Group) participated in a panel session (embedded below) to discuss their real-world experiences of rolling Google Apps out across large organisations. The key take-aways? Benefit won’t be recognised across the board until six months in, and Executive Assistants need to be kept on-side as their day-to-day work inside people’s calendars is disrupted… and they’re both ‘loud’ and ‘influential.’

Google’s Dave Girouard covered similar issues from the company’s perspective, and is clearly someone to add to my list of podcast targets.

My final highlight was Geoffrey Moore (he of Core, Context, and Chasms), applying some of his broader business ideas to the Cloud. I’d certainly like to explore some of his arguments a little further another day…

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Event organisers are feeling the squeeze as advertising, travel and ‘training’ budgets present easy targets to Finance Directors seeking to balance their books in the current economic climate.

Amidst announcement after announcement of cancelled and radically down-sized trade shows and conferences, one bright spot in the event management space appears to be anything related to ‘The Cloud.’ There is an understandable perception that Cloud Computing will save money, so that ticks boxes back at HQ. There is also a perception that a sound understanding of the Cloud (and yes, it’s more than simply outsourcing your Data Centre to save some money) will position companies to come out of this economic downturn extremely well placed to exploit new opportunities and grow.

One of those events to cross my radar just before Christmas was Powered By Cloud, which is being held in London – just around the corner from the UK Parliament – on 2 and 3 February. According to the site, attendees will learn;

“What does [the Cloud] mean for your business model?

How fast will this happen?

How can I make money from Cloud Computing?

What technologies will be used?

What are the implications for consumers, privacy and security?

What is the future of Cloud Computing?”

Speakers on the programme look like a nice mix of solutions providers, customers and analysts, and include Amazon‘s Simone Brunozzi, Dave Armstrong from Google, Woodson Martin from Salesforce, Rightscale CEO Michael Crandell, Elastichosts CEO Richard Davies, Simon Wardley and Sam Sethi.

If you’ve got a couple of days to spare, can convince the Finance Director to agree (tell ‘em Cloud Computing saves money…), and can get to London then this looks like a pretty good investment for that diminished travel budget. It might even be worth enduring Heathrow to reach.

And, thanks to Philip Low at event organisers BroadGroup, here’s something that might even make the Finance Director smile… If you use discount code ‘SPKR‘ when you register, you can get in cheaper and save even more money. Enjoy!

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A short post, sparked by two related items that arrived by Twitter and email almost simultaneously.

Via Twitter, TechnologyReview reports that it’s getting easier to visualise massive data sets without the traditional supercomputer.

Via email, the UK’s Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) announces its contribution of £200,000 to a joint funding call with the United States’ National Science Foundation (NSF) and National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), and Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). The scope of the call? The challenge of working with Big Data. I’m very keen to see the bids to that particular call… and to see the innovation that answering its challenges will (hopefully!) spark.

Add to that my post last month about Amazon’s Public Data sets, and  the signs are getting ever-stronger that there are real opportunities here.

It’s getting easier to manage massive data sets. Those data sets are increasingly addressable over the Web. There’s growing interest in working across and between data sets, and there are even licenses to ensure that researchers can do what they need to.

Interesting times, indeed.

The notions of core and context are, of course, most often associated with Geoffrey Moore, and one of his sites defines them, thus;

Core

“Any activity which creates sustainable differentiation in the target market resulting in premium prices or increased volume. Core management seeks to dramatically outperform all competitors within the domain of core. (Note this use of the term is unrelated to either core competence, which describes differentiated capability, or core business, which describes categories accounting for a high percentage of overall revenues.)”

Context

“Any activity which does not differentiate the company from the customers’ viewpoint in the target market. Context management seeks to meet (but not exceed) appropriate accepted standards in as productive a manner as possible.”

Writing in last weekend’s Financial Times, Gerrit Wiesmann tells us that;

“We’ve been waiting for trains since 1840, the year a British parliamentary committee invented mass transportation by ruling that rail traffic should be exclusively in the hands of the companies that owned the track. It’s an odd notion now, but in the years before that decision, a debate raged about how to use rails. In the 1820s, the British railway visionary Thomas Gray called for a national network for use by private vehicles. He reckoned traffic in and out of London could be handled by 12 parallel ‘rail-ways’.”

Here, as elsewhere, ideas given serious consideration at the birth of an industry are superseded as that industry matures and sustainable business models begin to emerge.

There will always be areas in which technology companies invest their own human capital rather than buying in services and products from third parties. The traditional view, largely captured in Moore’s terminology, holds that companies gain most by focussing their own efforts upon the differentiating aspects of their business whilst making use of supporting services from third parties to enable concentration upon those differentiators. It will tend to be cheaper and ‘easier’, so the argument goes, to pay for commodity services from a third party rather than develop everything in-house from scratch.

In the early stages of any technological wave, there is an understandable tendency to develop and control far more of the stack within a single organisation. Various players enter a nascent market, and attempt to shape it to their needs at the same time as laying the foundations for what they hope will be a successful product or service. Without agreement on standards and specifications, there is very little interoperability. With an emphasis upon attracting and growing a customer base, there is little incentive to make it easy for users to compare offerings with – or move to – the competition. With a fluid understanding of the final product and its differentiating features, there is little clear understanding of that which will be ‘core’ as opposed to that which will merely be ‘context.’ Internal and external pressures encourage, and almost require, an approach that is closed and all-encompassing.

The problem, it seems, is in making that move from a nascent market toward the point at which certain aspects of the technology stack are fit for commodification; the point at which a healthy and competitive ecosystem can begin to emerge that increases customer choice whilst lowering development and running costs. Looking at aspects of the Cloud Computing and SaaS arenas, we must surely be reaching the point at which numerous homegrown technology stacks become increasingly counterproductive? In the Semantic Web space, too, that early burst of innovation is becoming unnecessarily expensive to maintain as one company after another continues to concern themselves with segments of the problem space that might easily be made a commodity.

Look, for example, at the number of Semantic Technology companies continuing to pour effort into building, scaling and maintaining a basic ontology. The ontology is rarely the point of the company. It is simply something they need to have in order to get on with the business at hand. How many of them are ‘wasting’ time recording the fact that Gordon Brown is the UK Prime Minister, or that Beverley is in East Yorkshire, which is in England, which is in the United Kingdom, which is in Europe?

A recent conversation with Hapax CEO Mark Redgrave confirmed the extent to which they are having to focus upon ontology construction with Amplify. Refreshingly, though, he was extremely open to the notion of gaining value from a more open and generic ontology upon which Hapax and others could build, add value, and compete. In the SaaS space, too, Apprenda CEO Sinclair Schuller has some interesting ideas with regard to enabling others to build their own Software as a Service offerings on top of a common platform that begins to look increasingly like a commodity. It will be interesting to see the extent to which the reality of his company’s SaaSGrid is able to match that vision.

I have spent (too much!) time in the formal standards making process, and would be the last to even consider suggesting that freeform innovation and commercial creativity be snuffed out in favour of protracted and painful rounds of negotiation, specification and never-ending compromise.

However, it seems apparent that early innovators in a given market (Amazon with EC2, Salesforce, etc) often see little incentive to open up and behave less proprietarily. It is in their interests for every competitor to have to reinvent all the wheels that those early entrants first conceptualised. The shift needs to be driven by their competitors, some of whom will be sufficiently successful that they disrupt the market conditions in which incumbents dominate to such an extent that customers are incentivised to consider switching.

A little reinvention is a good thing. It encourages creative thinking, and probably leads to refinement, iteration, and further innovation. Perpetuated at the expense of opening up a nascent market, it becomes a tool of monopoly and ultimately counter-productive for all concerned.

Perhaps it is only at this point that those at the top of a market segment are able to realise the benefits of letting go a little, and of relegating much of what they do to the status of mere context.

Image of a bicycle with square wheels © Michael Vroegop 2007, and licensed with a Creative Commons Attribution License.

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