 to end with. To end with, we have, well, it's lost presentation, not ending yet. We have Joss Wynne here, who will talk about SICAN, a research data management tool, the University of Lincoln's experience in implementation. Now Joss works in the Center of Educational Research and Development, where he undertakes research and development in the role of technology in higher education. He specializes in information management and digital asset management, digital preservation, scholarly communication, content management system, and web publishing, and Linux system administration certified, that's also in his skill set. So I'll, very interesting to hear what you have to say. Go ahead, Joss. Thank you. Yeah, I was just wondering where you've found all that information from. Is it linked in, maybe? Probably. Okay, well, I'm just going to talk briefly. I have four slides. I'm not going to give you a demonstration of SICAN because that's not what I'm here for. If you only go away with one thing from the next few minutes while I'm talking, please remember that top URL, lncn.eu slash secan for RDM, linking you dot secan, sorry, linking you slash secan for RDM. That's a Google dot of my paper that I've written, which is a fairly substantial evaluation of the SICAN software. And I think it's probably the single most comprehensive evaluation of SICAN available to you at the moment. It's also heavily referenced, so you can start from that paper and go off and learn all about SICAN probably more than you wish to know. Could I first ask who knows what SICAN is? Okay, not many people. Right. SICAN is data management software, a DMS. This is just the table of contents for the paper. You can see that I describe what SICAN is. I go into the history of it. I go into requirements for research data management and then an evaluation of it. SICAN is data management software that was publicly released in 2007 and has been developed since 2006 by the Open Knowledge Foundation. Our first keynote speaker today was a representative from the Open Knowledge Foundation or OKF. And the Open Knowledge Foundation have been leading the development of this data management system. And SICAN is an open source software project and it is the single most widely used data management system, I believe, for publishing open data. It is the system behind data.gov.uk, the system behind data.gov in the US, the system behind the EU's open data portal. And it's been widely adopted internationally by public bodies and government departments for publishing open data. So as an open source project, it's a fairly mature project. It has at any one time 20 or so developers working on it and contributing towards it. And it's an extremely flexible system, as you'll see from my paper. Right. At the University of Lincoln, I ran, we've just completed a project called the orbital project. The URL is there, orbital.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk. And about halfway through the project, we decided to adopt SICAN for an institutional research data management system. And you'll find in the paper and on our project website a great deal of information about the decision making process around that. So I suppose the paper and my brief talk now is really aimed at institutions that are just starting out with research data management and are thinking, do we use E-prints? Do we use d-space? You know, what do we use? Maybe you use SICAN. SICAN is not perfect for research data management. It wasn't and hasn't been developed for research data management. It's been developed for publishing open data. And research data management, as we found out in our project and as you all know, involves a great deal more than just simply publishing open data. And we went through a requirements gathering exercise and then we also held a requirements gathering exercise in London focusing specifically on SICAN. There were over 40 people attending. It was fully booked. A great deal of interest in the UK about using SICAN for research data management. And we spent a whole day doing requirements gathering exercise around research data management and then analyzing SICAN to see how well it fit. So again, the paper, even if you're not interested in SICAN, the paper offers a fairly good list over 70 generic research data management requirements for software. That may also be useful to you. But research data management, as we all know, is a fairly new term. But it's actually quite an old practice. Many of us who are archivists or librarians in one way or another have been managing data for some years, if not decades. And when we look at the requirements for research data management, they range from anything from basically a virtual research environment, digital asset management, digital curation, archiving and publishing. So research data management is a fairly crude term, I think. And we need to recognize that there are software tools that are good at doing one aspect of research data management, but not necessarily meeting all requirements. The development of SICAN started in 2006. It was publicly released in 2007. And in 2007, SICAN was just a catalog. You could not upload data to it. You just registered the existence of data held elsewhere. So it was a catalog. And it can still be used just as a catalog. You don't have to upload data to SICAN. Then in 2011, storage facilities were added to it. So it became a repository. And then last year, a data store, a PostgreSQL relational database, a data store was added to SICAN. So it can now ingest tabular data straight into a database over its APIs. Also, if you upload some data, say a spreadsheet, you can select whether to have that spreadsheet converted and ingested into the data store. If it's in the data store, there are visualization tools built into SICAN for previewing the data and doing some manipulation of the data. So it's a catalog repository and a data store. And this development very much reflects the sponsorship that the OKF has received for the development of SICAN. A number of projects have talked about sustainability today. Well, the OKF and SICAN also have to remain sustainable. And that has been through the interest of a wide number of public government bodies effectively paying for SICAN development. And so one of the main points that I make in my paper is that if SICAN is to become a comprehensive system for research data management, then the academic community has to pay for it either in cash or in developers and developer time. And this is something I think that we need to organize ourselves and we need to lead and should not expect the Open Knowledge Foundation to lead for us. But it is clear in 2010 data.gov.uk was launched in the UK and the development around that time in 2010 ramps right up for SICAN. And so you can see that when money is being invested in the development of SICAN, when there is sponsorship in terms of its development, a great deal of activity happens. And that's very evident in the development of the features of SICAN. So the emphasis so far has been on publishing a discovery and reuse, not curation and not preservation. So SICAN is not, you know, I'm in a room full of archivists and librarians, SICAN is not an archival tool. It's a data publishing tool. Certain steps are being made towards it being a data management tool, I think in terms of what an archivist or a librarian might expect in terms of data management. But it is still lacking. This is my last slide and it's just a summary of the conclusions of my paper. SICAN is the de facto standard for publishing open data. It has a large community, very high profile projects, and it's relatively mature open source software. And one of the choices that we have to make working in institutions and selecting software is the risk involved. There may be software that appears to do a great deal more. I'm actually not aware of any, but there may be, but we also need to consider, you know, how sustainable the software is. What are the support? What is the commercial support available around the software? That's the first thing my IT department would ask. And overall I think SICAN presents a fairly low risk option for institutions. I like to think of it as a technology platform. It is open source. It has very, very rich APIs. Much more functionality is available via its APIs and its web user interface. So while the web user interface appears quite simple, a great deal more can be done with SICAN programmatically. And the work that we've been doing at Lincoln is not really SICAN development, it's SICAN integration through its APIs with other systems. And also it's modular. So it has an extension system so that, you know, if we want, I don't know, a specific academic feature adding to it, say, OAPMH or something like that, then you probably develop an extension for it so that it doesn't necessarily affect the core of the software. One thing I think might be useful, we haven't done it, but is to develop scenarios for how SICAN may fit into the OAS functional model. And I think that would help us identify, you know, its strengths and its weaknesses. One of the other recommendations I make is that there is a relationship between the Open Knowledge Foundation and the academic community is developed, too. There are a number of academics involved in the Open Knowledge Foundation and they reciprocally receive support from the OKF. But I do think because the objectives of the Open Knowledge Foundation and the higher education community are so similar that institutions and our funders should step up and offer formal support. As I've said, research data management is new as a term, but data curation, preservation and publishing is not new. There's a great deal of experience in this room, decades of experience about how to manage data. And I think collectively we have a great deal to offer to the development of SICAN and its community that has already been established. But as I said, I do think that SICAN and its use for RDM should be led by us. And I know that the Open Knowledge Foundation will welcome that. So that's the end of my discussion. I do hope that some of you read the paper and it's available for comments at the moment before I put it on our blog. So if in the next week you have any questions, you can leave comments on the paper and I'll try and get back to you about it. Perhaps I could take questions if anybody has any questions about SICAN or about how a relatively small university like ours goes about deciding on research data management software. I think some of you are probably also at the same stage. So yes, questions. What were the criteria for choosing a research data management system? What did you have? Budget constraints and what else was on the market? Maybe there isn't anything. Well, there are other systems. Within the GISC program that we were funded by, institutions are choosing E-prints, D-space, SharePoint. And they're being pragmatic about it. If they've already got E-prints, then they're thinking, well, we'll just try and make do with E-prints. And if they've already got D-space, likewise, they're doing the same. So I don't think there are any particularly good systems that are ready built for research data management that institutions can simply buy in. Why we chose SICAN? Well, we'd been keeping our eye on it from the beginning of the project, and it was the addition of the datastore functionality that kind of made with the turning point for us. What our researchers in our pilot project were saying was they wanted a system that would help manage active data, not just a deposit tool. Researchers aren't that interested in depositing anything. What they want is something that's useful for their research. And so this is a conversation actually that grew during the GISC program of funded projects. This idea of active data, that research data management is not just something you do at the end of the research lifecycle, and the system shouldn't just be in place at the end of the research lifecycle. The system should, where possible, facilitate the research process itself. And so we were developing our own software, principally with this idea of a datastore in mind. And then we saw SICAN had basically beaten us to it. And with everything else that it offered, we thought that it was a low risk. And we achieved a great deal just overnight by selecting SICAN. Well, thank you, Ross, for coming over to talk to us about it. Thank you.