Ariadne Issue 70 Now Available

Ariadne Issue 70 is now available with its usual range of feature articles, reviews and event reports. The issue contains a wide range of material which we hope will engage everyone's interest.

The issue contains a timely article entitled Gold Open Access: Counting the Costs which presents new data on the cost of Gold OA publishing at the University of Edinburgh. The article explains the significance of the recent RCUK amendment to their Open Access policy requirements of researchers and the importance assumed by the cost of publishing the Gold Open Access route. Theo Andrew aims to cast what light he can on the matter by presenting data on article processing charges (APCs) gathered at Edinburgh over the last five years. The findings and questions which Theo raises are not without interest. In their article Upskilling Liaison Librarians for Research Data Management Andrew Cox, Eddy Verbaan and Barbara Sen explore the design of a curriculum to train academic librarians in the competencies to support Research Data Management. They consider the new roles HE libraries are likely to adopt in meeting new demands from researchers, and how they address the complex, large-scale and transitory nature of current data practices.

In another contribution entitled The LIPARM Project: A New Approach to Parliamentary Metadata Richard Gartner outlines a collaborative project which aims to link together the digitised UK Parliamentary record by providing a metadata scheme, controlled vocabularies and a Web-based interface. He explains how the JISC-funded project employs XML to link the essential elements of the parliamentary record within a unified metadata scheme together with the use of its own Parliamentary Metadata Language (PML) and controlled vocabularies. In “Does He Take Sugar?”: The Risks of Standardising Easy-to-read Language Brian Kelly, Dominik Lukeš and Alistair McNaught highlight the risks of attempting to standardise easy-to-read language for online resources for the benefit of readers with disabilities. Further information is available in a blog posting on the Innovation Support Centre site.

In their ‘tooled up’ article Motivations for the Development of a Web Resource Synchronisation Framework Stuart Lewis, Richard Jones, and Simeon Warner explain some of the motivations behind the development of the framework. They point to the wide range of types and scenarios where it is necessary to synchronise resources between Web sites, including preservation services and aggregators and the care that must be applied in consideration of the protocols and standards that exist to underpin such operations. Meanwhile Leo Lyons confidently predicts in his account of The ARK Project: Analysing Raptor at Kent that the advent of many more mobile devices will only serve to increase the trend to use electronic resources. He describes how University of Kent librarians are benefitting from Raptor's ability to produce e-resource usage statistics and charts and how the ARK team is currently examining the uses to which they can put the MS Reporting Services in order to provide usable analysis and presentation tools. Moreover, Leo identifies a raft of uses for Raptor which go deeper than direct identification of e-resource downloads.

In their article entitled SUSHI: Delivering Major Benefits to JUSP Paul Meehan, Paul Needham and Ross MacIntyre begin by highlighting the benefits to UK HE and publishers afforded by the automated data harvesting of the Journal Usage Statistics Portal (JUSP) employing the Standardized Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative (SUSHI) protocol. They also describe the enormous time and cost benefits in using SUSHI to support rapid gathering of journal usage reports into the JUSP service. Stepping down from his pivotal role as CEO at ALT in May 2012, Seb Schmoller may not have expected to be pursued by the media for his thoughts on his career, but he was kind enough to respond to a few questions from Ariadne. In Seb Schmoller Replies he talks about online learning - which, it will come as a great surprise to some, began to develop before the Web - and what he has gleaned along the way in his own career. Seb also supplies some of his philiosophy and his thoughts about the people whom he considers to have had a telling impact on the development of learning, the Web and more. In 21st-century Scholarship and Wikipedia Amber Thomas explores the ways in which emerging research practices and Wikipedia illustrate the changing boundaries of academic work. While she she does highlight Wikipedia’s statement that its entries should not be cited as primary sources in academic work, Amber contends that scholarship is in the process of changing and describes in her article four key trends linking scholarship and Wikipedia.

Meanwhile in offering us Case Studies in Web Sustainability Scott Turner highlights the fact that Web resources that have been built with public money may be wasted unless thought is given to their future sustainability in the event of their hosts being closed down. He draws attention to JISC-funded work in this area and provides readers with some general principles behind the notion of Web site sustainability before turning to two different case studies. We are particularly indebted to Martin White who has been Mining the Archive: The Development of Electronic Journals and declares at the outset a fascination with the history of the development of information resource management. He finds that Ariadne is able to expose her archives far more usefully through her new platform, and as a result, he has found it far easier to mine the Journal’s content in his analysis for this article. He then embarks upon a walk around the Journal's archives as he traces the development of electronic journals and stops to point out people whom he considers to have made a significant contribution to the field.

As usual the new issue also offers a variety of event reports and reviews of recent publications. Ariadne welcomes proposals for articles for forthcoming issues. We hope you will enjoy Issue 70.