Leaping Hurdles June 22, 2009
Posted by chriscb in : Community, Conference, JISC, VRE , comments closed
I was asked to sit on the Panel Session at the recent JISC Leaping Hurdles: Planning IT Provision for Researchers event in London on 18 June 2009 (www.jisc.ac.uk/events/2009/06/leapinghurdleslondon.aspx). This event gave the opportunity for the JISC-sponsored Community Engagement projects to feed back some of their findings and to stimulate debate. The day started with presentations from the three Community Engagement projects eIUS, e-Uptake and ENGAGE and was followed by VRE projects, myExperiment, VERA, SDM VRE and CREW. There was a lot of useful discussion in the breakout sessions where barriers, and how these barriers might be solved, were discussed and then reported back to delegates.
The final part of the event consisted of the Panel Session where each member of the panel was asked the following question, “Who plans IT provision for researchers?”. The following is an extended version to the answer I gave during the session:
“One must remember that providing an e-infrastructure provides tangible benefits to the researcher – it speeds up their research, results are produced quicker, faster time to publication, an enabler for collaboration. The researchers benefits, the department benefits and the institution benefits. By funding researchers and giving them the e-infrastructure they need the institution benefits indirectly and this is something that needs to be realised so that it influences institutional planning.”
“The planning should be done at a national, institutional and research team level but they need to work together with an overall direction led at a national level.”
“Planning at the Institutional level must ensure researchers are served by the latest technology, realise the importance of research data and its value and ensure it is archived and accessible, ensure they are served adequately by their network and HPC clusters. They must give their researchers the support they need.”
“The funding bodies (research councils and the JISC) need to provide the required e-infrastructure but they also need to provide the help and support to use this e-infrastructure efficiently, to help join up communities and encourage collaboration, provide examples of best practice, identify successful projects and show how to overcome barriers.”
“Funding projects like the Community Engagement projects must influence institutional planning and not just national planning. There is no point having a national plan if there is no institutional plan, otherwise it’ll just cause barriers at an institutional level.”